"Don’t let criticism and praise disturb your heart."

By Sam Yang - Get similar updates here

There is this almost fixed understanding of how to produce creative work. The final product has been brainstormed, outlined, and revised multiple times. Regardless of the medium — visual, written, or consumer — we go about it in much in the same ways, as a project manager. The accepted mode of work is engineering creativity, relying on formulas and trends, carefully calculated, planned, and manicured.

Listen to a TED talk, a thought leader, read a productivity blog (or book), and this is the standard answer. We liken creativity to the construction of a building because it's tangible, it's manageable, and it works. It's how I would recommend it to most people, but — there is this other way.

Can you make something great without a plan? Can you jump out of a plane without a parachute? We fear it just the same. We fear starting, so we bog ourselves down with the preparation — prepping to begin. Starting is fun, but "failing" is not, so we attempt to form guarantees. (No matter what we do, we are only fooling ourselves if we believe there will ever be guarantees.) We will predetermine everything beforehand, eliminating fun and problem solving out of the process. The stuff that made creative work enjoyable, the reason many of us started. That is the paradox, to keep doing this thing while eliminating the parts that got us started on this thing. No outline, no script, no parachute, can you just jump and make a leap of faith that things will turn out okay, in the same way, the heroes of stories and myths do?