Why You Might Find it Difficult to Make Creative Decisions.

Lessons told from the perspective of baking a great pie.

Let’s imagine you are driving home from work one day and you get the bright idea to make a pie. You don’t want to buy one because you decided you want to try a low sugar diet and let’s face it Meijer pies have nothing on the recipe your mother gave you.

Your first thought is “man, this is gonna take forever, and I’m not even home from work yet. I don’t think I have all of the supplies I need at home anyway. I’m not going to make the pie.” You come home from work and retire to the couch to catch reruns of your favorite television show. The pressure to make the pie briefly crosses your mind but you let it go because what’s the point of starting now?

Now imagine you get the same idea of making a pie, but this time you think, “ok I’ll make the pie, but I won’t be happy until I actually get to eat it.” So you go on to make this highly anticipated pie. You get home and start dragging your feet through your kitchen when you realize you don’t have any pie crusts. Instead of making one from scratch, because that takes too long and God forbid you watch a tutorial on how to make it, you’d like to opt for a store-bought one. But you realize it’s about 6 pm and the grocery store is probably swamped. Don’t get me wrong, you want to make this pie but you’re tired from a long day at work, the lines are long, and you don’t even enjoy the act of baking because it’s time consuming anyway, right? So you end up not making the pie. You feel brash toward your decision not to make it. There were just too many things standing in the way of making the pie you wanted to make.

What I just described is something I call, punishment mindset. Punishment Mindset is when you fall out of touch with your ability to make decisions and create. It’s called Punishment Mindset because as humans our optimal state of being for years was to provide for our young and continue to fight off hunger. But when most of our needs today are at our fingertips, it becomes easier and easier to fall into punishing ourselves from doing what we as creative humans were made to do which is continue to strive for something and create. And because there is little driving force behind us to do more, or try again in a different way we get stuck in our inability to make decisions that could lead us to our desired outcomes.

Now I’d like to take a look at the same model of thinking but apply Reward Mindset in place of Punishment Mindset. Reward Mindset is your own decision to act with the agency to seek the rewards you desire by simply appreciating the work it will take to earn it.

Reward Mindset is your own decision to act with the agency to seek the rewards you desire by simply appreciating the work it will take to earn it.

So again, you get the idea to make a pie. You think, “I want to make a pie and I have a recipe that I’ve tried several times before and I know I like it.” You make the pie and all the decisions that come with baking and it’s exactly what you know. You don’t feel necessarily challenged nor defeated, you just made a pie. You go on to share it with your roommates and they tell you “It’s just like all of your pies, very good!” You feel somewhat accomplished and fulfilled because of your generally good baking abilities.

This is Reward Mindset on level 5 out of 10. The halfway-there kind of thinking that some artists and designers fall into out of comfort. The “I know what sells because I saw what someone successful did and did something similar” mindset that hinders your own creative style and voice. Deep down you know you could make your own recipe but why would you when it’s easier to follow someone else’s?

Finally, you arrive at the decision, to make a damn good pie. You’re excited to approach the task and you embark on a conquest to iterate the existing recipe and fuse together a new formula. So you go to make the pie and through all the obstacles in your way, and failures that follow, you persevere. Why? Well on the surface you are craving the flaky warm apple pie, but mainly because you are driven enough to experiment in ways that have yet to be conceived prior. You choose the harder path. The path of failure, several iterations, and working in what seems to be tireless directions. You choose to study your craft and understand what it takes to succeed in the given environment from all angles, not just skill. You allow yourself to make decisions and make pies that might be disgusting, or too sweet, or far too crumbly for your liking. You let yourself experiment. So then you will know what the right consistency is, by your own standards. You’ll be able to bake more efficiently, and finally because you know you were born to change the world with your baking.

You let yourself experiment. So then you will know what the right consistency is, by your own standards.

The pie is that painting, typeface, character, product, concept for a movie, or piece of music you’ve yet to conceive and you are the decision left to make. Choose to experiment with art and design and find exactly what you want to say. Persistence, pacing, and perseverance make the perfect pie.