How to beat creative block every time

Creative block can be exhausting, incredibly painful, and for professional creatives like us, financially devastating. We all go through it on some level. Some worse than others:

“I haven’t been able to produce anything in the last two years and it’s getting worse. I stare at my screen for hours, day after day, but nothing happens. It’s a horrible situation” - Ryan C.

That’s a particularly vicious case, but every creative person goes through this experience at some point. Personally, I experience a mini version of this each time I sit down to hack on something new. But I consistently overcome it. And so can you. How?

Steal like an artist

Focus on authenticity over originality when you’re starting a new project. What inspires you? What fires up your imagination? How can you play with it, extend it, and make it your own?

An extreme version of this is copy work where you literally recreate great work pixel by pixel. Obviously you wouldn’t try and pass that off as your own, but it can be a good way to get “inside” a piece of work and understand what’s making it click.

An approach that will translate more readily to work you can actually ship is to try and create something by incorporating stylistic elements taken from your various inspirations.

The key here is synthesis, extension, and integration into a new and authentic vision. Copying from one person is plagiarism. Copying from a hundred people is influence.

Why? Because as you attempt to do so you’re triangulating, editorializing, and mutating the source material. The resulting creation is something authentic and unique.

“It’s not where you take things from - it’s where you take them to” - Jean-Luc Goddard

How do you know if your work is sufficiently original to ship? Ask a friend. Show them your source material and your work and ask if you’ve sufficiently differentiated yourself while still paying homage to your inspirations.

Of course, inspiration is a double edged sword. When we look at great work, we forget sometimes that it’s the product of countless failed iterations and years of practice. As professional creatives, we expect ourselves to be able to produce original, quality work on command every single time.

The unfortunate thing is that our expectations are a major source of creative block.

Release your expectations

When you’re starting a design project, allow yourself to fail. You have to let yourself create bad work at first so that you can get on the ladder of iteration and make something worthwhile.

It’s interesting that children rarely seem to have creative block. They don’t expect themselves to produce something spectacular. They’re just playing and having fun.

To create quality work, you have to restore your sense of play. To restore your sense of play, you have to release expectations and get into the flow of the work.

To get into the flow of the work you need to habitually do a certain quantity of work consistently.

Great creative work exists at the intersection of discipline and spontaneous play.

Discipline and spontaneous play

“Formal practice, informal mind” - some zen buddhist

Consistently sitting down and producing work generates the surface area you need for creative lighting strikes.

It also helps you forget yourself and dissolves your expectations.This in turn restores your sense of play and lets you create new things without hindrances.

Great martial artists are like this as well. They are incredible disciplined about getting their training in. But within their training, there’s a sense of freedom and play. And that’s where you see athletic brilliance.

Martial artists also have to overcome resistance to get on the mats every single day. The parallels are striking and deep. It’s no coincidence that during the Kyoto Renaissance many Samurai were also poets, calligraphers, and painters.

I recommend the book “The War of Art” by Marine Corps veteran and prolific author Stephen Pressfield if you’d like to explore these parallels further.

Creative block can be consistently beaten

Authentic inspiration, spontaneous play, releasing expectations, and applying a high degree of discipline. Those are the ingredients to consistently beat creative block.

Here are some concrete steps you can take to beat creative block right now: