10 Principles To Massively Boost Your Creative Output
Creating content can be difficult.
You may not have a clue what to write about. You may feel discouraged at the wealth of possible options. You may just be lacking motivation because your current topic is not interesting you. Or, you may even be put off by the fear of lack of originality.
Whatever the reason may be, you are not creating as much as you want to, and that is a problem.
This article will aim to equip you with 10 principles that you can use to massively boost your output. Whatever issue you may be facing, you will likely find a helpful principle below. Many of these ideas are from Austin Kleon’s Steal Like An Artist, which I highly recommend you go out and read, along with his other book, Show Your Work. Both are gems that will help you enormously as a budding content creator.
So, sit back, enjoy the ride, and radicalise the way you view content creation.
Steal like an artist
“What is originality? Undetected plagiarism” — William Ralph Inge
“It is better to take what does not belong to you than to let it lie around neglected.” — Mark Twain
If you think using other people’s ideas and quotes in your work is unoriginal, think again.
In his book, Austin Kleon vouches to steal like an artist. Whenever you encounter content that resonates with you, you should save your moments of inspiration and help them inform your writing.
If you think this is not original creation, remember that no creative work is truly original. Every creative piece came from what came before it. All great artists emulated their heroes, and their failure to emulate them completely made them who they were.
With this in mind, write down all your inspirations. Copy quotes from books, jot down points from interesting conversations, save your favourite movie scenes and copy any other source of potential inspiration. Now, express these ideas in your own words, and see how you can fuse them to create something new.
Collect as many great ideas and insights as you can
“Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic.” — Jim Jarmusch
When stealing like an artist, to diversify your work, copy from as many different sources as possible.
This unique mash-up of the work of many different artists will give your work an original flair to it.
No one will be able to pinpoint your sources as there will be so many. People will instead think you are an original genius.
Put all the content from your favourite artists in your own words. Compliment their ideas with personal anecdotes and opinions. See how your current view of the world fits in with their narrative. What can you add? What can you change? How can you create an original insight?
Creativity is simply someone else’s work through your lens. Remember this. Now go collect!
Capture everything, everywhere
Your brain is for having ideas, not storing them.
It can come up with moments of genius. It is excellent at pattern recognition and can make incredible connections between two seemingly unrelated pieces of information.
But it is not very good at remembering.
This is why you need to write down all its flashes of brilliance in a system that you can go back to.
Come across an inspirational passage in your book or article? Write it down. Hear an interesting idea in a conversation with a colleague? Write it down. Stumble upon a golden tweet? Bookmark it for later.
Save, save, save. Capture all this information, or your brain will forget it.
Every now and then, go over these moments of inspiration. Develop them into standalone thoughts. Build a lattice of great ideas you can use in your writing.
Over time, clusters of similar notes will form around specific ideas. These notes will spill into your creative endeavours, so all you need to do now is write your thoughts down.
Fake it til you make it when blogging
“Pretend to be something you’re not until you are — fake it until you’re successful, until everybody sees you the way you want them to” — Austin Kleon
When blogging or pursuing any project, fake it til you make it.
Pretend you are a very creative, successful content creator. Now, ask yourself what a creative, successful creator would do. They probably read a lot. They probably write every day and write all their ideas down. They also probably publish content regularly. So go do this!
Over time, you will become this person. Keep pretending until you actually become the person you pretended to be.
Write the story you want to read
When we love a creative piece of work, we often crave continuations or sequels.
Whether it is your favourite YouTuber or blogger, or your favourite TV show, we often crave more of it. We want a new episode. We want a new video. We want a new blog post.
Well, why don’t YOU go create this thing you are craving!
Channel your inner passion for the thing into a creative piece.
See what is missing. What did your favourite blogger or YouTuber miss in their latest video? How can you add what you know about the world to their information to create a unique written piece? What is something they would probably create but have not yet done so? What do you want to read next from them?
Stop waiting. Put all these ideas to paper and create your own sequel with your ideas, your biases and your quirks.
