can you be creative AND a perfectionist?
If the idea of drawing, making music, writing books or performing interpretative dance feels totally foreign to you, this text is for you. As a self-diagnosed non-creative to another, I want to share my process of getting to know my right brain.
I am a recovering perfectionist who hates inefficiency. This is probably why I built a professional personality around things that can be arranged, measured, mastered, ticked off, put on timelines or into project management software. Structure feels safe, because it means that as long as you follow the procedure and work hard, no one can ever turn around and tell you you’ve done it wrong. It feels predictable.
Except this is, of course, not true. Today’s world is an uncertain, confusing place, and most people either don’t know what they want or keep changing their mind so adhering to their expectations is pointless. You will get it wrong all the time, and people will tell you that.
There is never pleasing everyone, and I noticed myself getting tenser and tenser trying. It felt like constantly having a tight rubber band around my head that I kept tightening without really knowing why.
Over the years, a few things have happened that helped the tightness come undone. Like any rewiring as an adult, it’s a challenge, but work that definitely feels worth doing.
CREATIVE ≠ ARTISTIC
This is perhaps the realisation that started my journey towards discovering my creative side.
A few years ago I was working for a content creation and sharing platform. One of our early discussions was about what should be considered a creation. A drawing or a music recording? Absolutely. A recipe or a piece of code? We were not so sure. Today, it’s hard to deny that TikTok isn’t full of super creative and form breaking videos, but back then drawing the line felt more challenging.
The dominating narrative tells us artists are the true creatives. That to create is to put art or something quirky into the world. It reduces the world into binaries: arts or sciences, creativity or efficiency, beauty or logic. Unemployment or success.
My narrative since childhood was that I’m good at school and academics, and therefore don’t have any artistic talent. I am a terrible drawer and the person who will snap your photo at Machu Picchu and accidentally crop out your legs, because I ’have no visual eye’. In 8th grade, my art teacher couldn’t work out which way to hold my water colour painting because it didn’t look like anything. Even today people will tell me that my Power Point slides are not pretty but that’s alright because it’s really about the content anyway.
Being artistic is not the same as being creative.
But here’s the thing: being artistic is not the same as being creative. During that work conversation I started separating visual, artistic creativity from any other forms of creativity. For the first time, it occurred to me that maybe it was just this particular type I wasn’t very good at. Or maybe I could be, if I allowed myself the space to practice. Which brings us to…
PERFECTIONISM AND HOW IT KILLS CREATIVITY
Perfectionism is the need to be or appear to be perfect. This need is not only external (we want others to think we’re perfect) but internal too, which is perhaps the most dangerous part. The idea of drafts, edits, discarded story beginnings and unpublished singles makes us feel queasy. We want to pretend they don’t exist. If we don’t produce diamonds all the time, we are clearly unworthy of the definition ‘’creative’ and should become accountants.
Perfectionism is what keeps us fixated on the outcome and renders the process of getting there invisible. Together with comparison it makes looking at your first shitty draft unbearable. You lose perspective. Comparing your v1 with the end result of someone else’s years of practice, you forget that all those people also started somewhere that most likely wasn’t brilliant!
Perfectionism is what keeps us fixated on the outcome and renders the process of getting there invisible.
Relentless curation and short living content on social media exacerbates this, because the sheer amount of content means we only see the latest and therefore most likely the best versions. Go to YouTube and check out your favourite channel’s first videos from 2015 and tell me they don’t look at least a little amateurish.
It’s a problem of timelines, really. Looking back 10 years at fashion trends, we all look collectively ridiculous. But with creative development, each one of us has a different starting point, which means we are at different parts of the journey, which means we are making unfair and unhelpful comparisons. We ignore the months or years that go into writing a book or making a documentary and the work of an entire profession (editors), the countless hours that go into music practice before you start taking over stadiums or the Internet.
And that keeps us paralysed.
CREATIVITY AS A PRACTICE OF DISCOVERY
A few years ago I came across a TED talk by OK Go — How to find a wonderful idea.
In the talk the band describes their process behind their quirky music videos. The lead singer Damian talks about how they never really think of great ideas but rather find them. It’s a process of trying, playing around with, shifting, changing, moving around, then trying something different until something sticks out and strikes a chord, sounds right, pulls you in. You keep moving towards that, continue the process until the next similar moment arrives. Like the kids game of Hot and Cold, it’s an endless process of repetition and discovery.
Creativity is the process of trying, playing around with, shifting, changing, moving around, then trying something different until something sticks out, strikes a chord, sounds right, pulls you in.
For a perfectionist, this messy trial stage is incomprehensible. We don’t know what to do with it because what we want coming out is, well, perfection on the first try. No drafts, no sketches, no unfinished or clumsy parts. Even though these parts are hidden in most published work, they are a crucial part of the process.
In writing, which is my medium, the process is seven different essay structures until I find the one that flows and creates a narrative. I move paragraphs around over and over again until it feels like they fall into place, or show a gap I still need to work on. When I’m 80% ready with a piece, it will still have a lot of this:
???
[bridge sentence here]
[think of a better example]
[what’s a better word here]
Creativity is learning to listen to what’s not yet there as much as what already is. Making space for it, allowing things to sound stupid while you iterate until the piece finally clicks into place. You can create from nothing, but you also create by rearranging.
Creativity is learning to listen to what’s not yet there as much as what already is.
For a perfectionist, all this is very uncomfortable. The moment you want to slam shut the laptop because what you just wrote looks embarrassing is exactly when you know you’re getting into the process. Sit with it, don’t run away. You create something, anything, and put it out in the world, be it for your own eyes only or publicly shared. Observe the response. If there was no response, clearly it didn’t resonate. People didn’t engage, the text doesn’t feel right to you, whatever. Now you know something you didn’t before. That does not mean you failed, it means you learned. Take the learning and try again.
You create something, anything, and it doesn’t work. Fine. Now you know something new. That does not mean you failed, it means you learned. Take the learning and try again.
Allowing yourself to toy around with anything creative means allowing for things to not work out, to fail, to come out ugly and non-sensical, to be deemed wrong, average, not interesting. A nightmare for a perfectionist.
This really is a journey, which is why I said at the beginning that I am a recovering perfectionist. For me, it has been incredibly helpful to hear other people whose work I admire share their their creative processes.
I’ve learned a lot about creativity from these:
- Jenny Odell: a writer and visual artist
- How to find a wonderful idea | OK Go
