The Biggest Challenge Facing Creatives Today

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I’m sitting in a hotel room in Anaheim, reflecting on my conversation with Kent Sanders and writing this blog. My church denomination is having their annual convention this week, beginning this evening. The other day, we went to Disneyland.

These are all Good Things. But they are also perfectly good excuses for me, a creative, to not get all my work done. I owe myself a blog. You see, I decided last week that I was going to start writing two articles on Substack every week, rain or shine. I want to make it as a writer, publishing pieces under my own name.

I’m learning quickly just how challenging this line of work can be. In fact, let me tell you the biggest challenge facing you if you’re a creative.

By the way, what do I mean by creative? That’s probably you if you do:

• Writing

• Design

• Art

• Video 

• Photography

• Music

• Dance

• Poetry

• Pottery

• Weaving

• Social media

And a million other things that involve, well, creatively creating things. And if that is you, I’m about to tell you the absolute hardest thing about your life. You’re going to think I read your mind. The biggest challenge facing creatives today is…

Creating stuff.

That’s it. Doing stuff. That’s the hardest part. Why? It’s due to imposter syndrome, perfectionism, and the fear of rejection, I think.

When we’re starting out, we can pour our heart into something for hours… and get 3 views and a “like” from our mom. And that’s it.

By the way, thanks Mom for becoming my first paid subscriber!

But anyway. We have this vision in our brain of reaching thousands or millions with what we create… and it doesn’t quite work out that way at first. I mean, who are we, anyway? We’re nobody. Definitely not good enough to create what those famous, successful people in our zone of genius are creating.

Or we get an amazing idea (or one million of them) about what we could create, but we just can’t translate that idea into reality without losing something. That’s perfectionism. It makes us keep ideas as ideas, just lovely little things in our heads. But we’re never to mess up that perfect picture by actually trying to bring it to life.

And don’t even get me started about actual rejection. When someone hits the dislike button, passes you up for a commission, or comments something negative on your post. We bared our soul, and then someone ripped out our heart and threw it on the sidewalk. No, thanks.

That’s why, if you’re a creative, you probably find it incredibly difficult to create stuff. Which sucks, because that’s kind of the whole point. We have unfinished songs, unfinished manuscripts, a blog that got started and we hope everyone forgot about… we even made a sweet Instagram page for our Big New Thing.

Then, we had to actually start doing stuff. That’s the tricky part. 

So what’s the fix?

Well, to be honest, I don’t know exactly. I mean, I’ve managed to finish a book before, but I didn’t have a whole lot else going on in my life at that time. Almost every other creative endeavor I've begun has faded into the dust in a matter of weeks.

I guess part of it comes from accepting a few difficult truths. We need to accept the fact that we’re going to suck at first, what we create is going to suck for a while, that some people won’t like it no matter how good it is.

That, if we start now, and really commit, we will look back in a year and say, “man I could have done that better.” But guess what? All of your creative heroes feel the same way. They look back and think their early stuff was flaming garbage. I would know, because I’ve written for enough of them.

The only difference really is they kept going and kept growing.

So, they got 1% better at what they did each day, and after a year they were exponentially better. After five years, you encountered them online because they got picked up by whatever algorithm. But you never got to see their early stuff.

Which means you need to commit. I need to commit. Whatever your creative pursuit, treat it like an experiment. Go 90 days, 150 days, or even a year (or two), and see where it takes you.

What if you committed to posting every day, writing every day, shooting every day, for the next year? Where would you end up?

That’s where I’m at with my podcast, YouTube channel, business, and substack. Instead of beating myself at the results I’m getting after 2 months or less in each one, I’m committing to see what happens if I do stuff with them all, consistently, for at least a year. Maybe two.

But it’s rough fighting the imposter syndrome, perfectionism, and rejection. So bear with me here. It could be a rocky start. It definitely won’t look as cool or read as good as the people with millions of followers. But it’s where I’m at. And I’m committed to getting a little better every single podcast, article, video, and commissioned project.

What creative stuff do you need to do this week?