How Slowing Down Your Creative Process Will Make You A Better Artist
Impatience is the silent killer of productivity.
Impatience.
It creeps into your mind when you’re working, whispering all kinds of dangerous nothings to your subconscious.
“Hurry up!”
“You paint too slowly.”
“Why is this taking so long?”
“You said you were going to finish writing this chapter three days ago.”
“You’ll never make that deadline if you keep working at this pace, you laggard.”
“Mozart composed 13 symphonies by the time he was 15 years old — how many have you composed so far, Mr. 30-Year-Old?”
Comparing yourself to other more successful artists and beating yourself up for not producing work at lightning speed are pernicious habits that all of us creators suffer from, at least on occasion.
And the disappointment of not having made the kind of progress you’d hoped within a specific time frame can be crippling to an artist’s confidence.
However, one lesson that I’ve really begun to embody recently — though it took years to really appreciate despite knowing it all that time — was that pumping the brakes on my eagerness to make progress on…
