THE NONLINEAR PATH 05: What To Do When You Get Stuck
And How Do You Know Your Creative Work Doesn't Suck?
This week I got stuck, again. Like many times before and many times yet to come. My article is late. My boss came out to berate me. Since turning pro I have been settling into my new job and developing my relationship with my new boss, myself. I’m learning a lot about myself in this new role, and even more about my new boss.
She didn’t get mad, but she also didn’t let me off the hook. Instead she told me to figure it out.
She surprised me. She didn’t get mad, but she also didn’t let me off the hook. Instead she told me to figure it out…and get it done. My new boss is teaching me how to simultaneously be a good boss and how to get to work. A teacher is always a student.
Artists are known for their creative flow, which also leaves them prone to getting stuck. Why do we get “stuck” and what does getting stuck even mean?
As artists, writers, musicians, designers, we are well-aware of trying to get into that flow state, to ride a wave into someplace deeper where we can access uncharted territory and new ideas within ourselves. Being in this state is pure bliss, ultimate joy of which we are barely aware. Time passes in an instant and hours fly by without notice.
Then we are thwarted. The flow disrupted, the current smashes headlong into a huge rock wall, sending us drowning in an undertow. We are left gasping for air, disoriented and confused. Joy is gone, and stress, frustration and annoyance have taken its place.
Sounds dramatic but this is how feeling stuck can be for artists. Our creative work is so important, so precious to ourselves. It takes hard work and extreme focus to access the flow and when we can’t, when we hit that wall, or when we have to remold our hard-birthed creations to fit commercial needs, it feels like life or death.
Getting stuck happens to all professional artists, regularly, at different times and to varying degrees. It happens at the beginning before you ever get off the ground. It happens at all phases of the middle, and it happens at the end right before you release your work out into the world. Disruption of the blissful creative process can happen from within ourselves or from the external forces of commercialism.
Fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi captures some essence of this in the 1995 documentary Unzipped:
“Here’s my process…I get inspired, somehow, somewhere, from the ballet, from dance, from a movie, from something. I get this gesture in my head and then I think ‘is this worthy of doing a collection?’. Usually it is because its the only thing I can think of. And from there I just do all these millions of sketches about that one gesture…..What gets annoying is when it actually becomes like a giant puzzle and things have to be taken out for certain reasons and things have to be added in this very kind of clever way, that’s when it becomes a little bit grating on my nerves. Because it’s no longer about creating a look, it’s about creating a show.”
While we as professional creatives cannot control the pressures and needs of the business and must learn to adapt and work with them, we have a personal duty or responsibility over our internal stuck-ness, our own blocks to creativity.
Writer’s Block Doesn’t Exist
The author Seth Godin is known for his stance that writer’s block does not exist. He attributes the very creation of the idea to Percy Shelley, husband of Frankenstein author Mary Shelley. In an essay Shelley implies that not everyone can dare be a poet, stating that the only way one could be a poet is to be “touched by the muse”, meaning that inspiration for good writing must come from the divine, not from a place of hard work. Not just anyone can do it.
So what does it mean when your muse has abandoned you? Writer’s block.
What do we do when our muse has abandoned us? In reality, it is us who have abandoned ourselves, not some unseen entity who controls our ideas. It is simply two forces that we own and can control: fear and perfectionism.
While perfectionism is a form of fear, fear itself comes from many other places. We get stuck from the fear of not being good enough, that our ideas aren’t relevant, that our skills aren’t up to snuff, that we’ll look foolish, that we will be judged harshly, that we’ll fail, that we’ll succeed.
As an artist, you risk all of these each time you put creative work out into the world, and indeed you will experience these fears coming true. However, these are external factors that happen after the work is already released. Just by completing the work and putting it out there you have already succeeded.
“You are one-hundred percent successful as soon as you send your project out into the world…. regardless of how it is received.” -Rick Rubin
It’s the battle of the internal fears before the work is started or completed, that must ensue to keep you from getting stuck in your tracks. You have to risk it, you have to be willing to fail over and over again. You must be willing to suck at it for a while knowing that if you stay with it, you will improve.
Be where you are, not where you think you should be.
As my martial arts teacher says, you have to be where you are, not where you think you should be….and to get where you want to be, you have to put in the time and the work. And remember, some of your work is gonna suck. It’s baked into the creative process if you want to have any creative progress.
