You Might Want to Try Being Less Creative
A jam session at Secret Studios with my friend Jon showed me why I never finished a song as a teenager: I was too proud to borrow from others. Jon taught me to sketch with borrowed riffs, chord progressions, and drum loops, treating it all as just a demo. The lesson applies to software and startups too: focus your creativity where it counts, and the rest falls away.
The classic sign of a shitty startup idea is that it requires at least two (or more!) miracles to succeed.
- herbertl
While I like the punchy title, I'd suggest the often invisible role of preliminary work IS a part of being creative. In music it's "demos," in art it's "sketches," in writing it's "drafts," etc. I write in my book, Creative Doing:
> This stage is far too early to demand perfection; it’s best to keep expectations low, to refrain from self-criticism, and to support psychological safety (the feeling that it’s okay to make mistakes) to allow every single detail of the idea to flow out.
It's related to the original post's mention of scarcity, and how "the path to writing a great song really is through hundreds of mediocre songs." The most reliable way to good work is to allow it to emerge through a lot of preliminary work (e.g., lots of drafts, demos, and sketches).
More on preliminary work here: https://www.holloway.com/g/creative-doing/sections/draft-dem...
- dofm
Choosing your constraints is an inherently creative decision, because it is foundational to all the other creative decisions you make.
There are no creative chords. There are creative chord progressions.
- andai
Started having way more fun (and making better music) when I released the "need" to make everything from scratch and just started dragging and dropping loops.
Now it's like I'm back in 2003 when my feature phone had a little music composer thing on it. You'd just slap together some presets.
Life is good.
- computerdork
Am an aspiring composer. We often say we have no qualms about "stealing" from other composers. Yeah, if we see an idea or technique used in piece of music we like, we won't hesitate to try it out in our own pieces. Of course, we don't actually steal to the point of plagarism, but it's pretty common to do, and the ideas we take are often modified for your own needs or just taken in parts.
- comrade1234
I was programming a lot and felt that my mind was getting somehow rigid, for lack of a better term. So I took up scrabble since I thought that that maybe is a different type of thinking, but it really isn't as you are just using logic to predict valid words that may or may not exist. So I took some creativity courses, mostly painting, and those were great for my brain. But then the pandemic happened and they were shut down.
I've taken some hobbies since then and haven't felt the need to do something other than programming and my hobbies since then - having these other interests (mushroom collecting, weightlifting, hiking, etc) has been enough.