Impulse

In a Lenswork pod­cast, The Power of Deadlines, Brooks Jensen admits that though he knows that dead­lines are help­ful, he hasn’t fig­ured out how to apply them to his cre­ative work. Inspired by this, I thought it’d be an inter­est­ing exer­cise to make a list of all those lit­tle guilty admis­sions that affect my cre­ative work.

• I need dead­lines to get work done.
• I am bet­ter at doing work for other peo­ple than for myself.
• External dead­lines are bet­ter than inter­nal deadlines.
• I am inter­ested in far too many fields to ever mas­ter in one life­time. Maybe even 10 lifetimes.
• I am learn­ing to merely appre­ci­ate art that moves me with­out feel­ing the need to emu­late it.
• There is more non-creative work than I could ever pos­si­bly fin­ish. I will never “catch up”.
• In music, I’m equally inter­ested in the tech­ni­cal / gear aspects of mak­ing music as I am in music.
• In pho­tog­ra­phy, film, and writ­ing, I’m more inter­ested in the con­tent than the gear.
• I am a nerd and love gear. Especially if it has lights that blink. Especially blue ones.
• I can spend days writ­ing scripts, build­ing machines, design­ing tech­ni­cal things because it’s easy for me.
• Computers bore me after a while.
• Copyright issues, for­eign pol­icy, and domes­tic issues really get under my skin.
• I want to make the world a bet­ter place — really.
• I love peo­ple but am also afraid to trust them.
• I get over­stressed more eas­ily than I used to.
• I love story craft passionately.
• I love ani­ma­tion and have always wanted to make ani­mated movies.
• I never learned to draw.
• I am really, really good at orga­niz­ing peo­ple, but I hate doing it.
• I’m bet­ter at under­stand­ing other peo­ple than under­stand­ing myself.
• I find it eas­ier to riff on some­one else’s idea than to cre­ate an orig­i­nal one.
• I love com­ing up with orig­i­nal ideas.
• I pre­fer to work by myself.
• I am most cre­ative when I am bounc­ing ideas off another person.
• I’m really good at see­ing pat­terns in things.
• I love find­ing pat­terns in things, espe­cially if they’re hid­den, or abstract.
• I pho­to­graph peo­ple because I love vic­ar­i­ously feel­ing people’s emo­tions, feel­ing con­nected to them.
• I love solv­ing problems.
• I love mak­ing things.
• I am a supremely tal­ented procrastinator.
• I am immensely sat­is­fied when some­thing I do moves some­one emotionally.
• I want an audi­ence but not a spotlight.
• I’d rather whis­per in the audience’s ear than be on the stage.
• I like edit­ing work in any medium.
• I’m very goal oriented.
• I like fig­ur­ing some­thing out more than build­ing it.
• I’m a lit­tle bit lazy.
• Ok, maybe more than a lit­tle bit.

Related posts:

1. Finding focus
2. Creative progress & rip­ping off JFK
3. Holiday mass hysteria