What keeps you motivated?
People often say that you need to follow your passion and that will make you happy. In the context of this post, I am not going down the road of happiness, but rather discuss a few thoughts about passion and motivation. I don’t believe that following your passion will contribute to your creativity long term. Passions burn high, and like anything with a hot fire, it does not last very long. Of course, passion is not a bad thing, but it can be tragically short living. Kind of reminds me of being inspired by the muse.
She pops along, and you cannot help yourself so you create, create, create. But then you get tired and stop. Then you have to wait for the muse to strike again and the destructive cycle starts all over again. The problem is a lack of consistency and frustration. So if passion is not the answer, what is the alternative? I wish the answer was easy, because you need to clarify this for yourself, but here are a few pointers to help you out.
What motivates you to create?
- Creativity is not given to a selective few. It is something that we all use almost every day, even if you are not aware of it. If you think for a moment, you will realize that even solving a small problem, often uses your creative skills even if it only involves thinking about the best way to do it.
- Creativity cannot be used up. One of the reasons where the muse theory often lets you down. Because if you need to rely on the inspiration that is inconsistent and fickle, how are you ever going create anything for someone else? Let’s say you show this awesome painting to a friend and they want one too because her mother is having a birthday soon and she would just love this style of landscape. If you need to wait for the muse to rock up and do her thing, you are never going to produce a single mark on the canvas. That means that you need to find the inspiration within yourself to do the work because that friend is not going to be impressed if you tell her a day before her mother’s birthday that you couldn’t paint.
- Finding motivation needs a habit update. You are creative, and you are drawing, and the muse does visit once in a blue moon, but that is not good enough. To make it good enough, you will have to take charge of your creative practice. And there is the keyword to this whole post: practice. Creativity needs fuel, and the fuel is practice. Now you’re wondering about that fire again, right? Let’s get into that again.
- A habit update will keep the fire burning. What will last longer: a slow fire fed regularly, or a bonfire where you dump all the fuel on it in one go? Of course, the slow fire, there is no argument. For a sustained creative life, feeding the fire requires a regular effort. Daily if you can. Habits are those things that we do without thinking and adding a habit of creative practice to your life will not only keep the fire burning (without a fickle muse messing it up) but it will also produce the work that you can promise to others. And regular practise has the additional benefit of improving your skills too. Win-win, right?
You might wonder when I got so smart about all this? When I started writing 22 years ago, I knew nothing about writing books. I have read hundreds of books in my lifetime, and subconsciously understood what makes a good read, but I had to learn how to write that book that captured my attention. The same thing happened when I started drawing and painting. I read books, I took classes, and I practised. A lot. Now I teach art (and engineers), but I still learn and still practice, because it motivates me to keep adding fuel to my creative fire.
And that is both the journey and the motivation. Learn. Practice. Learn some more. Practice some more. And over time you will find the voice that makes you the author, the artist, the poet, the engineer that creates new solutions, new art, or new words every time you sit down to produce and deliver.
Stay healthy, and live creatively until Monday!
︙ Linzé 🇿🇦💚
