Is there another way to bridge the creative gap?

Years ago, I remember Ira Glass talking about what he called ‘the gap.’ The 10,000-hour chasm between your creative abilities and your taste. I found this unhelpful. It highlighted the problem but offered no motivation to persist through the gap. Recently, I identified a trick that can make closing this gap less tedious. I’d been unknowingly using it in other areas of life, but I didn’t have a word for it back then. I’ll share more on this later.

As mentioned in previous weeks, I’m still in a merry-go-round hellscape of drafting, over-editing and overthinking posts. Even though I write for work, writing my own thing triggers a spiral of analysis paralysis.

To propel my evolution in this area, I decided to do a little further inquiry into the concept of ‘flow state,’ hoping to find some sort of psychological apparatus to dislodge whatever’s in the way. The reason I’m interested in flow is because honestly, it just sounds so idyllic. But also because I know it’s been identified as a key component of creativity and quality of life. It’s one of the only states that sets off a unique cocktail of happy hormones that’s only accessible through flow.

The first interesting thing I learned about flow state, is that you can’t will yourself into it. This feels like a pointed cosmic message for someone like me, who’s learning to control things less. But it doesn’t mean surrendering all effort. While the flow state can’t be grasped, we can create the conditions that encourage it to visit us more often.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (the guy who coined flow), said it’s something we experienced more often in pre-modern times because the conditions that made it flourish were more common in our environment back then. There were fewer distractions, multi-tasking or societal expectations. Motivations were intrinsically survival-based and there was less information overload. The conditions of the modern world encourage what Mihaly called ‘psychic entropy.’

To experience its opposite—the unique cocktail of dopamine, endorphins, norepinephrine, serotonin and oxytocin that flow provides—we need to do the following.

• The ‘challenge-skill’ balance: Having the task be challenging enough to stave off boredom, but not so difficult that it causes anxiety.

• Clear goals - Setting project goals and task parameters (like time-blocking).

• Deep focus - Reducing distraction (like tech, or hungry bellies).

• Immediate feedback - Seeing visual progress from the task at hand (something you don’t get in abstract job roles).

• [The solution to the creative gap]: I will reveal this one further down.

Its positive side effects include…

• Loss of self-awareness and self-editing: The ‘ego’ apparently dissolves and you become one with the task.

• Sense of control: Feeling confident you can meet the task’s demands.

• Time distortion: You lose track of time, hours feel like minutes.

Now onto the wild card element that encourages flow…

Intrinsic Motivation

The most interesting thing about flow is that it requires something so many of us forget due to the nature of the world we find ourselves in. That thing is intrinsic motivation. It’s the solution to the creative gap that Ira Glass identified. Intrinsic motivation is like a scenic train ride on the way to a destination, which is as nice, if not nicer than the destination itself.

I didn’t have a word for it back then, but when I look back, I can think of a few examples where I switched from extrinsic to intrinsic motivation. The first one that comes to mind is exercise. When I was in my mid-teens, it was the mid-2000s and exercise was often framed as a chore necessary to meet the beauty standards of the time. Unsurprisingly I had a terrible relationship with exercise and was very irregular with it. Like many tween girls back then, I’d go for a run and check my body in the mirror immediately afterwards. The run felt like a punishment and every agonising step was just one step closer to it all being over.

From age 17 onwards, this relationship changed when I noticed a friend who had a positive relationship with exercise. They had so many wonderful intrinsic motivators to do it; self-care, a release, a way to unwind, fresh air, enjoyment, play and learning a new skill. I began to exercise voluntarily and regularly. It began with a yoga practice, then dancing, pilates, gym, regular lighthouse walks and now surfing. I never even labelled it ‘exercise’ any longer, it was just whatever the activity was. I have thoroughly enjoyed all forms of movement ever since.

Another example is when I learned to dance swing and salsa in my early twenties. As a beginner, I didn’t expect to look good, so I absorbed myself in the steps and I had no self-awareness. Once it was committed to muscle memory, I had more time to think about how it looked. This temporarily stripped the joy from it, so I stopped for a while. When I went months later, I didn’t take it as seriously, so I forgot about how it looked and focused on how it felt. I remember getting a lot of compliments around this time from people who were probably looking at a person in flow. Extrinsic motivators like doing a good job or looking a certain way makes all ‘flow’ leave the body, taking all its virtuous qualities with it.

Most recently, after two years of interviewing artists for work, I noticed they all had a great relationship with their work and their work served them in some immediate way. For some, they found it meditative, others used their work as an outlet to express emotion, others to understand, or explore. Thanks to this lesson, I picked up a new craft in search of meditation: crochet. I never in a million years thought that would be something I’d do, but I gravitated to it because of the meditation in the evenings and as a phone replacement. I’m not doing it so much recently, but it has been a wonderful gateway into a new relationship with my creativity in general and something that I’m sure I’ll always pick up and put down.

So where do these insights leave me and my (endearingly termed) silly little newsletter?

Well, I’ve now realised that I need to identify some strong intrinsic motivators for writing here. So far, I’ve identified that I want the growth that comes from doing something that I find challenging. I want to grow the sharing muscle, in large part, because I find it so hard and I know there’s a lot of growth on the other side. I want to divorce from the part of me that wants to avoid vulnerability, either through procrastinating or over-editing and perfectionism. I want to experience what happens when I allow myself to be more visible and vulnerable (something I’ve shied from). I also want to write in the spirit of experimentation—to see what happens when I do something like this, which is different from anything I’ve done before. I want to see how the writing itself evolves. I’m curious about where this might lead, even if it leads nowhere. I’m keen to find out either way. What might I create when there’s no one else directing it? What matters to me enough that I’ll write it regardless of the readership? What might I learn about myself? Who might I connect with?

I have no control over the outcome. It might only be a short-term project that fizzles out. Although judging by my persistence through these posting blocks, it might not. Time will tell. But the outcome is no longer my business. I’d rather explore a difficult or intimidating path and be rewarded with growth—than never venture anywhere out of fear and stagnate. I’d rather read a book where the protagonist is doing something challenging or interesting, than not at all.