For a creative professional, a creative block isn’t just frustrating — it’s potentially career-damaging. When you rely on your creativity to pay the bills and build your reputation, you can’t afford to be short of ideas or the energy to put them into action.
– 99U
Creative blocks, or barriers to inspiration, can be described as the inability to access one’s internal creativity. Those in creative professions—writers, musicians, performers, artists—are often more likely to be affected by creative blocks, which can last for days, weeks, months, or even years.
– goodtheraphy
- According to Seth Godin
Writer’s block is a myth and what does that mean, It means that that feeling that we have when we say we can’t write is really the feeling we have when we say we can’t write anything that’s perfect. That we are certainly capable of writing poorly. No one has writing poorly block and so if you write poorly enough your brain will give up and sooner or later, you’ll start writing well.
No one says this to a plumber “uhh, how did you find the energy to fix a toilet”, if that’s what you do.
So go ahead and write. If you want to write poorly, write poorly. If you want to tell me you have writer’s block, first show me all your bad writing. If you can show me 50,000 words of bad writing, then maybe I’ll tell you you’re not a writer. But until you’ve done 50,000 words of bad writing, you have no idea if you’re a writer or not.
A quote from an answer by Seth Godin during the live conversation with Chris Do on the topic of Creative Block being a myth.
Question: How do you overcome this quest for perfection?
Seth: “You don’t. You cannot overcome it. You can dance with it. And the harder you try to overcome it, the more you’re giving it power. Because what it means to overcome it is you’re saying I will be creative as soon as I get a standing ovation from my brain and your brain will not give you a standing ovation because it is afraid. So what you have to say is, “I will be creative especially when my brain is freaking out” that every day at 4 o’clock I’m going to ship something out and if you make that commitment and keep doing it, then you will become creative.”