By Noah Scalin

 

One of the questions I get asked most frequently when I give talks about Skull-A-Day (www.SkullADay.com), the project in which I made a different piece of skull art every single day for a year is, “what happened when you ran out of ideas?” It’s an interesting question, since from an outside perspective it would seem like a logical thing to ask, but the answer is rarely what people expect to hear: I never ran out of ideas. In fact, I ended with a long list of ideas that I never got around to doing!

Most people assume that if you’re constantly being creative you’re going to eventually hit a wall, you’ll develop writer’s block, etc. But here’s the thing – when you engage in the idea of creativity as a daily practice, the experience isn’t one of draining a well: slowly using up all of your good ideas until you’re completely dry. Instead what happens is more like rolling a tiny snowball down a mountain. It grows and grows until it’s a giant ball with a huge amount of momentum flying downhill.

So how does this creativity momentum happen? Simple. Make something. Make anything at all. It doesn’t have to be good, it definitely doesn’t have to be perfect, but it does need to exist in the real world. The act of creating is the act of striking a match that will help bring a much bigger fire into existence.

And it’s most definitely something you can’t just think about; trying to visualize ideas into reality doesn’t work. I can’t emphasize enough that this is something that only comes when you force yourself to make things on a regular basis, whether you want to or not. By having a deadline and an expectant audience I felt obliged to work (and share my work) regardless of how I felt about it. And once I started making things daily, the ideas started flowing and the tap is still running even years after my initial project was completed.

In fact, I’ve interviewed more than 500 people who have taken the daily creative challenge on my site MakeSomething365.com and across the board I hear the same thing over and over: Once you get started, the ideas just come and they build upon each other. And usually within two weeks people say they start waking up excited about what they will create that day, rather than worried about where the next idea will come from. Not a bad way to start the day, eh?

That’s not to say that we don’t ever experience moments where we don’t know the solutions to the creative problems in our work or life. But by developing our innovation muscles, we end up with a toolbox of skills that can help us find new ideas at a moment’s notice.

So can you commit to making a practice of creating? It doesn’t have to be every day and it doesn’t have to be for an entire year. But if you treat it like any other form of practice (yoga, guitar, tennis, etc.) and start making things on a regular basis, without judgment, you will see a real difference in your life.