Get in trouble
Get in trouble
Ready-fire-aim is one way out of procrastination, perfectionism, and stagnation
I’ll admit that the only thing I find worth anything at all on Instagram anymore is the search page. Is it just me?
The feed is mostly ads, the stories are hit and miss…but the search page is full of all the goodies IG thinks (knows?) I’ll love, and for the most part, at least for me, it’s more hits than misses.
Not long ago, it served up this gem: Stephen Colbert responding to an audience member basically asking how to get a job like his. I know attention spans are at a minimum these days, but since you can’t scrub through an Instagram video, you’re going to have to watch to the end, because that’s where the really good stuff is, though it’s all interesting.
Stephen and his pal Dex and a bunch of other folks would take on a project that a lot of people would describe as ill-advised on its face. They would book a theater, invite the press to an opening a week and a half later, and then write the play, learn it, and perform it.
Crazy, right?
Well… yeah.
This ready-fire-aim sequence of events is generally not recommended for any number of reasons. It’s not even recommended if you have a script and cast at the ready. These things involve a lot of people, which takes time, and if there’s a union involved (which there clearly was not in these cases), that complicates things further—for totally valid reasons, and no disrespect to the union folks.
But there’s a stroke of genius in it if you really need something to motivate you.
There’s a pervasive myth that says that the “spirit” moves us, and that’s almost never true. Sure, we can be hit by a bolt of inspiration and suddenly want to do nothing more than act on it, but those bolts tend to be pretty rare. If we wait around for one to strike, most of us will be waiting for a pretty long time.
In the meantime, a lot of us get stalled by the twin demons of procrastination and perfectionism. I’ve been noticing a tendency in myself lately to get caught up in things that don’t really matter very much that keep me from actually doing the thing that needs to be done.
The key word here is noticing. Is this a new thing? I don’t know. Probably not. I just know I’m noticing it more often, and asking myself, “Does this thing actually matter? Really? Or can I proceed without having done it/answered it/solved it/climbed the Mount Everest in my head about it that’s delaying me?”
At least nine times out of ten, it doesn’t really matter.
The thing that creates action, surprisingly enough, is action. Once you start doing something, you almost always want to do more of it. If you spend five minutes tackling that mess you’ve been avoiding in your garage for two months (or more), odds are good you’re going to spend another five, and another five after that, because now you’ve done something. Action begets action.
The same was no doubt true with Colbert and his friends. Credible deadlines (as opposed to random deadlines I make up for myself that I know no one else cares about and therefore aren’t “real” to me) can be magical. Once they’re set, you know things have to happen. Plans have to be made and executed. And somehow, they are. And you notice that nowhere here does Colbert say anything about these productions having to be pitch-perfect, and in fact still seems somewhat surprised that they got decent reviews at all.
Nota bene: some people are immune to this effect. Douglas Adams was famous for his ability to completely ignore deadlines, to his publishers’ despair. But for many, they are a fantastic tool that helps us get things done.
Deadlines scare creative folks because, well, they sound scary. But they were my best friends in grad school. I had three weeks to put together a packet of work for my advisor, and I can’t tell you how many times I would be even halfway through those three weeks and have not the very first clue how I was going to finish it. All I knew was there was no chance in hell I was going to send my work in late—and I never did. There were many times I could not have told you how that work got done, but somehow, it did, as if by magic, and I know it was the deadline that made it happen. I’d probably still be finishing my degree 15 years later without them.
I’m sure Colbert’s shows weren’t perfect, but they were clearly a heck of a lot better than you might expect from the setup, since they got pretty good reviews. And the point was not perfection—it was doing something. It was setting up the challenge and then doing everything possible to make it happen for the creative joy of it. The fact that the press was coming just made it more real. (I’ll bet there was also a healthy dose of “Why wait for roles to come to us if we can create our own?” since he mentions having something on his resume at the end.)
“But… you talk about lowering the pressure all the time! You just talked about it last week!” You bet I do, and that’s still advice I live by. I obviously wasn’t there, so I can only guess at what it was like behind the scenes, but my bet is that it was a ton of fun, involved making a lot of bad art very quickly, and that everyone was doing a lot, and learning even more, which is a whole lot more than what happens when you wait for inspiration to strike, or to be cast in a role.
And the thing is… while this kind of “trouble” comes with an intense amount of deadline pressure, that pressure can actually, paradoxically, be really liberating.
Let me explain.
I’ve been using the same ready-fire-aim energy to create the free workshops I’ve given over the past two months. I’ve chosen a date and a topic, published the signup and started getting the word out, and then put the workshop together. I didn’t even know what I wanted to do for this month’s workshop until Saturday a week ago, and as soon as I knew, I picked dates, put them on Eventbrite, and knew I had a week to figure the rest out.
If I didn’t do it this way, it would be so much easier for perfectionism and procrastination to take over, and it would be weeks before I’d actually start to advertise a workshop, much less give it. This way, I can’t afford to let those part of myself run the show. There’s no time for that.
It reminds me of the famous quote from Samuel Johnson: “Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” Of course, in my case—and Colbert’s—even though there are moments that may feel like I’ve signed my own death warrant, I’m not actually facing a hangman’s noose at the end, but the effect is still there.
In that weird sort of way, upping the pressure actually releases the pressure, because that concentration shuts those voices down. Well… they still try. But it’s easier to put them in their place because there’s just no other option. Bigger fish must be fried before the time on the calendar comes, and they take priority. And thus… amazing things happen in far less time than they would take otherwise.
This is the other thing about creative blocks that surprises people: You don’t have to get rid of them. You could spend years or even decades—and a lot of money in therapy1—trying, but that’s not necessary. You just have to outwit them, to get around them. All your fears can still be right where they’ve always been while you pull a fast one on them and sneak off to do what you want to do, leaving them none the wiser.
Getting in trouble, the kind Stephen Colbert advocates getting into, is one way to do that. It may not work for everyone, but it’s worth trying at least once to see if it’ll work for you.
Oh, and by the way? A quick Google reveals that Colbert’s friend Dex Bullard made a pretty good name for himself, too. It pays to get in trouble every now and then.
Don’t forget, making bad art is a great way to get in some safe trouble for a couple hours, and you have a second chance to do it for free in a gentle, friendly environment this weekend!
In most cases, coaching is sufficient to handle creative blocks. There are situations where a therapist’s help is desirable or even required, which is when a creativity coach, like me, will refer someone to a qualified therapist for that help in addition to, or possibly instead of, coaching.