Creativity Thrives in the Absence of Judgment
Create first. Assess later.
Your job is not to judge your work. Your job is to create it. It’s easy to find skeptics, so no need to insert yourself among the masses.
I recently read an article by Thomas Oppong that reminded me not to hinder a creativity binge. When you’re in the zone, just launch ideas out there. You’ll have time later to really evaluate whether or not a concept is going to fly.
Stop the obsession with perfection. Perfection doesn’t exist. Perfection can quickly lead to self-judgment; a major creativity killer.
Quit caring about judgment from outsiders, and listen to your intuition. In fact, most successful creators achieved so much as a product of the sheer volume of work they were brave enough to produce, rather than as a result of raw talent.
Dean Simonton, a distinguished professor and psychologist who studies creative productivity, discovered two things about highly creative people:
- They’re bad at knowing when their own work is going to sink or swim
- It’s their capacity for productivity that makes them original, not their innate talent
Simonton writes: “On average, creative geniuses aren’t qualitatively better in their fields than their peers, they simply produce a greater volume of work, which gives them more variation and a higher chance of originality.”
The more you create, the more likely you are to discover a gem among the rocks. You’ll never find the spark to create the new if you are rooted in what makes other people feel comfortable.
Innovation occurs on the fringes of the market, testing boundaries, not playing squarely within them. The most exciting entrepreneurs offer new solutions to old problems and deliver something the market has not previously experienced.
Dive in headfirst and make the rules up as you go along.
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