Creating While Adulting

Hey friends,

Today I want to talk about the curious problem of creating while adulting.

1. Why we stop creating.
2. Why we should create.
3. What EVEN IS creativity.
4. And some things we can do to nurture it, even while adulting.

But first, a disclaimer. The following content is Rated O for Opinion and contains questionable research mixed with my own experiences and speculation. It’s my opinion and how I’ve come to think about creativity.

That said…

Let me introduce you to 'Little Nathan'.

Like many of us, when I was young I spent a lot of time creating and playing.

Lego sculptures, play acting — usually as…

BATMAN. (Batman was a big deal to me at the time.)

…but especially drawing. I loved to draw and I drew a LOT. These are some of my early drawings.

Many of us can confirm that children are REALLY PROLIFIC artists.

They fearlessly create from their inner selves.

They’re not concerned with how it looks as much as the process: the smell of those Crayola markers, the feeling of pencil on paper.

They create because they want to, for the joy of it.

As a kid, I created entire worlds (often ripped from the things I loved).

I drew comics, wrote stories, and just kept creating.

But at some point, we stop creating like this.

We stop creating for the joy of it.

Why?

I think two things happen as we get older:

We encounter 'The Gap'. And…

Life gets hard.

"The Gap" is a term defined by Ira Glass and it describes the discrepancy between your creative taste and your creative skill.

Although typically when you first encounter it looks more like:

A chasm.

Through exposure to great work your inner sense of quality—your taste—has developed enough for the skill of your OWN work to become a disappointment to you.

It may not have been one particular revelation but a slow confidence drain from critical review or rejection.

But you’ve come face to face with "The Gap" and find a crossroads.

Some people stop here. They feel their work will never be as good as their ambitions and they move on.

Some will accept the challenge, double down, and work on closing that gap.

This was my experience when I saw the work of Todd McFarlane, Akira Toriyama, and many others. I was enthralled by their work and knew what I was producing wasn’t the same quality.

So I copied, I traced, I riffed, and I kept going. These are some of my high school drawings.

But creating had changed for me, it was no longer JUST for joy of creating — I had something to prove now, an inner tension.

Which… isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it can be a consuming thing.

Our taste tends to improve faster than our skill leading to confidence spirals.

When I look at something I’ve created I can VERY EASILY see everything that’s wrong with it, what I could have/should have done differently.

In fact, in one particular confidence spiral of my own I destroyed a lot of my art.

The only reason I have some of these pieces to show you today is because my Dad found a old copy of slides that I used to apply to the Art Program at Radford University.

We’ll come back to confidence spirals in a bit.

But for now let’s go on to another reason we stop creating… and that is…

Life gets hard.

When I graduated with a BFA and got a real job, things got busy fast.

Housing, bills, budgets, repair and maintenance. Layer in in relationships, family, and kids, and things quickly reach capacity.

I came to realize that I am finite, and my energy is finite.

My life was so FULL that I thought I didn’t have the juice outside of my job and responsibilities to create.

And I thought that by not creating "capital A" ART — that I wasn’t being creative.

But I was wrong.

And I believe we can recapture the JOY of creating, even during the busiest moments, because…

Creativity is not a talent, it’s a mode of thinking.

It’s not something you’re born with.

It’s about how you approach things — and it bleeds into all areas of our lives.

It's a way we can relate to each other. We can show love through creativity and give back to the world and the people we encounter each time we create something new.

It’s about what you have to say:

A thank you note says, "I cared enough to use time-consuming analog materials to convey my appreciation for what you did."

A homemade pie says, "I have created a majestic sensory experience for you of carbs and sugar."

A garden says “Look at how amazing nature is, these plants are cool and I want to share them with you.”

Everything we create says something big or small.

And we all have something to say.

But some people say, “Well, I’m just not creative.”

To which —I— say…

PHOOEY!

It takes a lot of creativity to keep little ones engaged in soccer practice.

Parents of small children — it takes a lot of creativity to teach and provide experiences for them.

But you have to see that creativity for what it is.

Because creativity is not a talent, it is a mode of thinking.

So let’s think about thinking for a bit

John Cleese has a famous talk on creativity that’s helpful here. (And I've already started referencing it).

In it, Cleese describes two modes of thinking:

The Open mode:

Which is relaxed, expansive, humorous, curious. It’s not under pressure.

And the Closed mode:

Which is a heads down, purposeful, it’s work-mode. It can be either pleasurable or stressful — sometimes both, depending

You need both modes.

If you only stay in the open you never get anything done.

If you only stay in the closed mode means going through life with our heads down.

But we need a few things to help move us into the open mode.

You need space, the ability to seal yourself or you and your collaborators off.

You need time to create boundaries, To reserve that time for yourself, because it TAKES TIME to get into the open mode. It’s not a switch you can turn on and off.

