3 Creative Pitfalls
Creativity is really hard. It takes not just getting to the work itself, but also a way of living and being. Creativity is the outflow of our lives: spiritually, relationally, existentially. Falling down in the spiritual life is easy. Getting up is harder. It takes grace, and prayer, and the willingness to repent, confess, and move on. As we can fall in our daily spiritual lives, we can hit pitfalls in our creative working lives, whether writing or sculpting or filming, etc.
These three pitfalls come from Seth Godin’s book The Practice. A book I highly recommend for people who work and struggle creatively.
Here are 3 pitfalls that can destroy our creative spirit and ruin our ability to properly serve God and others through our work:
Pitfall 1: Attachment to the Outcome
Because we are producing things, it’s easy to get locked in on a particular outcome of our work, which typically relates to our desire to be loved and accepted. The outcome thus becomes not so much the result of our creating, but a way to appease certain market expectations or voices in a particular industry or niche. The attachment is not so much about the product itself, but rather how the product is triangulated with me, ‘the artist’, at the centre. Godin …
Attachment to the outcome. Attachment to what a certain person is going to say about our next piece of work. Attachment to our perception of our standing in the community. We are in free fall. Always (86).
Attachment to the outcome is only secondarily about the product; for the real product of attachment is our egos. Yes, we get in the way of our work believing somehow we are the product. Back to death of the ego, death of the artist. … You have to let go (link).
Pitfall 2. Playing it Safe
When we’re attached to the outcome, which is ourselves, we kill our own work. We become hesitant, closed off–not free. Creativity requires high levels of play and a kind of boundlessness, an openness to the world and to God and to others that is out of pure love. Creativity requires being open to risk and making tons of mistakes, but not seeing them as mistakes but rather mere iterations of work.
But when it’s ‘all about me’ and my ego and my resentments and hurts, I’m not free to play–I don’t want to play. And I don’t stop there, but then out of my laziness, my complacency, my hurts, I lash out and judge others and spiral further away from vision, calling, Love into the hell of my own ego–a burning, gnashing hell.
Godin …
Focusing solely on outcomes focuses us to make choices that are banal, short term, or selfish. It takes our focus away from the journey and encourages us to give up too early. The practice of choosing creativity persists. . . . We do this work for a reason., but if we triangulate the work we do, and focus on the immediate outcome, our practice will fall apart (23).
Pitfall 3. Hoarding Your Voice
Your resentful, complacent, and, worst of all, egotistical. Now you’ve become choosy about ‘your voice’; the voice that is for all intents and purposes “your precious”–that thing you stare at and stroke amidst the hookah smoke of your many illusions and disillusionment. The time comes to work, to produce something, to serve with your gift–‘the gift’!–but you can’t … no, you can always, but you simply won’t! This too is an illusion, for you’re so attached to your ego you can’t move if you wanted to. You end up hoarding your voice, saving it for just the right time; saving it for a time when you can be seen as the brilliant poet, painter, sculptor, film producer, whatever, you are. You don’t realize the prison cell of your own making. Godin …
Hoarding your voice is based on the false assumption that you need to conserve your insight and generosity or else you’ll run out of these qualities. Hoarding isolates you from the people who count on you and need you the most … (47).
This state is spiritual death. Creativity is a spiritual exercise, a spiritual way of being. It requires a daily death to ourselves and a clinging on to Christ in prayer, devotion, and service. And there are people counting on us: that person who needs to read your book, or who would be inspired by the icon you’re painting, or the film you envision producing.
The Scarcity Mindset
Godin calls the state of working creatively as “generosity”, to which I fully agree. It is an act of love. When we hoard it, we’re withholding love and keeping it only for ourselves in self-love. And self-love is bad news. It is the foundation of two of the great sins: Pride and Envy. Hoarding our voices also leads to scarcity: the fear that we will have nothing left to produce. It’s because we’ve become the tree that produces no fruit and withers
and dies …
A scarcity mindset creates more scarcity, because you’re isolating yourself from the people who can cheer you on and challenge you to produce more (47).
And I would include with that the choir of the saints and the hosts of angels–those whom we commune with in Divine Liturgy, those whose prayers we seek and who cheer us on here on earth, protecting us, loving us–the mystical family we belong to! We isolate ourselves also from them! Hence the spiral into further death.
It all leads to death–the wrong death: the death IN the ego, not the death OF the ego. We then watch as our dreams, our vision, our work pass away as if dead in the water. Godin likens it to reaching out to a child you see face down drowning in water. You wouldn’t hesitate to save him. Same with our work.
We need to do everything we can to live out our calling and not let it die. Why? Because as Christians, we are called to create for the life of the world; and so when we let our work become about us, when we hoard our voices, when we play it safe, we are letting down our fellow man, and we are letting down God, and, yes, ourselves.
Death to the Ego
It all comes back to dying to the ego. We need to get over ourselves–everyday, and perhaps countless times per day. We need to seek God for more love, more joy, more generosity–for the fruits of the Spirit. We need those fruits to love and serve others in the daily tasks of our lives, and in our creative work. We are called to be living icons of Christ. Let us take this seriously. Let us open our hearts to Christ. Let us repent of our egos, and ask God to heal us, to open us to His Love, for others, for our art, and for the life of the world.
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If you like this topic of creativity, check out my book Creativity and Becoming: On Art, Writing, and Orthodox Spiritual Life. (Link)
