100 Day Streak | Creativity Everyday
My Top 3 Most Surprising Takeaways
Hey everyone,
Thanks for reading Revision Mode: Rewrites, Reinvention, and Creative Revolution.
Revision Mode is a mindset. This occasional newsletter explores what it means to evolve as a creative — writer, artist, entrepreneur, maker, builder, doer, thinker and problem solver. It’s also an opportunity for us to connect, collaborate and grow as a creative community.
The April Monthly | 100 Day Streak Creativity Everyday
My 100 Day Streak of Creativity Everyday inspired a work-in-progress potential chapter in my forthcoming book. While I’m in launch mode, I’m making this deeper-dive post free for all subscribers. Typically, my occasional posts for the free newsletter will be lighter/faster reads.
For my paid subscribers, please comment and let me know if and how these ideas resonated with you, and what else you’d be curious to learn or know more about when it comes to exploring how we value our creativity. AMA! For you and everyone else that subscribes before April 30, you’ll also get the bonus of the Q1 Async Master Class. Q2MC drops this summer.
When I set out to create something new everyday on January 1 of this year, it was mostly just to see if I could do it. Like, could I keep this promise to myself? There’s a million things I want to do every day, but life happens, right? You get it. We’re all juggling a lot and just trying to balance those priorities as best we can.
Most critically, with a hierarchy of non-negotiable, time-sensitive priorities on my daily to-do, I wondered if I could consistently make time for what’s essentially this game that I’m playing with myself — without adversely impacting my relationships and responsibilities to others (and myself).
And that’s what led me to the first surprising takeaway.
#1 How Lower Expectations Yields Higher Performance Outcomes
TLDR; Mindset Matters.
If every time you sit down to create, you expect yourself to generate a masterpiece, you’re sunk before you’ve ever set sail. This may feel obvious— especially to all the golfers out there who know the futility of trying to land the perfect shot at every opportunity. Nevertheless, I find it’s really hard to put into practice consistently, effectively. Because inevitably, as we find success with our (anything, or) creativity, we start to expect a certain performance outcome. And the reality is that it’s just unrealistic. Even Michael Jordan had off nights. Somehow we forgive this (a little) in our sports heroes, but we’re often less forgiving of ourselves.
Releasing rigidity — in practice, in process, and in product expectations for outcomes — is key to nurturing the flow of creativity, no matter the project. We have to allow ourselves the space and time to discover, which is hard to do on a deadline. Over the past 100 days, I figured out that taking the time to make discoveries helped me “mint” new creative competencies which, once consistently practiced, led to faster content creation wherein I was also ultimately satisfied with the outcome.
In other words, let yourself be bad at something, and do it anyway. A no-expectation mindset allows us to be open to learning new ways of doing the thing (whatever it is), and/or doing it better. For me, that included a number of creative efforts from cooking to tarot, social media content, drafting and rewriting my own work, as well as developing 8 new courses to teach for 3 schools and 2 new product services for my consultancy… all in the past 100 days. Especially when we’re trying to crush things that we feel (for whatever reasons) that we should be better at, the pressure of high-performance expectation can prevent us from being open to more optimal ways of getting it done well, maybe even at all.
Ultimately, I discovered that when I lowered my expectations for what I should be creating, and empowered myself to discover and explore what I could be creating, I often surprised myself with the quality of my work. Releasing myself from the pressure of trying to perfect the process and product is something I strive for intellectually, but in practice— creatively, emotionally, it’s really hard for me to do.
Many of us want to know that the time we’re spending to do the thing “is worthwhile”, same goes for the money/time we’re spending to get an education, coaching, consulting, editing, or hiring other freelance artists to collaborate with us on projects. Together with the “I create better under the pressure of a deadline” or, “I really hope I get paid for this spec work” or, “If I don’t win the festival / contest what do I tell my investors” — expectation can be a really gnarley buzzkill for creative flow. And it’s the reality that many of us face daily in our creative work.
What I found in the past 100 days was that practicing playfulness in other aspects of low stakes creativity and releasing my expectations over those outcomes was like training a muscle — that gave me the creative endurance, strength and agility to apply greater focus and discernment to create more-better-faster-on-a-deadline when I actually had to deliver.
And I was a lot less stressed along the way. Tired and spent, but not really stressed. What I initially feared would be inefficient uses of my precious time and bandwidth turned out to be effective practices that nourished me in ways I didn’t realize I needed.
Which leads me to the second surprising takeaway.
#2 Why Creative Self-Worth Must Come From Within
Spoiler: Connect your purpose to your process, not the product or how it’s received. That’s the key to unlocking your creative potential, your relevance, your reinvention, your rebrand…
How many writers, artists and entrepreneurs out there miss their shot because they don’t take it? Because they tell themselves they’re not ready, or aren’t good enough, or aren’t at some [insert random metric of comparison] level, yet? Or, shift the paradigm —how many of us fail to create and pursue our own opportunities because somewhere along the way, our faith or self-confidence has been shaken and we come to believe that we can’t, couldn’t possibly, or that it’ll never be “worth” our investment?
Granted, many feel the very real pressure to practice various types of creativity with a certain level of competence, skill, or authenticity. We want to approach a new venture or project with a certain amount of humility and strategic pragmatism to measure its potential for success and analyze the cost/benefit of our investment.
However, sometimes the desire for certain external metrics of success and validators can, frankly, f*ck with us, our work, our process.