Have many projects going at once
“I think it’s good to have a lot of projects going at once so you can bounce between them. When you get sick of one project, move over to another, and when you’re sick of that one, move back to the project you left. Practice productive procrastination.” — Austin Kleon
When pursuing any creative endeavour, try to have as many projects going at once as you can. This way, you will never get bored and always have a desire to write something.
When you get bored of one project, procrastinate by working on a different, more engaging one. When you lose interest in that new project, go back to another old project.
Slowly and steadily, all projects will eventually reach completion as you oscillate between them.
Instead of procrastinating one project for lack of interest or passion at that moment by scrolling through TikTok, you are diverting your interest to your next most interesting project. You are constantly working on something and always advancing your work.
Quick caveat: Every individual piece will take longer to publish, but because you will have so many going on the go, you will end up publishing many more than if you were to work on one project at a time.
Doing boring stuff can lead to idea generation
Doing something boring, like washing the dishes, cleaning the house or cleaning the room, can lead to your best ideas.
We often avoid doing boring, monotonous tasks and opt to outsource them instead. This attitude can be unproductive, though. These boring tasks give your mind the mental freedom it needs to come up with its best ideas. The brain has absolutely nothing to do in these moments, so instead serves its primary purpose — generating ideas.
So next time you opt out of doing the dishes or cleaning your room, remember that the activity may just deliver your next best idea.
Accept that you will suck for a while, but relish the lack of pressure
When starting a blog or any creative project, you are bound to suck at it for a while, like every new endeavour you start. This is normal. No one starts off a good content creator.
Remember, though. The more you write, and the more you practice, the better you get. Like anything in life, practice brings perfection. So practice practice practice. Write write write.
Also, when you are unknown, there is no pressure to deliver high-quality content.
Nobody knows you, and nobody expects anything of you. You have no reputation to live up to and no particular content to churn out. You can create whatever you want without worrying about an audience or algorithm to please. You can just do whatever interests you whenever you want.
So relish this newness. Use it to your advantage. Use it to explore your ideas and passions and figure out what works. You won’t get this freedom once you have a crowd to please.
Use compliments to keep you motivated
When starting out creating, it can be a bit demoralising when you have such a small following.
You do not feel like anyone is reading your stuff. Your strenuous efforts in your pieces can seem fruitless, and the whole thing can seem pointless sometimes. Quitting can become an attractive solution to the lack of acknowledgement.
Here’s my tip. Don’t quit.
Instead, curate all your nice comments and mini-victories in one document.
It is such a nice feeling when you get the odd nice compliment. Giving value to someone else across the world is a privilege and seeing your efforts appreciated is genuinely awesome.
Use this document to remind you of the pleasant feelings you got from these compliments. Let it serve as a reminder that there are people out there getting a lot of value from your stuff.
Whenever you feel unmotivated, use these compliments to propel you forward and keep going.
Restriction will promote creativity
“Telling yourself you have all the time in the world, all the money in the world, all the colors in the palette, anything you want — that just kills creativity.” — Jack White
“Less choice frees our mind to unleash our potential, which would otherwise be wasted on making those choices. “ — Sönke Ahrens (Author of How To Take Smart Notes)
Restrict the number of choices you have to make in your creative process.
Have one centralised location for creating your stuff. Curate all your sources in one document and publish to one or two platforms at most.
If not, you will spend more time wondering where to write, where to get your information and where to publish more than actually writing.
There are many other ways you can standardise your workflow. If your creative bottleneck boils down to the choices you have to make when working, you are doing something wrong.
Figure out all the ways you have to make decisions when creating and eliminate these. Have one standard way of doing your work, and you will see tremendous results in your productivity.
Conclusion — closing remarks
I hope you enjoyed this article and managed to get something valuable that you can use in your creative journey.
As I said, many of these insights were inspired by Steal Like An Artist and Show Your Work by Austin Kleon. If you haven’t already, do yourself a favour and pick up two copies. He talks about many of these points and more in a much more compelling way.
If you like what I write, consider following my account, so you never miss another post. Reach out to me on Twitter if you want to discuss these ideas further. Thanks!
Originally published at https://www.timjcarden.com on July 24, 2022.
