We all want to accelerate toward our goals, but sometimes we create our own impediments. Most of the time it’s something psychological that gets in the way – a barrier of our own design that comes from ignoring vital parts of the creative process.
Those vital pieces are (perhaps to your dismay) setbacks, errors, mistakes, and failure.
We can set up the right structures to create and work through goals more easily, but that doesn’t deal with our aversion to failure or the self-consciousness that comes with attaching self-worth to creative outcomes.
In the audio presentation below, I dig into this in greater detail… But let’s briefly tackle this idea of errors as a path to acceleration.
I often work with a model called Structural Tension – the difference between what you want and current reality – and inside this model, tension is a key element of, well, any structure. It’s the tension of the walls on the beams that keeps a building standing… When you draw a bow, the tension between the two ends concentrates at the center of the string, and that tension is what launches the arrow…
So, you need tension in your own creative process too. I don’t mean stress or anxiety, but rather the opposing points of where you are and where you want to be, the opposing points of what’s working and what isn’t…
In the creative process, we’re going to make plenty of mistakes… Experiments don’t always work…
But we can look at this like bumpers on a bowling lane – we might be bouncing back and forth in a state of tension, but it’s all moving toward the goal, the proverbial pins at the end of the lane. Ideally, the further along we get, the closer the bumpers get together, and the more our “bouncing” becomes a straight line.
And yet even if we know this, even if we have experienced the learning process of refining our approach through trial and error, we want to skip ahead to the goal and avoid tension. We want to accelerate past learning and experimenting and making mistakes and get right to the endpoint…
And when we’re looking for acceleration, we start looking for shortcuts too. We bury ourselves in information, hoping to find the magic solution that will get us right to the goal, but this ignores another essential part of the learning and creative process: heuristics.
Heuristics are the learned frameworks and techniques that work on behalf of creating an outcome we don’t already know how to create. Heuristics are what enable people to learn for themselves, not based on a preconceived idea or someone else’s process. They are the direct acquisitions of the process itself – it’s the foundation of “learn by doing.”
In that process, there’s emotional conflict. It’s uncomfortable to make mistakes, it can be embarrassing to fail… And this often leads to taking things personally. We get our identity wrapped up in our creative efforts, and setbacks feel like failures as a person – instead of what they truly are, a critical part of moving toward any goal.
We have expectations, then get frustrated when things don’t go that way. We want to protect our sense of self, so we resist the truth of the creative process: that it isn’t actually about YOU.
It’s about the creation itself, not fixing yourself or attaching your self-worth to the outcome.
You are going to make mistakes, and that’s a good thing. It’s an iterative process that improves as you go. It won’t come from perfection or getting it right the first time (which likely won’t happen anyway).
Instead, we need to hang out in this space of trial and error, developing our own heuristics and refining our methods along the way.
So then, accelerating isn’t about finding the silver bullet or the exact tip you need. It’s about failing faster, about working through iterations fearlessly and detaching the outcomes from your sense of self. Action is key, and you learn the path by walking it.
Identify what you want. Stop the “should, would, and ought to” and pursue what truly matters to you, and let that serve as a track to guide you. Each iteration will come with valuable lessons that you can carry into the next, and show you errors that you can leave behind.
This is a PRACTICE. You get better by doing. You learn by doing. Anything you create will make you better at creating in the future.
That is the way to accelerate toward your goals.
Exploration, building heuristics, and repeating a process of modification and iteration will not only move you through the stages of your current creation, it will also empower you to bring these heuristics into your next creation, which will fuel your next creation, and so on.
You refine your creation process through action, and simultaneously refine your entire creative process in the same way.
This is building the plane while flying it.
Take action, fail fast, focus on what you love, and keep going.
