(Photo Credit: TheArtGuy via Compfight cc)
If you try to make every press release, every commercial, every radio script you work on an absolute masterpiece, the pinnacle of innovation and a trendsetter not just regionally but globally, you’ll drive yourself insane. You’ll never make deadlines. You’ll get depressed.
Basically, you’ll fail. The truth is that no one’s going to have a 100 percent success rate 100 percent of the time. You can’t always be brilliant, so learn the value of “good enough to get the job done.”
Lightning can strike twice. Multiple times, even. But you can still get stuck, and very few people have creativity that lets them just will a good idea into existence. My wife is still unconvinced that all of my ideas just pop out of my brain unbidden.
But when I’m sitting there staring at a blank screen, or dealing with a pile of video that’s utterly boring, that’s when it’s time to get to work. If your mental muse isn’t working for you, then go with the guy in your head wearing the hardhat. He knows how to make a pot.
I was a music composition major at Georgia Southern University. One semester I was having massive difficulties getting anything written. The ideas weren’t flowing, nothing was catchy, nothing sounded beautiful, and I was getting discouraged.
That’s when my composition professor, Sonny Walden, gave me some of the best advice I’ve ever received. “You think everything a potter made was a Ming vase?” he asked. “It wasn’t. There’s a place in this world for Ming vases, and there’s a place in this world for a pot to put water in. You know the techniques, just make me a pot.”
Sure enough, after the process of writing music that was personally uninspiring but technically solid, my creativity got unstuck. And the piece served its purpose, demonstrating that I knew the techniques I was supposed to be learning, and getting me a good grade.
Now when I’m stuck, I just make a pot. Not every idea will be a winner. Do your best, make it technically solid, get the work done, and move on. Your next Ming vase will be right around the corner, and sometimes the sheer process of pot-making jars something loose and you end up with true inspiration.
The saving grace of pots is that the public remembers the really good stuff. They remember the really bad stuff even longer.
Pots? Nobody ever remembers a pot. It’s reliable, it’s solid, and it gets the job done. Sometimes that’s exactly what you need.