Origins of creativity

Creativity comes from constraints and freedom tied together. Pressure is ok, good in fact. It’s a wonderful thing to know that you have boundaries around your work, something holding it all together, forcing you forward.

I think of the anology of swimming through a hard current and struggling against it. The activity wakes me up, brings me to full awareness and makes me feel alive. Of course it can swiftly go from hard to deadly. That’s not what interests me. I don’t want to drown, but I do want to have a challenge. So I’m interested in hard things that feel extremely pushing on my capabilities, but not all-in-one gambits that could end in catastrophe.

Creativity also requires something nebulous. I find that when I’m working within a team, the expectations and reliance of team members on my results drives me forward. An amazing manager that I worked with years ago let me know that her job was to be my cheerleader and support and provide guidance when needed. She was like a coach on the sidelines. She wasn’t doing the actual work, but she was pulling the best out of me each and every day. And she could do the work, but she chose not to. Instead she trusted me and trusted that together with guidance where needed we’d reach the results that mattered.

She wasn’t—to stretch the anology—grabbing the ball from me while I was in play. But she was calling out ways I could improve, areas that went well, and I knew she always had my back.

Contrast that with other managers I’ve had who are still learning this, or flat out refuse to acknowledge a better way of supporting creatives. In a pinch they jump in and start designing; figuratively pulling the mouse cursor away and making things happen without the autonomy of the rest of the team. When things get tight they start to define every tiny aspect of the work, choosing to focus their time on moving the creative to their exacting—sometimes unecessary—requirements, instead of trusting the team working with them.

In those cases something switches for me. I’ve gotten better at acknowleding it, recognizing when it’s about to happen, and working with colleagues to anticipate it before anything comes up. But still in some cases it trips me up. When I become micromanaged—that’s probably the word you were looking for—I’m no longer in charge of the creativity and beauty and possibility. Instead I’m looking to the manager to determine success. That’s not how a good project is run. That’s not why so many creatives are hired to do their work. Nowadays when that happens I do all I can to pull it back, coaching, supporting, encouraging, and working with the manager to help each of us find our roles and spots to keep the project moving forward. Sometimes it doesn’t work though, and that’s ok. The world is too big to let squabbles like this lead to personal insults or worse.

I’m also not talking about disagreement with a manager. One of my current managers (calling you out Tanner) often disagrees with decisions I make. But he does it in a way that I absolutely appreciate. He’s not pulling the power card and forcing, he’s prodding and asking and challenging toward a solution we’ve all agreed we want to accomplish. I embrace that, love it. On a good day I don’t agree with more than a third of my own design decisions, so I don’t expect a manager to love everything I do. That’d be ludicrous. What I look for is a partnership where we’ll pull back and forth to find the right solution, given all our constraints.

When all these pieces come together you find a beauty harmony in creative work, and frankly it makes the process of showing up a joy, a challenge, and some days you make things that will last.

I love to be struggling a bit against the current, but also to have a healthy dose of autonomy in the decisions I make.