Creativity is an end game

I recently heard Mary Oliver speak about her relationship with poetry and the creative process. She treated the whole business of being creative and producing creative work as a process one needs to be diligent with. It’s hard.

Real grunt work.

She speaks of how it asks one to ‘show up’ with a notebook, a pen and the vulnerability to walk in any direction that one is led. This is the foundation of her wonderful writing—to turn up for the job and sometimes, do as little as ask for the next word. And wait.

Because creativity, more often than not, is less about how we start and more about how we finish.

What does that mean?

How we conspire against ourselves

Enough has been said about everyone having the capacity to be creative. And yet, not many of us end up in that place. We don’t feel as if we have too many days where something radically creative has emerged from our laptop or spade or whatever it is we lean on for our work.

There are a couple of reasons for that.

The first is an impoverished imagination, which is at the heart of all incremental improvements masquerading as transformational efforts. It is the reason why there is always a lag between the emergence of a new technology and its crystallisation into a life-changing solution. A healthy, vivid imagination is a crop one needs to harvest and sow with a discipline that celebrates our unique nature. That is a pursuit of a lifetime.

But, this article is about the second thing.

Even with a rusty imagination, something magical can still find an embryonic path out of us, if we are so willing to bring it to life. And the true measure of our willingness to birth something truly creative hides behind our tolerance of its totally unpredictable, quirky gestation.

That’s the reason why it’s never easy to honestly answer if we’re being a perfectionist or we’re simply standing in queue, waiting for the right word to arrive.

Deliverables make us accountable

Delivery is a harsh, yet essential truth to be faced. Quite literally – for the embryo who turned into a baby and is asked to fight for life to come to life, as well as the product or labour of love we have been carefully nurturing.

It needs to be shipped.

Almost always, the whole creative voyage is triggered because of the ask to reach a certain shoreline. A need, a problem that demands solving, a call that needs to be taken. It is in this very practical, nuts and bolts-laden path that something truly creative waits for us – to be discovered, to be expressed.

What usually happens though (at least in my experience) is something else.

As we are making our way with, and through our creation, the first sighting of the finish line can be the point on the creative path where a definitive turn takes place.

That first sight of a ‘landing’, a growing sense of something significant having been said or done, triggers a sense of accomplishment.

It’s the first hit of dopamine, the moment when a smile breaks out across our faces involuntarily like something special might have happened. Whether the work in question is a poem, a piece of code or a PowerPoint, it is a feeling of wholeness; a proverbial crimsoning of the sun we were trying paint against a dull, grey sky.

It’s always about the ending

The moment the 'This is ready to be shipped' message shows up, is where the artist needs to summon the sharpest attention.

It is where one can feel drawn to a slightly premature completion.

The allure of an obvious, easily available ending, and our inevitable turn towards it switches on, almost like an automatic response. This whole idea we have fashioned which, until some time ago was a stranger we had never met, is now the person with whom we’ve had the most beautiful conversation. A conversation that drew more out of us than what we may ever have estimated; leaving us astonished, impoverished and fulfilled all at once.

After all, having struggled with a miserly problem that offered no approach, we have now scaled a peak where we are seeing more than we ever did. So, this faintly visible ending seems like a justified resolution to the tension that had been building up all through the climb.

The choice we make now can turn the entire effort something transformational (for others as well as for us) or a clever regurgitation of our old patterns. Steve Jobs, for instance had over a hundred patents (many registered posthumously), but only a handful went into becoming the legendary products we know today.

In some ways, this moment, this point in the path is a beginning, all by itself and unmistakably, the quiet, unspectacular start of something truly creative. In fact, if our efforts only reproduce or repackage our work from yesterday, it’s not so great, is it?

Inevitably, if we are prepared to wait, we will be surprised.

And, this wait is not so much a spending of time, but a settling into silence. A silence in which we allow a bridge to form between the work we have shaped up to this point, and the point where it will leave us, with an ending of its own choosing.

We trigger the discovery of this ending by submitting an honest question into the silence. In the case of this article, it is this:

‘What will this ending begin?’

Perhaps it is to humbly apprentice ourselves to this notion.

Anyone can be creative if you choose to start where others end.

And that’s why, creativity is an end game.