Creativity

  • The Accidental Creative is a book by Todd Henry who runs a website of the same name. It covers the challenges of creative work, what causes those challenges, and five practices to help avoid those issues. I have written this The Accidental Creative Book summary to help distil my understanding and key lessons from the book. It is not a comprehensive guide to every aspect of the book.

    The Accidental Creative book summary Sketchnote

    A sketchnote of The accidental creative book summary.

    The Problem: being brilliant every day

    As professional creatives, we have to be brilliant every day. We are only as good as our last idea and our next one had better exceed our last.

    If we were amateurs then we could relax, take the pressure off and just enjoy the process. But that’s not easy when your income is on the line and your manager or client even more spectacular work than yesterday’s product.

    To cope, we usually try to brute force our way through creative blocks. We spend more and more time on projects, but that ultimate just leads to burn out.

    The Goal: Sustainable Brillance

    The three characteristics of great creative work.

    There are three characteristics of great creative work, but we can usually only get two at a time.

    1. Prolific – generating large amounts of work
    2. Brilliant – generating high-quality work
    3. Healthy – Not feeling emotionally, physically and spiritually drained.

    Achieving two at a time is easy but when one aspect is missing, we either are unreliable, mediocre or burnout. The goal, is to manage to achieve all three. To produce high-quality work on a regular basis and not breakdown or split from our families.

    The Obstacles: The Assassins of Creativity

    The three assassins of creativity: Dissonance, Fear and Expectation Escalation.

    There are 3 pressures that prevent us from doing our best creative work.

    • Disonance – confusion caused by unclear systems, tasks and objectives. This causes creatives to spend effort working out the task or dealing with the system than doing the task.
    • Fear – both of success and failure. We become worried about the repercussions of our actions and so trend towards safety and stability instead of taking needed risks.
    • Expectation Escalation – We can reject good ideas because they aren’t great. This pressure can come from inside the project, from our past success and from looking at our competitors. Many great ideas have humble beginnings.

    The Soltuion: Creating a routine that aids creativity

    We can’t guarantee that our next project will be our best, but we can guarantee that we will fully apply ourselves. If we implement a series of routines and habits, we can ensure that we aren’t overwhelmed with stress. Instead, we will have an abundance of inspiration to draw upon when we create.

    5 practices that help create on demand.

    These habits fall into five areas

    1. Focus – directing your efforts where they are best placed.
    2. Energy – whole life planning to avoid burnout and prepare for challenging times.
    3. Relationships – cultivating purposeful relationships to help each other grow.
    4. Stimuli – avoiding distractions and reducing low-quality input while feasting on rich creative input.
    5. Hours – Managing your time to ensure that important tasks get done.

    Adding more can actually help you get more done.

    It seems counterintuitive that adding extra activities can help you get more done, but it can be true in creative work. Most creative work tasks require a breakthrough, insight or motivation. When you are burned out, it will take you far longer to complete even easy tasks.

    By adding extra process and activities, you can be more well rested and inspired which allows you to more effectively address tasks. This means you can do more, and work more effectively.

    But this doesn’t mean you should work extra long hours. It may be better to take a good break and regain your energy than try to push through the creative barrier.

    Implementing practices that drive creativity

    There is a challenge between reflecting too often, leading to overthinking, and too infrequently, not benefiting from reflection. By adopting weekly, monthly and quarterly checkpoints you can strike a balance. These items can be used alongside other systems.

    The difference between weekly, monthly and quarterly checkpoints

    Each checkpoint looks at the forthcoming time period mentioned in the name. So a weekly checkpoint looks at the week ahead, while monthly ones look at the following month and Quarterly the subsequent quarter.

    Consequently, a weekly checkpoint is much more detailed orientated while the quarterly checkpoint is more focused on the big details.

    While the weekly lays out an agenda for the following week according to set in place principles, the quarterly examines the big picture. Quarterly checkpoints reflect on your principles and makes adjustments to apply in your weekly and monthly actions.

    Reflective prompts for the 5 Creative Practice

    The following section includes reflective prompts to bring these creative practices in your life.

    1. Focus

    Focus is about identifying the most important activities that will bring about the greatest results and match your values. It’s not just about work, but your personal life as well.

    Focus is also about being clear over what you are actually doing. A clear project helps avoid wasting time. This can come from working out what you are doing, or finishing a project and then realizing it’s wrong.

    1. At quarterly checkpoints, establish areas of focus. Make sure you list personal and professional.
    2. Set (quarterly) or review (monthly, weekly) your “big three” (These are big challenges you need to address. Make sure you write them as challenges answering “What am I really trying to do?”)
    3. At weekly checkpoints, Identify any tasks you can cluster together.

    2.Relationships

    Being intention with your relationships allows you to find stimulating, inspiring and challenging creators to help and be helped by. These can (and should) be people in similar areas or in wildly different fields.

    At your weekly checkpoint, check if you need to meet with anyone, what you should prepare and schedule your meet ups. At your quarterly checkpoints, consider your relationships and note times to meet.