You also need MORE time to stick with the problem, to tolerate the discomfort of an unsolved problem and not always take the first solution.

You need confidence, because a fear of mistakes blocks creativity.

Try to be open to anything in this mode.

And then finally, we need humor. An attitude of humor allows play to happen, to ask “What if”, to explore silly ideas that you’d never normally consider.

Humor is what brings us into the open mode faster than anything else.

However, when you’re also attempting to adult at the same time, I think we need three additional things to help us find this open mode:

We need to prepare before we even try to be creative.

We need perseverance in the struggle, in the doing.

And we need perspective in the after to keep ourselves ready for the next thing.

Let’s talk preparation, specifically energy and community.

We’ve already talked about how our energy is finite.

But some of us have energy tanks that look like this:

Full of holes. Mine included.

And when you look closely at some of the activities you THINK are FILLING your tank, they’re actually…

Energy parasites. They’re taking energy, not giving it.

Doomscrolling, distractions, vapid entertainment, even negative people.

For me personally, I found almost all social media was eating up a lot of energy just to engage with it. So I cut it out of my life.

It’s going to be different for you, but if our energy is finite, what are we doing to protect it?

A lot of our energy also comes from community.

Consider, if you will, the apple tree.

Specifically a branch of an apple tree. On a functioning tree, the branch will produce fruit.

In periods of my life I’ve tried to be the branch without a tree.

I wanted to do it on my own, I’m an introvert after all, but the branch can’t produce fruit without the support of the rest of the tree.

The water and nutrients from the sap and leaves. Even the bees that pollinate the flowers.

Without a community we’re just a lone branch.

We need people who encourage us, support us, help us along the way. We’re not designed to live life alone.

So who or what are you connected to? What does your community look like?

So we’re preparing by hooking into community and guarding our energy, let’s talk about the doing.

Sometimes when you’re working on a creative problem, you hit…

THE SLUMP.

THE DOLDRUMS.

This is the struggle section of creative effort. You’ve committed to creating but it’s just a slog. Nothing is coming.

I have found a way to short circuit the slump is if you can find and harness your…

FREAK ENERGY!

Freak energy is one part curiosity, one part humor, one part weird (and weirdness is subjective).

Everyone has something you could go on forever about, you can't read enough of it, you don't tire of it, you can do it again and again and it remains enjoyable.

And the joy of this can help pull you through a slump.

Some of you already know exactly what it is that you get your freak energy from.

But if not, ask, “What would you do for free?”

Because that’s a good indication of the source of your freak energy.

For me it’s games. Specifically game RULES. I can read rulebooks all day and learning a new game is an enticing brain puzzle that I can hardly put down.

Now, that’s not particularly practical in itself. But harnessing freak energy doesn’t mean it has to be the MAIN thing.

Kevin Carroll, the author of Rules of the Red Rubber Ball, his freak energy was from sports. But when he injured his knee and could no longer play, he pivoted to being an athletic trainer. He harnessed his freak energy to propel him into something else tangential.

So if you find yourself in the slump, find the point of tangency, that point of connection, between your problem and your freak energy, and let it pull you along.

Now lets talk about keeping perspective afterwards.

Remember those confidence spirals we talked about?

There’s a tendency when you look back at your efforts to see the failures. An endless todo list that makes everything else disappear behind the flaws.

But if we let our work ONLY be a catalog of mistakes it will make us feel resentful and guilty.

We have to work on reframing to ALSO see our successes. We don’t ignore the failures, but we look PAST them to find the successes too.

When we criticize our past MISTAKES, we criticize ourselves for not knowing as much THEN as we do NOW.

It’s FROM the mistakes that we’ve learned what we know now — our mistakes make it OURS.

And we cannot let a fear of mistakes prevent us from doing or trying new things.

As an example, I will confess, I’m terrible at gardening and landscaping.

This is the opposite of my yard.

And when I look at my yard, I see where the grass failed to grow even after all that money I spent.

Where the kudzu is trying to take over.

I see the holes where I’ve killed the plants.

And if I stop there, it’s all failures.

But I’ve also:

Learned how to dethatch and properly seed a lawn, revived my gardenia bushes from near death, and already reclaimed a huge section of my yard from the kudzu.

These successes help me each time I go back out there and we need to remember and draw on these successes.

So to wrap this up:

We stop creating from discouragement and demands but…

Creativity is not a talent, it’s a mode of thinking that’s available to us at every stage of life so:

Protect your juice.

Find your freak.

And remember, the world doesn’t need flawless. It needs people brave enough to show up and make something.

Because every time we create, big or small, we’re not just making things, we’re SAYING something. And we need more of that.

Thanks everyone for listening!

Happy creating!