Growing up as a wide eyed child of the 90s- we played make believe with our parents clothes and “Don’t touch the lava” with couch cushions. Regardless — we went outside and we used our imagination. Kids these days (yeah, I said it) seem to be trading in perfectly good stick swords for sword swipes on an iPad.
Now, I’ve begun this conversation about stifled creativity because more commonly do you find that people quantify likes, shares, and reposts in correlation with success, and in that same regard — failure.
Who cares?! The world of the Internet is, in itself a grid of 1's and 0's. At the end of the day if you’ve shared something you made you’re already winning.
As of lately I’ve been fighting inner demons about my professional life as a motion graphics designer. I studied design in college I had so much passion it kept me up at night with all of the ideas I had. As of today I struggle with getting all of those ideas into one tangible stream of consciousness. One project, or one final product. The biggest obstacles I still fight with is the idea of “Should I really post this? Is this as good as the last thing I posted? Is this good at all?” But why? Is being a few taps away from the rest of the world ingrained this mentality that artists HAVE to be better than one another to be noticed?
Anyone who starts thinking seriously about pursuing art innately believes their creativity is put into a competition about being the best, the most talented, or the most innovative (at least crosses their mind). -news flash- everyone just wants to see cool shit, then when they’re done looking at it they either care to associate with it or they don’t and they keep moving on to look at other cool shit. So it really doesn’t matter that you’re not Picasso or Rembrandt or that really cool Polish designer whose name you can never pronounce; if you are sharing the work you do, you are contributing so the rest of us can be inspired — or not.
If you don’t enjoy the product of your work, how can you expect other people to? — Benjamin Hardy
This past year I graduated and moved to work in New York City and those long nights of hoping things would work out and I’d finally be a real designer have come to fruition. The strangest thing though, it sounds crazy but I thought coming to New York City and finally working in advertising would make me a great designer. That if I came here and got that job title I would magically be turned into this graphics titan whose work can stand up against my own design idols. -wrong- I came to find that my normal habits are still my normal habits, my skills in design were still at the same level, and I was still the same person I was before I was paid for design.
Once I figured that out I got frustrated, for some reason I thought the cosmos owed it to me for all the hard work I had put in — (I thought I paid my dues )— wrong. The world owes us nothing, and no job title or fancy location in the world will make my work or yours more important.
The key to great work is: Persistence. You have to be willing to keep working, to keep learning, to keep pushing, and to keep creating. Don’t strive for followers or likes because all of those 1’s and 0’s mean nothing in the grand scheme of things. Instead share to make connections, to inspire others to action, or to simply open a window for the rest of the world to peer into your imagination.
We as creatives are just trying to reach that flow in what we love to do and surround ourselves with inspirational works to help kick us over the edge. We shouldn’t concern ourselves with the superficiality of meaningless things, instead we should focus on becoming better at our craft. If that means less “liking” and more doing so be it.
Back to the Internet — you, whether you’re an up-and-coming creative graduate or a veteran artist we all are pretty influenced by the things we choose to surround ourselves with— be it people, or what you choose to subject yourself to on the Internet. But heres something I find interesting — One day I was hanging out with one of the producers after hours and she was browsing through her Facebook when I noticed similar articles, images, and posts from strangers I had no connection to but were exactly the same on my timeline. The same 1’s and 0’s circulate whether we like to believe it or not but that also means the same creative is circulating.
Art, is pretty much whatever you want it to be and thats the beauty of it. Creativity, now that is in the eye of the beholder. Creativity is about connecting dots that someone didn’t think to connect. It’s about figuring out the solution to a problem in a way that doesn’t necessarily have to be the first thing that comes to mind. It’s about dazzling someones attention for a just a moment in time where they forget their world and jump head first into yours.
“Art is not what you see but what you make others see” — Edgar Degas
Now my mission is not to convince you that my work or your work is in fact creative but its about diving deeper than keyboard shortcuts. There needs to be more substance in the world of creatives — more color — more noise. So I challenge all of us creatives to share more of what we love, more of who we are, more of what will make the world more beautiful.