    1. Head to heads – meetings with individual people where you prepare something to share that is interesting you at the moment and may interest them. A relationship to ignite the creative spark in each other. This relationship may last for a season. Meet every month or so.
    2. Circles – A group meeting where you share work, ideas and challenges to draw collective wisdom and accountability. These groups may come, go and change. Meet every month.
    3. Core team – Individuals whose opinions and whose perspectives you want on major decisions. These relationships should last a long-time, but they too may change over time due to commitments. The most infrequent meeting you will have.

    3.Energy

    Energy is about managing your ability to perform. Some times you will be more drained than others. Some tasks and personal commitments can be more draining. Noticing these trends and commitments that will drain you allow you to plan to avoid burnout.

    Weekly planning focuses more on moving projects on a day-to-day basis. Quarterly planning should look more at regular activities and week-long projects or commitments.

    For example, if you have a major work project one week, it’s probably best to scale back personal commitments that week.

    • Identify any large projects and commitments. Pay close attention to possible conflicts.
    • Identify activities that should be pruned. Perhaps it seemed like a good idea at the time, but now it isn’t.

    4.Stimuli

    Many of us consume mostly low-quality input that is pushed to us such as pop TV, the news, and social media. While there is nothing wrong with this content, it shouldn’t be the only content we consume.

    It’s much better to get some high-quality content in the form of serious study material and time-tested classics.

    In your quarterly checklist you should focus on identify the types of materials and projects you will do. In your weekly checklist you should look at your study, project and experience lists and select the best items for that week.

    1. Make a study plan with areas where you are lacking knowledge (25%) things you are interested in (50%) and What would be good for you (25%).
    2. Review your notes on material you have studied recently.
    3. Plan stimulating experiences (nature, museums, out of comfort zone locations, service opportunities).

    Hours

    Hours is about allocating your precious time to all the activities you have listed. Although it is tempting to focus just on work, make sure you allocate time for every part of your life. This should include stimulation and unnecessary creating.

    In your quarterly planning sessions, look at the major time commitments on the horizon. Also look at your general routine and patters. When would be a good time to spend studying? What activities are at an ill-suited time? When could you move them to?

    I remember having a Polish class very early in the morning. I always arrived feeling tired and found it hard. We moved it thirty minutes later, and I was a far more effective student.

    Get your copy of The Accidental Creative

    If you have found my Accidental creative book Summary interesting, you might want to purchase a copy of the book. It goes into more specifics on how to reflect on each point.

    You can find more book summaries here.

  • 4 Ways How To Get Sketchnote Ideas Faster

    One of the challenges every sketchnotes faces is getting things down on the page in time. This “curse” is actually one of the blessings of sketchnoting as it means you have to analyze and make decisions over what to include and what to cut, which is a key part of what makes sketchnotes more memorable. This does, however, cause problems when key ideas quickly follow each other. If only there was a way to get sketchnote ideas faster.

    Trying to get sketchnote ideas fast can be really stressful and while you’re thinking of the best idea to use, there can be a rush of information you aren’t picking up on.

    Fortunately, it is possible to get quicker at sketchnoting and here are 4 ways you can get sketchnote ideas faster.

    4 Ways How To Get Sketchnote Ideas Faster leave space

    1) Don’t, leave space for later

    The first trick is to leave space for later when you have more time. This could be after the event you are sketchnoting, or at a quieter moment when the information is less relevant (or the talk less interesting).

    By leaving space you can come back when your mind has processed more information and doesn’t have the stress of requiring an idea NOW.

    The only issues arise when you can’t remember WHAT you left space for. To prevent this possibility, I recommend leaving a short note or…

    4 Ways How To Get Sketchnote Ideas Faster get the basics first

    2. Get the basics, then fill the details.

    A house is a square with a triangle on top, right? Well, you can add a lot of extra details after that.

    • doors
    • windows
    • chimneys
    • gutters
    • flowers out front
    • whatever!

    All these details can be added later when you have more time. In addition to helping you remember what you wanted to sketchnote there, you also have the right amount of space taken so you won’t find yourself stuck with a small image later.

    4 Ways How To Get Sketchnote Ideas Faster practice

    3. Practice

    The second technique that really helps to come up with ideas is to practice. Practicing coming up with ideas will help you in two ways. Firstly, it gets you into the mindset of coming up with ideas regularly. Your brain starts to know where to look for ideas within your head.

    Secondly, you get a bank of ideas that you can call upon when you need them. It’s easier to think of something the second time and even easier the third.

    [p.s. looking for some practice activities? Check out 30 days of sketchnoting]

    4 Ways How To Get Sketchnote Ideas Faster use a search engine

    4. Have a search engine handy

    If you really can’t think of an idea, then you can use someone else’s idea. You can search on Google (I usually add “icon” at the end of my search to get simpler images) or on a site like thenounproject which specialize in simple icons. This can help you get past the idea stage. If you make digital sketchnotes with an iPad Pro, you have safari off to the side, ready for when you need it.

    How do you get sketchnote ideas faster?

    Have you got any other tips or techniques to help you get sketchnote ideas faster? Share them in the comments below.