The Dark Pit Of Perfectionism
I’ve battled perfectionism my entire life. I think I wore it as a badge of honor too many times. It’s a bit of a twisted ego boost to say “I’m a perfectionist” even when admitting it as a weakness. It falsely lifted my ego to think I was always trying to do things “right” while actually hiding the real truth of a massive insecurity that came from the earliest years of my childhood.
I used being perfect as a weapon against abandonment issues. Who could leave such a perfect child? So I had to remain perfect, on the surface at least.
Until I started training kung fu. Over the years I would hear from my teachers “perfect is boring”, and “there’s no such thing as perfect”. It didn’t really hit home until years later, after I had already earned my black belt and my ego had been put in service of a higher energy. One of my teachers was working with me to prepare for a performance. I was to present my personal form, or kumbong as it is called in our Indonesian art.
As my teacher sat in the front of the room, I walked to the center of the hall and stood silently in a ready stance, calming my breath before starting. Before even moving a single muscle, she yelled “stop it!”. I was stunned. What on earth could I have done wrong already? (I have always been prone to thinking I am doing something wrong, a clear perfectionist trait). She continued, “Stop trying to be perfect. Who are you to know what "perfect" is anyway?”
Somehow, that single statement set me straight for good. She was right. I don’t know what’s perfect, and if I don’t know then that means nobody else does either. Therefore no one, not even myself, can judge if I am being perfect or not. That’s when the playing field leveled for me and everything shifted. From that moment on I realized we were all in the same boat, all on our own path, and that the need to appear perfect was all just ego. I didn’t need it anymore.
That facade was broken through quickly and relentlessly by my martial arts teachers, thank goodness, and I am forever grateful for it. Perfectionism is a shield that is built up and reinforced by our cultural love of stardom and the beautiful shiny object. However, it keeps us from finding our true selves and our true path.
It Takes As Long As It Takes
It also can keep us from getting shit done. Sometimes we confuse our perfectionist tendencies with wanting to do things well. We stall our progress and in wanting to do things well, we lose sight of just getting them done.
Don’t sacrifice done for perfect.
In my first year in a new role leading a design team at a large well-known company, I did just that. Wanting to prove myself and make a big impression, I became myopic, focussing on my own needs of perfectionism instead of the needs of the team and the company. I risked missing important deadlines which would be absolutely detrimental to the business and the brand.
Fortunately my boss was on to me and quickly set me straight with these words: “don’t sacrifice done for perfect”.
I was recently listening to author and podcaster Tim Ferriss interview Rick Rubin, legendary music producer and author of the book The Creative Act: A Way of Being. In the interview Ferriss, a notorious type A personality, talked about his own recent foray into fiction writing, his tendency to write many, many revisions and how to know if revision 56 is really better than revision 49. How would he know if he’s making progress or just adding time?
I wondered if he was just getting himself stuck on a cycle of perfectionism.
“When the work has five mistakes, it is not finished. But when it has eight, it might be.” -Rick Rubin
Rubin did not see it this way but rather, much like the sage or kung fu master, gave helpful advice for where Tim was actually at. He recommended that he compare revision 56 not just to version 49 but to version 1. He knows from experience that sometimes the first efforts can be the best ones, but that one must exhaust ideas, options, versions, in order to find that out. Just because you’ve put in the work doesn’t mean the latest version is the best, or even good at all.
It takes as long as it takes…until that deadline looms.
So What Do You Do When You Get Stuck?
So how do you get unstuck? You show up, start, keep going, finish, and put it out into the world. You’re somewhere on that timeline. Figure out where you are and move to the next step.
Show up. The Artist’s Date and Morning Pages in Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way are all about this. The most important, and hardest piece is that you show up: to the canvas, the studio, the training hall. That’s half the battle. The blank screen or piece of paper is the scariest part (that and releasing your “child” into the world). What you do after that doesn’t matter nearly as much because now you’re doing it, you’ve shown up.
Move. In martial arts, our answer is always to move. When you feel stuck, move. When you’re injured, move carefully. When you have no ideas, move, write, it doesn't matter what it is. Let it be awful, let it suck because eventually something useful and beautiful will arise. The pro moves in the face of fear. The pro knows he or she will get stuck and develops ways to unstick themselves when they do….and behind every pro is a vast body of work that just sucks.
Do the work and release it. There really is no magic. You just do the work…and then let it go.