I messed up. See, I went full steam into production on this video and I still don't know how it's going to end. I'll just think of the ending later, I thought.
And then I just started filming. Idiot. And in exactly 11 minutes and 21 seconds, everyone is going to see that I got nothing.
Every artist that I know has faced issues surrounding the management of their creative energy. Whether it's a lack of drive, they can't think of a good idea, or they make reckless choices early into a big project in the heat of their inspiration. If you're not aware of how you will feel at the various stages of your project, then problems will inevitably surface down the line when you no longer have the creative juice to fix them.
You'll be suffering in tregerous work when you want to feel that creative spark. And then there's times where you need to be creative, but you just want to put on a YouTube video and do some brainless monkey work. I think every artist struggles between inspiration and discipline.
Whenever I've hit a major roadblock, it's almost always trying to summon the wrong virtue at the wrong time or operating under the false belief that I could just be disciplined or inspired indefinitely. I've gained some awareness over the years, even if I still mess up a little bit. Want to give you some pro tips that's helped me to get to this point.
I get comments from people who want to know how I can do so much work without blowing my brain down. Through trial and error, some success, and screwing up a lot, I gradually built a system to see big projects through to completion. It's a mindset that I use as a kind of blueprint maybe you can use on your own projects.
As a creative professional, there are two sides of you. One that is open, feeling, emotional, airy, fairy, arty farty. It's the side that sees beauty in a lonely cloud, a haunting poem, or a humble Chinese man at a tired strip mall quietly enjoying a slice of white bread.
It's just so beautiful. And then you've got the other side, productivity grindset Hugh, who just wants to take stuff off the list and eat, sleep, and grind. He's hustling.
He doesn't give a about bread [Music] guy. Whenever I start a new creative task, I know that there's going to be two phases. In the first phase, I try to be open, receptive.
I'm just playing around with stuff, trying to let things come naturally. But then I actually got to make some I need to narrow my field to a single point of focus to bring these ideas into reality. I see the process as a series of expansions and contractions.
And I think this is analogous to all stages of art. Roughing verse refining, exploring verse defining, ideulating verse implementing, divergent verse convergent thinking. So if I'm trying to come up with a video idea, I first got to build a well of inspiration, resources, feelings, and information, pulling things apart, diverging, and splitting into new pathways.
The general vibe should be one of freedom and openness. Then once I have enough raw material, there's a shift in vibe. I'm honing in, refining, isolating the most important parts, trimming the fat, connecting things, and compressing them together.
I want to distill its essence, the core of my idea. In putting this video together, I came across another concept called the double diamond, which aims to really condense down the stages of design. As you progress through a project, the first half of each diamond represents increasingly expansive divergent thinking, whereas the second half represents focused convergent thinking towards a single point.
It's a really elegant way of describing the process. But yeah, I also thought of it all by myself. And not to be a massive about it, but I could come up with a way better [Music] diagram.
If I'm starting a big project, there's a lot more on my mind. It's months of my time, income, my survival. So, management of my creative energy becomes critical.
When I follow my creative whims, they tend to branch, grow. They get more complicated over time. A milestone is a useful anchor that helps guide my focus to one simple, well-defined deliverable.
I see the creative process as these diamond structures that sit between each milestone. By approaching each project task as two thinking phases, it can provide clues as to why I'm hitting certain problems. Writer's block.
Staring at the page. Can't think of an idea. When I'm hitting my head against the wall, it's useful to remind myself that I can't form connections here if I haven't done enough branching out back there.
Or maybe the task has become too complicated to focus, big moving parts, or I'm lost in the weeds. I can often solve this by adding additional milestones that help to keep me from branching out too wildly. Milestones can act as a kind of mental reset.
If it's a big project, it feels good to thoroughly finish something. So, I like to keep my tasks in well-contained, unfragmented batches. It helps my thinking across the project to stay in rhythm.
So, I've talked about this idea that creative tasks have these two thinking phases, but I like to think that the project as a whole is wrapped in a similar kind of meta structure. It's just intuitive, right? that in the early stages, your thinking is going to be more expansive.
And then as you approach the deadline, you're going to increasingly need a narrowing focus. Remember when I said earlier that there are two U's? Well, I think it's valuable to be attuned and aware of what it feels like to be in each of these separate phases.
[Music] Whenever I forget that there are two Mi's, they inevitably end up screwing each other over. One is primarily creative while the other is productive. And from the perspective of either one of them, even the world feels different.
I need to plan around their individual strengths and weaknesses. I'm often surprised when in early production I forget to add a basic sound effect. Then in the final days when I get around to it, how stressful it is to have to make such a simple choice, I feel like my brain is dumber.
It feels like I've lost sight of the bigger picture and I'm somehow going to make the wrong decision that screws the whole project up. I've made some real frigin dumb choices, operating while high on inspiration, committing to ideas that I could never complete, or worse, not making the choice at all. I still don't have an ending to this video.
All thanks to airy fairy arty party me who didn't plan his And now Captain Ortismo can't focus when he wants to finish the thing. I got exactly 4 minutes and 3 seconds. I need an ending, but there's no time.
Well, there is a little bit. I'm going to go browse [Music] Reddit. This is the worst place to be.
I think we've all been here. Your personal project mismanagement has depleted your creative energy. Has led you to distraction and self soothing.
This is why projects that should take days, take weeks or months. Creative you and productivity you are nowhere to be seen. This is the third you.
the lazy, stinky piece of It's a toxic cycle where over ambition leads to high expectations, which leads to pressure and then [Music] avoidance. As the pressure builds, so too does the creeping sense of your avoidance. First bubbling to the surface, then heating to a simmer before it finally erupts into a raging boil.
What? No. I sometimes get like this when I'm stressed out, dull, foggy, uncreative.
It's usually when I've just finished a big project or if it's bogged down and starting to drag. I've been in focus mode for too long and I'm this vigilant, nervous husk of a man. More grind and focus isn't going to move me forward.
I need to take a few steps back to see the bigger picture. I think to be an artist, I want to be acting as a kind of funnel of emotion, culture, human sentiments, waiting for these intangible things floating around in the spooky ether to come to me through open awareness. But it's easy to get disconnected.
I don't see these things when my body's been stuck in that tunnel vision raw productivity mode. Staring at a blank page or sitting at my computer is the worst place to be. I've got to get out of my head and into the world, bouncing into things, going to the gym or running, movement, chaos.
If creativity is connecting two things, then I need to find more things. I think the best answers come from unexpected experiences. This is what I consider to be the raw material for creating my art.
If you're familiar with the cutout technique for creating song lyrics, I think that all of experience is kind of like that. There's material everywhere, just waiting for the right context. I saw that Chinese guy 10 years ago.
He had a bag of bread and he was just eating one dried piece right there in the street. The image was so idiosyncratic and I've always wanted to use it in something. Wait a minute.
I need to end this video with a little bow that evokes the themes of convergence, a satisfying consolidation of all of these ideas or some kind of superficial joke that uses underlying subtext to prove my process and all of that somehow communicated through the simple key image of a Chinese man. Yes, yes, yes, that's good. A twist ending.
No one will ever suspect that such a preposterous throwaway gag will be the pivotal call back for the final culminating shot. I just ruined it, didn't I? Ultimately, when it comes to creativity, there are no guarantees, only mindsets, tools, surrendering to the process.
and hoping that you get lucky.
