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Sitting Down Was the Easy Part
10 strategies for discovering what to actually do with your creativity
I recently received a question from a reader:
I was hoping if you could advise me on how to develop habits that I could incorporate into my day on how to actively do design work and just explore my creativity. I feel like a lot of the times I get in my own way. Rather than actually doing work, I spend time thinking about what work I am going to do. Any advice will be greatly appreciated.
I could relate entirely to this, and pointed the reader to one of the prompts in Creative Doing, entitled, “Source Inspiration.” Here’s the full excerpt:
One of the most difficult parts of creative work is sitting down and deciding what to actually do. One solution to that is to draw from a predefined source, each day. For example, over a decade after he first worked as a lecturer at Yale, graphic designer and Pentagram partner Michael Bierut assigned a brand new project to his students: pick an activity and commit to doing it for 100 days in a row. This project emerged from a practice that Bierut had started five years prior to the assignment, starting January 1, 2002.
Every day, Bierut would make one interpretive drawing of a photo he found in the New York Times. These drawings could take…
