Nobody Has Time.
Cut the Crap and Get Your Hands Dirty.
Today I started a 30 days creative challenge. At the worse time ever. “I’m sick. I have four videos waiting to be edited. And I’m waiting on two contracts that will send me in the working-cave if they’re green lit. Please pity me, look how busy I am!”
Blah blah zzzz.
Yes so, I’m doing it anyway. And I think you should too.
Here is the thing when it comes to vital topics like health or creativity (yes, I consider creativity a vital element):
It’s not about Having Time, it’s about Committing to Doing It.
Last weekend wasn’t a regular weekend.
Whether you care about the symbolism around December 31st or not, every cells in your body knows December 31st is a point of transition and that change is invited.
December 31st can be -if you choose to make it so- an opportunity to stop and change, modify or adjust your course.
This year, I completely missed this invitation for change. I was too busy. Too sick. Too tired. I went into 2017 as if it was just another week, going through the motions and crossing my to-do list. The problem is:
Going through the motions kills creativity
Sure, sometimes it’s nice to master a skill so your brain can daydream and ideas can grow. But if your whole day is one giant motion that carries you from bullet point A to bullet point B, creativity can’t sparkle.
Your creative muscle needs to be stretched and juiced or it atrophies.
Some hit the gym daily, we hit the creative trenches.
I’ve done many creative challenges in the last 3 years, from 10 days long to 365 days long. Those challenges have helped me produce in quantity, develop technical skills, my endurance, my willpower, and make sure I would spend a dedicated amount of time each day in the creative trenches.
You don’t climb a mountain in a single giant footstep. It’s an accumulation of small steps, physical, technical, and mental. More importantly:
Nobody climbs the Everest alone.
Circling back to today. I was playing with the idea of doing a creative challenge but excuses were still stopping me. And then, Joe Sejean, Activate Creativity’s co-founder, shared that he was starting a 30 days creative challenge.
What?!
Without consulting each other, we had developed the same need to take a step back in our crazy daily life and challenge our creativity. Seeing him share that was the last push I needed to kickstart my own challenge:
A few years before my grandma died, I started collecting sentences and record her talking about her crazy life. I’ve been wanting to make a short animation about her ever since, but never took the time to do it.
This creative challenge, that I’m calling #30daysofteita, is going to be my excuse to go through some of the content I have amassed, and see what comes out of it. I’m not sure I’ll have enough, I’m worried I won’t have enough time, but the point of stretching your creativity is exactly that: not wait until all the conditions are perfectly aligned, but go for it and see what sparkles from your survival instinct.
Which leads me to this:
There’s never a right time. But you can always make time for something you really want.
Ask yourself: do you want to find ideas? to use your voice? to gain more focus and energy?
Do you want it enough to make 10 minutes per day for it?
Then you should join us.
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Nathalie Sejean is Activate® Creativity co-founder, a company dedicated to help you reconnect, stretch and nurture your creativity. Click here for more.
