The Paradox of Creation

dancing between play and productivity

Doing anything creative usually feels more like herding cats than sheep or cows. When you come from the rigor and fast pace of academia, medicine, the corporate world, or almost any other corner of society, it’s easy to imagine that you could harness your creativity and forcefully plow your way through a project to its completion. I’ve always known that I have to let my inner artist play freely for it to do its best work, but dammit, we live in a world that demands results, so how do we bridge that paradox?

One evening in the 1990s, I was lolling on a sofa in the common area of my boyfriend’s dorm suite at Juilliard, shooting the shit with some of his roommates. Someone was practicing the violin in the bedroom on my left; practicing and vocalizing made up the soundtrack to our lives from 6 AM till midnight every day and we had mostly learned to ignore it to preserve our sanity. Today, though, one of the roommates paused, listening, and said:

“Edwin is really good at practicing.”“What do you mean?” I asked. “How do you know?”“Most people want to sound good when they’re practicing,” he said. “Like, they want to prove to themselves that they can do it, but Edwin never sounds that great. He’s always really working on something and letting it be bad. That’s why he sounds so good when he performs.”I scrunched my forehead and gave him a funny look.

“Isn’t that kind of a backhanded compliment?”“No. Who cares how you sound when you practice?”

I spent many, many forgettable evenings in those years talking about everything and nothing with friends and roommates, but this conversation made such a strong impression that it has remained neatly preserved in my memory for over 30 years. Until that point, I had been guilty of safe, self-congratulatory practice. I kept my practicing in a very small enclosure, and as a result, it kept me in a small area of development and expression. Performances felt safe but canned, like bland recitation rather than spontaneous artistry.

At Juilliard, we were all trying to emulate greatness. It was clearly a prerequisite to being admitted to the school in the first place, and we were constantly being called upon to demonstrate our superiority in public.

It was not an atmosphere where you could easily present yourself in any stage of development that fell short of dazzling virtuosity. Beginner’s mind was a foreign concept; the way we learned to control our fingers and arms was further from experimental artistry and closer to Olympic training in the former Soviet Union. It was assumed that the only way to achieve the pinnacle of performance was to practice for hours on end, day in and day out, pain notwithstanding. The problem was that no one taught us how to practice back then, and I wasted countless hours stress-testing my technique without ever actually improving it, let alone growing as an artist.

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Recently, I had a conversation with an artist friend who was trying out a whole new genre and struggling with it. She was used to producing work of a certain standard, but in this new series, nothing was working. She despaired as one sculpture after another turned out looking like a fifth grader had made it.

Instead of commiserating, I congratulated her.

“You’re growing,” I said. “That’s great.”“Yeah, great, I’m growing so much that I can’t produce anything at all anymore. I have deadlines!”

As surely as there is an inner artist, there is also an artistic ego, a little imp of a creature who is not at all helpful to the creative process. It arrives at a new milestone and plants a flag in the soil. I did it, it says, and is terribly pleased with itself. Now I will replicate this success again and again until I am the greatest in the world.

The inner artist, however, is an adventurer, an explorer. It has no interest in laurel-sitting or reenacting a conquest that excites the public. It is not invested in anyone’s reaction, nor in your confidence level, nor even in your ability to put food on the table.

So while the ego is bemoaning this sudden cliff jump from mastery to face-plant, the inner artist is loving plunging its hands into the muck and making a mess.

My friend started to question not just her decision to explore the new genre but also her very competence and identity as an artist—a deeply familiar scenario to me as a teacher, a coach, and a creator myself. I’ve talked countless people down from this bridge and have had to make the emergency call myself dozens of times. It’s not just normal; it’s part of the process for most of us.

It always starts out innocently: the inner artist wants to experiment, yay! Experimenting is fun, so we take on a new project, a different genre, a whole new skill. This requires some sacrifice of status, of course; you are leaving familiar territory. You know it won’t be easy to live according to unicorn ideals, but your inner critic allows you to do it for a certain period of time as long as you promise to create something so mind-blowingly, earth-shatteringly brilliant that it would make the pyramids of Giza look like a Lego castle. It is difficult to notice this subtle shift from experimentation to control, especially if you consider yourself a rational, capable person, because the inner critic would have you believe that its stringency is responsible for all your past achievements. And before you know it, you’ve made a pact with Mephistopheles.

Do the thing, design the event, switch up your career and take off on a whole new trajectory!, it enthuses. Just make sure you win an award for it, it adds as it leans back and lights up a cigarette.

And so it comes to pass that the pristine paradise of your new project gets clearcut to make way for the perfidious path of perfectionism.

When you demand perfection, you are not open to any other outcome. Not to mention the fact that perfectionism is a race with an eternally receding finish line, which will leave you exhausted before you can even figure out where you are going.

Perfectionism is trying to herd cats in a small enclosure.

You are going to get scratched.

When you’re learning a new skill or experimenting with a new genre, the point is not to look good while doing it. The point is to practice well, to learn it so bone-deep that the execution of it becomes organic. That kind of learning results from play, not brute force. It happens when children build impossible towers of blocks until they fall. When you have no fear of the tower falling, then you gain valuable information about how many blocks to use and which way to stack them so they won’t fall.

But we would rather look good right from the beginning, because there is always a deadline or an audience, and who wouldn’t prefer the certainty of having chosen the right path?

The irony here is that the inner critic isn’t entirely wrong about its involvement in our past achievements, and getting rid of it is not the answer. The trouble starts only when we allow it to be the boss.

I’ve learned that my own inner critic would prefer to be an exacting editor rather than a tyrannical party pooper, but in order to take on that role, it needs good leadership. It needs the artist as leader.

When I let the artist lead and the editor follow, I can linger in that spacious meadow, playing with blocks, getting my hands dirty, mixing my metaphors happily and illogically. Afterwards, my editor can step in with its clear-headed aesthetic judgment and sense of structure, making the mess look intentional. My editor keeps me from publishing the incomprehensible stream of consciousness that is always my first draft. It sends me back to the practice room after recording something that didn’t capture the emotion the artist was imagining. But with the artist in charge, the editor/inner critic is not allowed to go on a toxic rant about how I should just give up because I’m wasting precious time and this is all useless shit.

That is not editing, it is abuse.

The trick is in the timing. There is a phase for play and a phase for creation. Play requires the spacious meadow—observation without control—while the creation phase allows for a certain amount of judgment. The wisdom I glean from the quote above is that there is a much more refined level of control that naturally grows out of observing this play, and therein lies the bridge across our paradox of play and productivity.

The most productive thing you can do while building something is to keep your inner critic from whipping your creative creatures with all the ambition and fear you learned from the capitalistic world. When you do that, you are granted access to the spacious meadow where you can step back, observe yourself playing, and see the pieces fall together of their own accord.

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If you’re wondering how to find the discipline and the tools to move between play and creation more effortlessly, I want to hear from you.

I’m cultivating a group that will comprise The Creation Circle, a transformative community that turns the solitary work of creating into a meaningful individual and collective journey.

Spots are limited to 10 and I can offer 5 full scholarships for this cohort.

Read about it and send me a personal note or book a call to talk to me about it.

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