Pablo Picasso once said, “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.”
I believe that artist is still alive within. The problem is the artist is buried under right answers and the proper way to do things.
Creative anxiety is like worrying about the seeds in a dandelion puff. The puff is full of potential for future possibilities. Back as a child, it was fun to just blow on the seeds and watch them scatter with the wind. It was fun to watch. No worries about what would happen with all those seeds.
Then you grew up, and took on adult responsibilities. And lawns. And neighbors with perfect lawns. Dandelion puffs became bad. Now you worry about blowing on the puff and releasing all those seeds to land where they will. What if they scatter and spread across your perfectly manicured lawn. Or what could be your award winning lawn if it weren’t for the dandelions already in your yard.
Scott Adams, of the Dilbert cartoon strip fame, once said, “Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes.”
What if you began to look at your creative ideas as seeds of possibility. Some ideas might turn out to be dandelions in your lawn. But others will turn out to be prize rose bushes. It’s only by embracing your creative expression that the rose bushes will have a chance to appear.
And it’s darned hard to tell at the beginning which ideas are which. When I am drawing an illustration, or even starting a new business project, until the creativity has had time to take root I can’t tell whether I’ve got a rose bush or a weed. If I pluck it out too early, it never has a chance.
If you’re always focused on having the right answer, you’re going to be limited in your creative expression.
A friend shared on Facebook today that she is frustrated and burned out from always focusing on effectiveness and efficiency. I can relate. The battle cry of the Industrial Age still lingers on today: “Is it efficient? Is it effective?”
I’m reminded of a time when I was driving with my father-in-law, an engineer by trade. He insisted I was driving the wrong way to my own home because it wasn’t the most efficient route. I was like, “Huh?” He was right. I wasn’t taking the most direct route home. But I liked the route I was on because it wound through some attractive tree-lined streets.
There is a time for efficiency and effectiveness. Creativity doesn’t have to be dwarfed in the process, though. In fact, creativity can be the route to greater efficiency and effectiveness.
I was able to take a creative approach to changing a process that had been taking three days to complete in the accounting department. By creating a different solution, I was able to reduce the time to process to fifteen minutes. If I had simply focused on being more efficient and effective, I might have made some improvements but not as much as I did by taking a totally different approach.
When you make the risky move of blowing on the dandelions, expressing your creativity, you’re giving the little kid inside the chance to see what else is possible. If you’ve learned to tuck that little kid away, it might take some time to be open to other possibilities. But it can also happen in an instant. All you need is permission to blow it.
Much of what I’ve learned in life has been learned by paying attention to my mistakes. Instead of looking at mistakes as errors and bad, I’ve learned to see them as another way of learning. Sometimes those other ways turn out to be prize rose bushes, i.e. great discoveries. Other times they’re dandelions that need to be removed.
We tend to be uncomfortable with mistakes. We alI want to know the rose bushes from the dandelions from the start. If we were perfectly efficient and effective, we would know from the beginning which were the dandelions and which were the rose bushes. We would have perfect foresight. Creativity doesn’t work like that. And as we learn from mistakes, we also often learn more from trial and error.
My father-in-law told me of a neighbor farmer of his family while he was growing up. Bob’s (my father-in-law) told me that his father, who was a trained chemist with a masters degree, would see his neighbor trying to solve a problem on his farm. Ted (Bob’s father) would spend the day figuring out how to solve the problem. The neighbor farmer, on the other hand, would go out and face the problem head on. He’d try this thing and that thing in order to solve the problem. Inevitably, he’d solve the problem more quickly than Ted would. Maybe not as elegantly, but the problem was solved and he could move onto other things.
I’ve spent so much time trying to find the perfect solution to what I’m doing. I am almost positive if I’d simply gone out and tried like the neighbor farmer I would have found the solution sooner.
I like what David Kelley, of Ideo, says, “Fail faster. Succeed sooner.”
To finish Scott Adams’s quote, “Art is knowing which [mistakes] to keep.” Keep creating. Keep allowing for the roses, and the dandelions, to appear.