Creativity Hurts

Nobody wants to hear it. Welp... here ya' go.

Ease, flow, inspiration, joyful creativity, follow your bliss!… not interesting. It’s moms sipping wine and painting fruit in a class.

Why… why? is it so popular to write spiritual self-help books of a vaguely Eastern persuasion about how you can do anything if you just wiggle into the present moment good enough? I have to admit, I read a lot of those damn books (when I should have been reading the classics, in hindsight).

You'll notice, for one, these spiritual self-help types have never written a great original novel. They just write books theoretically teaching other people how to be interesting (or worse, manifest money). They benefit from our spiritual confusion, and so the truth is sometimes scattered in the leaves.

Here’s what I’ve gathered: the West’s current animating myth is essentially Rousseauian. Meaning, we believe (or, we MUST believe) that our state of nature is pure and good, and the only thing that corrupts us is the state, culture, or mankind. Under this dogma, good can never come from an act of will (much less a heroic act of will). That would just be to further oppress the immaculate state of nature.

Plus, we’re super lazy. So, 1 + 1 = “Power of Now” gurus make a killing.

In real life, all the people I know who did something original and great did it by relentless, uncomfortable effort. The methods wildly vary: Kierkegaard’s contemplative walks for miles a day, Hunter S. Thompson’s extreme daily diet of hard drugs, and Benjamin Franklin was famously early to rise (and therefore healthy, wealthy, and wise). The common thread is always beyond “follow your bliss.” It’s more like “follow your blisters” (I stole that from someone).

It’s not just pain, though. Near the outset of any great creative journey is a massive cliff down, down into stupidity:

What’s not indicated on this graph is that “confidence” doesn’t only mean “perceived skill.” You lose actual skill as you dive into the Valley of Stupidity. We call it “beginner's luck.” The first swing a golf club, our intuition does a better job than the procedural knowledge that we haven't mastered yet. Choke up!

Then, a devil whispers: it should feel easy like it did in the beginning. You should try something else. But the beginning is misleading. That ease comes back… occasionally… if we're lucky… on the other side of relentless practice… 99% of which is doing things long after we no longer want to do them.

I watched that Sylvester Stallone documentary. He wasn't wanted as an actor: droopy eyes, half-paralyzed face, a slur. So he wrote his own script, snuck into a movie theater every day, hand copied dialogue, and revised his script, over and over.

Finally, a studio bought Rocky and agreed to film it. They offered him $500,000 to not star in it. He turned them down. Which, was crazy: he was so poor at the time, he had to give away his beloved dog. He suffered to create that movie. Even after his rise, he doubted himself, felt intense pain, was confused, became estranged from his family, and was sure many times it was all going to come to an end.

Reflecting as an old man, he wished he would’ve taken even more risks, saying, “Of course you're afraid of it, that's why it's interesting.”

Most of a creativity is putting one foot after the other, pushing through what almost no one else is willing to tolerate, and then, maybe finding some little nugget of gold.

Creatively, I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know what to say next. I don't know what you want to hear. I don't know how much I need to know. Sometimes, I fall down a rabbit hole of complexity, trying to understand things I don’t need to understand. Other times, I gloss over facts I absolutely should know. Along the way, I can’t help but notice other people are so much better at so many things. It terrifies me, fills me with envy and doubt.

Those who have never tried have no idea what it takes. Only those who try with all of their being know how impossible it is. What layers of exponential insight! one after the other they roll through you, each wave blowing apart all preconceptions. Each washing you deeper and farther than you ever thought possible or reasonable, only to find another and yet another layer. The Dunning-Kruger effect finally melts away and you can see: the truly great are so much better than you that it’s a cavern that could not be crossed in 10 lifetimes. In the middle of that cavern—that waterless pit—you wonder if your striving is futile, a waste of your precious life… maybe there's an easier way? What did that Power of Now book say again? What could be gained from this suffering? Why would anyone subject themselves to this?

Then, you remind yourself that, if you give up, that you will go your entire life without seeing what you could have become. You will die with regrets. You can push that thought out of your mind because it's uncomfortable, but ignoring it keeps you stagnant and complacent.

You constantly have a choice to make: keep the promise you made to yourself, or give up—tell yourself you never cared that much about it, anyway. Let the possibility linger, “I could have made it if I really tried.” And never know for sure.

Or, keep going.

As Frost said,

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

Robert Frost chilling. ‘I only hope that when I am free,’ Frost says in “Misgiving,” that ‘[I] go in quest / Of the knowledge beyond the bounds of life.’”