🖍️ Are you a “Reluctant Creative?”

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my story and who it is that I can help. And as I reflected on my journey, I realized my entire online existence can be summarized with a single term:

Reluctant creative.

A reluctant creative is someone who feels the need to create but has trouble starting because they don’t think they are any good.

I am a reluctant creative.

This may come as a surprise, but I actually never thought of myself as the creative type. In fact, I used to confess:

“I’m just not creative.”

selective focal photo of crayons in yellow box

It started with writing music. I used to love writing songs on my guitar, and I would get discouraged when I realized that the chord progression of melody line I came up with actually came from another song. Over time, I eventually believed that I was incapable of coming up with anything original on my own – all I could do was copy what other people had already done.

Then I read the book Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon, and it gave me hope. Austin described creativity as the collection and synthesis of the dots you collect. True artists simply connect pre-existing dots in ways that haven’t been done before.

I realized that creativity is a formula.

Austin gave me permission to accept what I created because it was the natural culmination of the dots I’d collected.

I still wasn’t thrilled that my work resembled some of my influences so closely, but I continued to collect and connect the dots. And over time, my work became more and more original. I was a reluctant creative who had discovered my art.

But what about you?

Have you been telling yourself a story about how you just don’t have what it takes to create?

Maybe you once knew how, but you forgot. And you’re not sure how to find your way back.

Hugh MacLeod once said that everyone is born creative. We’re all given a box of crayons in kindergarten, but we lose them as we get older. Being hit with the “creative bug” later in life is simply a small voice inside of you saying, “I’d like my crayons back.”

If you have the desire to create but feel nervous about starting, you are a reluctant creative! My parting advice to you is to just start. Don’t judge your work or compare it to something someone else has done.

Just create. Make something.

You don’t have to share it with anyone else. You don’t have to worry about people judging it. The value isn’t in the responses you get – it’s in the act of making your art.

Until next time – keep going, keep growing, and keep creating!

— Mike

Sketchnote Summary of Building a Second Brain

I recently read Building a Second brain by Tiago Forte, and summarized the book in this sketchnote file: