Striking a Balance: Creativity vs. Productivity
The Creativity-Productivity Spectrum
Creativity and productivity are oppositional forces.
The more creative you are, the less productive you are.
If you are highly creative, you might be productive by the standards of creative people, but you will absolutely not be productive compared to someone working in a non-creative realm.
If you are highly productive and you can crank out lots of work all day every day, there is little to no creativity to your work. This is not a dig – creative work is not better than productive work.
In creative work, sometimes you drive down long and winding roads only to discover they’re dead-ends.
Sometimes you slowly come to realize you just drove in a big circle.
And yet other times, you get lost in a maze of crisscrossing roads and eventually run out of gas.
Creativity is inefficient by design. It requires experimentation. That means failing a lot. But these setbacks are part of what leads to innovation and new ideas.
Also: creativity needs slack. It needs mind-wandering and daydreaming. It needs playtime. It is play. Creativity is play.
There’s a reason lots of creative people have toys around the office and love playing with their kids and still seem to be kids. That childlike sense of play is the origin of creativity.
If you phase out the play, you kill the golden goose.
And to be clear, it’s easy to go too far with playing. It’s easy to wander too much, to have your head in the clouds too much. I’m certainly guilty on all charges.
But even more often, the forces of modern work will slowly but surely push you to the productive end of the spectrum.
It’s up to you to keep that flaky, frivolous, impractical, unproductive part of yourself alive. If you push your creative work too far toward productive work, creativity dies.
Creativity is play. You gotta work hard, you gotta ship, but protect that core of play because it’s the heart and soul of creativity.
I’m building a system for creativity.
What you’ve just read is a work-in-progress excerpt from my upcoming on-demand video course, The Remix Method.
Pre-order now and save 50%, plus get the Everything is a Remix Toolkit Bundle FREE ($70 Value).