Brick By Brick 🧱
Newsletter-3 — In creative journeys we tend to get lost in the complex structures, sophisticated tools, and more. But the ultimate work that we want to remember is to stack bricks one after the other.
When starting your creative journey, it is easy to get lost in making the perfect thing or the best thing that you bring in a lot of complex structures to the process to keep it smooth; in reality, you don't need such complexity.
When starting out, you always need to keep your process simple.
For example, If you are starting to read more as your habit that boosts creativity. The goal shouldn't be to read a book a day. It should be to read for 15 mins a day.
If you think big right from the beginning you will at some point feel overwhelmed and maybe stop your habits or creative practices. And the whole point of creative habits is to get you out of the normal to do something that you like for at least 15 mins a day.
Question for you? What is the fastest way to build a wall? By stacking one brick after another.
This simple method of realizing that it takes stacking one brick after another is one way to emphasize that in creative journeys we tend to get lost in the complex structures, sophisticated tools, and more.
But the ultimate work that we want to remember is to stack bricks one after the other.
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Austin Kleon, the writer of show your work provides an interesting point in his book:
The process is always messy which is the reason why most viewers need the result, the finished product. Whereas the process is for you and you alone. It is your discoveries of doing the work and finding new insights, making mistakes, that shape the artwork that excites you. So, if you share your process, you will form an ongoing connection with people which indirectly moves our product.
Since the process will be messy, why not keep it simple? One that helps you do the thing you enjoy and nothing else. If you focus more on other things, this leads to two things.
You hinder yourself without even realizing it. and
You get too focused on the other parts than the actual work.
You hinder yourself:
Without realizing it, at some point, you will get into other things and no time will be left for the actual work that you enjoy.
If you are into singing, once you decide to post it on social media, the hindrances would be to check the metrics, follow similar minds, engage, keep it aesthetic, and attract more people.
These all will be important one day, but worrying about them right from the start will hinder your way of singing which you actually love.
You get too focused that you miss that actual work:
Don’t let sharing your work take precedence over actually doing your work.
Oftentimes, we tend to overdo sharing our work. We need to actually manage the time spent on sharing rather than managing the time we actually do.
When I started writing, I was so excited about it that I used to make social media posts, videos, tweets, and every other thing possible. It was fun doing it, not gonna lie. But after a while, I automatically got sucked into looking at more things online than doing the actual work I love which is writing.
So, that is when I decided no matter what, I need to start writing at least 10 mins a day. It can be a summary of an article, I read. My thoughts about a movie, song, or video and more.
This led to my previous newsletter weekly brew which was me sharing all my curations of the past week on Saturday.
So, no matter what, keep doing the things you love. Even if it is just for 10 mins.
It will help you in ways you can't even imagine. One of the important discoveries to help me do things consistently is because of the term habit stacking I got to know from the article by James clear and his book called Atomic Habits.
How to Build New Habits by Taking Advantage of Old Ones
This habit of building things brick by brick can help you enjoy the process, set goals accordingly and not overwhelm yourself.
That's it for today. Thank you for reading.
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Until then, wake up, drink coffee and keep creating😉.