The above image that I stole from Creating Passionate Users’ post suggesting not waiting for the muse to get work done, perfectly illustrates the situation.
It is hard to deny that there are times that I wait for the muse to come to start getting work done. The waiting game gets worse when there are lots of things to get done and the stress is trying to kill the creativity. However, that stubborn muse insist on not coming at those times. It just does not come by itself without any real invitation and turns out waiting is not a real invitation.
Creating Passionate Users’ post refers to the concept of constraint-driven creativity and points out that existence of a time constraint may not allow for waiting for the muse to come. This way of thinking and putting constraints on the work that needs to be get done is said to help creativity. This is a concept that I was not aware of before and I will be reading more about it. I was referred to a potentially very good article about innovation and constraints from the comments of constraint-driven creativity post which I will definitely read later.
If I go back to not waiting for the muse topic, my favorite part in that post was the following:
Yet another benefit of constraint-driven creativity is that you don’t have time to wait for the muse to show up. And as film critic Roger Ebert told an audience of would-be filmmakers and musicians, “The muse never shows up at the beginning.” You have to start doing something and trust the muse will follow, not the other way ’round.
This is so true that once you get yourself into the flow of the work, you forget about the muse. At that point, it has either already come or it is something like Santa Claus.
Technorati Tags: constraint driven creativity, don’t wait for the muse
[tags] creativity, productivity, getting things done[/tags]
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