Most creatives have been there. You want to work on a new project, and you just don’t know where to start. Why does that happen though?
As counterintuitive as it is, having no limitations or guidelines can be terrible for creatives. The way the creative mind works is it processes new information in a bunch of different ways. That means that it’s spitting out new ideas all the time and a million at a time. That’s great when you have something to organize them. That something is usually some kind of a goal you can aim for. When you have no limitations, though, it can be very overwhelming. One of the issues with that is the fact that if you have no goal, you don’t know what you want to achieve and therefore you don’t know where to start.
At first all ideas can seem boring and uninteresting. This is the point where even a creative needs to be organized. What you need to do is just to start. Just get it off the ground and will start flowing. The worst that could happen is that your idea ends up being boring even at later stages. In that case you can simply start over and work on a new one. As simple as that.
If you can’t even get started, what might do the trick for you is just put some limitations yourself. If you’re a photographer you can start shooting with a kit lens or start shooting film, or even use your smartphone. You can also set some limitations in post. Some photographers edit their photo when flipped upside down. This is a massive limitation as your entire composition is wrong, but it can also be a good boost for your creativity.
The difference between your creativity and your muscles is that you can’t exhaust the former. You can improve them both by pushing them and by using them every day but at some point, your muscles are going to need a rest. That is not the case with creativity. It can only get better…
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