The Joy of Creativity: Practicing Your Creative Craft with both Discipline and Enjoyment. (DAY 17)

DAY Seventeen: Push Yourself

This is a 21-Day Exploration of Creativity.

The authors of ‘Peak: Secrets From the New Science of Expertise’ write of creating professional training programmes for doctors to keep them challenged so that they did not get rusty on the job. Why? Because, contrary to popular belief, when you keep doing the same thing over and over again, you actually get worse at it instead of getting better. What Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool discovered after years of research was that even those who are considered the best at their profession, whether they’re doctors or athletes etcetera, would actually get worse if all they did was do what they had always done over and over again.

This fact actually gives us a lot of insight because the average person usually works at something until they are relatively good at it then they just keep doing what they’ve always been doing. All this means is that you have plateaued and will remain there until you start to push yourself by taking on tougher challenges in order to get better at your chosen creative craft.

I remember watching a British documentary once that followed a literary writer on her quest to write romance fiction. You see, said writer had always scorned the genre because she thought that it was lazy writing which any ol’ nitwit off the street could pull off if asked to. However, when challenged to write a romance novel with a group of hardcore readers as judges of her work on a weekly basis, her story failed to go down. She ended up admitting that write romance wasn’t as easy as it seemed. (I wanted to provide the link but can’t even remember what the documentary was called! Sorry)

More than just learning not to scorn any genre of literature, what I learned from the author’s journey was that we can get so comfortable in our creative lanes to the point of thinking we know it all until we are asked to try to change lanes. Therefore, perhaps changing lanes is a good way to prevent a plateau in our creativity as we challenge ourselves to try different things.

As writers, changing genres is a good a challenge as any. But remember that you have to do so in a way that can be judged against set standards. This is the only way we know we are making progress. If you write children’s fiction and try to write a Sci-Fi which you then keep in a random folder on your laptop, you might want to rethink the challenge because how would you know you were any good at it? It is not just about trying something new but trying something new until you’re damn good at it! So, find some way of being assessed regularly as you challenge yourself. Enter competitions, get a coach, post your work on Facebook to see what your friends say. Just find a way to keep yourself on your toes in your craft because, if you are not being challenged daily, then you are not getting any better. And that’s just the sad truth of it all! Good luck on your new adventures!

Originally published HERE — iampreciousck.com