Branches

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” -Aristotle

Between spurts of swimming, eating and putt-putting, this weekend was spent mostly reading. Sarah and some friends and I headed up to the peaceful confines of Devil’s Lake State Park, in what’s turning out to be an annual summer tradition. I spent the time doing what parks are designed for: devouring a good book. This year, I picked up Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit.

Tharp is a choreographer by trade—one of the most famous working today. Yet for the sake of this book, she’s simply an artist. Choreography just happens to be the form of expression she’s chosen to get her creative energies out in the world. She also happens to be a compelling writer, and despite sprinkling her essays with stories about ballet and Barishnikov, she remains completely accessible to the dance-ignorant. Which serves her greater point, which is that creativity, whatever form it takes, is something earned through hard work and habit, and not some magical spark bestowed on the lucky.

This is somewhat antithetical to our preconceptions about creativity. Creativity is often framed as the outcome of serendipity touched by the spontaneous bolt of inspiration. Tharp doesn’t deny this, but points out that the best inspiration comes to those who’ve put themselves in position to do something with it. It’s about getting your tools ready and keeping your mind sharp and attacking the canvas over and over again until finally finding something that clicks. At first this will take a while; hopefully with practice, the duration between first draft and final version will shrink.

Tharp trots out dozens of ways to get yourself into the creative habit. (So many, in fact, that by the end you wonder if she’s just throwing out as much as possible and hoping some of them stick. A small quibble.) A few lessons stand out for me. The first is that you’ve got to give yourself room to fail. Success can’t happen without it. (cf. the tagline of Matt’s great fortuito.us blog.) Most people prefer to do the failing in private, which is fine, but it’s gotta happen somewhere. I hear this lesson a lot, and it resonates, and I think my confidence in my abilities would greatly increase if I started to heed it.

The second addresses a problem that I’m sure many designers would love to have, but which bogs me down: It’s great to plan, but it’s dangerous to overplan. I definitely overplan. I’m good at it and I enjoy it, and that allows me to easily fall into the habit of doing too much planning and not enough doing. The overplanner is doubly cursed: first we never get anything done, since we’re spending all our time figuring out how we’re going to do it; then, when things don’t go exactly according to plan, we get stifled by inflexibility. I need to remember to loosen up.

The third lesson is not something explicitly mentioned in the book, but comes more from the experience. While I was reading, I kept a pencil and open notebook next to me, so I could scribble down any ideas as they came to me. By the end, I had filled three pages of my Moleskine. Some notes were lessons from the book. Some were applications of the lessons to my business. Some were seemingly random ideas about various endeavors I’m currently juggling right now. I say “seemingly” because I hadn’t planned to think about how to organize my guest room, or what to do the next time I set up a blog for a client. These ideas came to me because I had set up the mechanism—an inspiring book, in a relaxing park, with time available to daydream—and given myself a place to collect the ideas as they came.

(photo by Rocketlass)

It’s easy for me to get overwhelmed by work, bury my head, and steam ahead. I need to be careful about this. Tharp’s book is a good reminder to give my mind room to breathe and play, and to do it habitually. The planner in me deserves it; the artist in me demands it.