Side story. I’d just graduated from film school and found myself at a charity event where Bill Murray was one of the keynote speakers. Some readers know that I caddied for Bill when I was 14, and that at this event when I was 21, I approached him to see if he’d star in a feature I’d written for him. I told him I was an “aspiring screenwriter” and he quickly corrected me, saying something like, Are you currently writing a screenplay, or just trying to? And I was like, Well no one’s paying me yet… And he was like, Doesn’t matter. If you wrote the script, and you’re writing more, you’re a screenwriter. Don’t sell yourself short.
I’ve told that story a million times before. And, I have since been paid to write, direct, produce, consult and coach others to do the same. With that, I’ve also tied my creative worth to money and recognition for the past 20+ years.
As with most freelance and creative work, even at the highest levels— there comes a time when you are inevitably out of work, between jobs, gigs, clients, etc.
At some point, others not needing you can compel you to question your worth, your relevance, and even worse— your purpose.
Been there. I know that many of you, readers, have also been there.
By practicing creativity broadly, applying it to many different types of disciplines— both things that I do professionally, and things that I just dabble in for fun or to serve my professional goals, I began to liberate my creative self-worth from those external metrics of success. Money. Awards. Recognition.
And while I preach the essentiality of writers learning how to validate the merits of their own work in every class and workshop that I teach, that’s also double-edged sword. Many of us writers, artists, entrepreneurs know the value of our work, our experience, our expertise. So it’s hard to reconcile your purpose with your potential when the realities of being an artist surviving capitalism collide — you suddenly find that your work is not published, produced, out there, in galleries, museums, winning awards, the deal falls through, the clients change their mind, the job you thought you had is not yours… When our professional creative lives implode, or even just the pursuit of something creative in which we’ve heavily invested, perhaps not even professionally— it can definitely bring on existential crisis mode like, what am I doing?
For me, practicing play and releasing myself from the expectation of certain outcomes allowed me to realign myself with my core creative values, aligning my purpose with my potential. I fell in love with my (new) process (again). I got messy. I got vulnerable. I got radically on my own team. I love coaching, consulting, and teaching (and being a mom, obvi) because I love to cheerlead others, I love giving a fired up pep talk, and since I will (probably? Not ready to count this out yet) never get to be a quarterback under those Friday Night Lights, my creativity is my Glory Days where I get to do all that. In the past 100 days, I realized that I had to give myself a fired up pep talk, and this was it. The past 100 days of exploring creativity everyday pushed me to be on my own team, cheerlead for myself, put myself out there unapologetically, no hiding behind supporting others to do their thing, and just. f*cking. do it.
Which leads me to the third surprising takeaway.
#3 Cringe is Cool. We Could All Be More Cringe.
Low-key cringe might be the sword-in-the-stone that we need to fight back against fear. Creative Revolution LFG!
I love being cringe. I also am like OMG WTF am I doing being so cringe. And then I am cringe anyway. Because cringe is obviously totally my brand. But it took me until I was in my 40s and a mom of a Gen Zalpha old enough to articulate all the ways in which I was so cringe for me to really put myself out there in a number of ways beyond the page and screen — like, live on stage, or on social media — making cringe cool by confidently, comfortably, owning that, doubling down on it, and making it worse. (Everyone, go see The Boys - Rachael Mason and Susan Messing - on stage and take improv workshops with them. They are geniuses and taught me how to find my joy and confidence in making it worse.)
There is something about being creative for each and every one of us that we’re like — I don’t know…. [if I can or should go there]. Right? It might not be conscious, or it might be a sense of humility or modesty or just the discomfort of being so exposed. What if no one likes it? What if no one thinks I’m funny? What if it sucks? What if…
What’s the thing you’re afraid to put out there about yourself? That you’re worried will come across as too much, too strong, too amateurish, too out there, that no one will like, or get, or appreciate?
I got called on it in film school, actually, that I tried too hard to make my characters too cool, too perfect, that I was undermining my own storytelling, unable to tell a story with flawed characters, vulnerable to growth, learning a lesson, transforming. They weren’t real, they weren’t authentic, and probably also boring AF.
There’s Cringe… and there’s Cringe. When we’re talking cringe because it’s so painfully self-aware, raw, vulnerable, honest, earnest, sincere, authentic, genuine … there’s a whole lot of truth in there that can be heavy or uncomfortable for ourselves to confront, for others to witness, and for all of us to engage.
But when we are unapologetically ourselves, comfortable in our own skin, we have nothing to prove, nothing to lose, and there’s a freedom in that which empowers us to take creative risks.
Final Thoughts
The past 100 Days of Creativity Everyday and documenting it has given me an incredible opportunity to reflect on the meaning my work has for me, and others. Effective practices to take care of our body, mind, and soul require a certain amount of daily devotion and there are only so many hours in the day. Prioritizing the act of creating at a time when destruction and disasters loom large everywhere we look, feels profoundly hopeful to me, it feels like a way through, and that’s why I launched Revision Mode. Also because I’m in Revision Mode, rewriting my way one project at a time through my personal reinvention, and doing my part to progress the creative revolution along the way.
Throughout our lives, I think many of us find ourselves facing failures, ghosting our dreams, craving reinventions, searching for our evolving relevance and realigning our pursuits with our purpose. My hope is that wherever this newsletter finds you, it offers creative sparks of inspiration from time to time for you to do just that.
And for those that want more access to exploring your creativity, coaching, supportive conversation, connection— I’m creating and curating that community. We have to build it together, though, and so I hope you’ll join me! Upgrade to paid to access the chat, connect with others, and/or to enjoy the monthly deep-dive, master classes, and more! (I’m thinking live webinars, virtual workshops, mixers and meet ups… more on that, coming soon!)
Thanks for reading all the way to the end. Lol.
