Play to Play

I'm reading Rick Rubin's The Creative Act: A Way of Being. It's spiritual without being religious, simultaneously vague and specific, and unerring positive about the power and ubiquity of creativity.

We artists — and we are all artists he says — can boost our creativity by being open and welcoming to knowledge and experiences and layering them with past knowledge and experiences to create new knowledge and experiences.

If that sounds a little New Age to you, well it does to me too, yet also fits with how I think about how I work. This is in part due to that vagueness, in part due to the human tendency to pattern-match, and in part because it's true.

I'm only about a quarter of the way through the book but already I am making connections to things that I think and that I have thought in the past. For example, in some ways it resembles essay-format Oblique Strategy cards and I wrote about the potential value of them to testers 12 years ago.

This week I found the following paragraphs across page 77 and 78 and felt compelled to note them down and share them here:

While the emotional undercurrents of self-doubt can serve the art, they can also interfere with the creative process. Beginning a work, completing a work, and sharing a work — these are key moments where many of us become stuck.

How do we move forward, considering the stories we tell ourselves?

One of the best strategies is to lower the stakes.

We tend to think that what we're making is the most important thing in our lives and that it's going to define us for all eternity. Consider moving forward with the more accurate point of view that it's a small work, a beginning. The mission is to complete the project so you can move on to the next. That next one is a stepping-stone to the following work. And so it continues in productive rhythm for the entirety of our creative life.

All art is a work in progress. It's helpful to see the piece we're working on as an experiment. One in which we can't predict the outcome. Whatever the result, we will receive useful information that will benefit the next experiment.

If you start from the position that there is no right or wrong, no good or bad, and creativity is just free play with no rules, it's easier to submerge yourself joyfully in the process of making things.

We're not playing to win, we're playing to play. And ultimately, playing is fun. Perfectionism gets in the way of fun. A more skillful goal might be to find comfort in the process. To make and put out successive works with ease.

Oscar Wilde said that some things are too important to be taken seriously. Art is one of those things. Setting the bar low, especially to get started, frees you to play, explore, and test without attachment to results.

This is not just a path to more supportive thoughts. Active play and experimentation until we're happily surprised is how the best work reveals itself.
Image: Penguin

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