Creativity Without Stress: How Elaboration Helps Us Create Without Worrying

Ideas don’t pop into our heads fully formed and ready to launch. The process from initial idea to a finished product worthy of other people’s attention can be a long one.

Each idea develops over time. Your very first attempt at a creative idea will likely only capture the general feeling of what you’re after. Your earliest work tends to be very abstract in nature. There are general ideas you’d like to pursue, but you’ll likely find yourself with very few concrete ideas to work with. This is the nature of the creative process. We begin with the abstract, and we work towards something more concrete.

It’s the next few generations that expand on your original ideas. Your initial idea is generic, but your second idea extends and elaborates on them. Over time, those abstract ideas about what you’d like to achieve and how you think you might achieve start to take shape. At this point, you’re about midway through the creative process.

Towards the end, your continuing to elaborate on your old ideas, but you’ll place special focus on problem solving and smaller details. This is where your creative idea really begins to take on a life of its own. In earlier stages, your creative idea was largely something that was in your head. It was a possibility. Now, it’s something concrete. You no longer have to imagine what it’d be like, because its right in front of you.

Thinking about creativity in this way can take a lot of pressure off of you, especially in the earliest stages of the creative process. Knowing that you’re first attempt at an idea is allowed to be flawed is freeing. It frees you of the stress you feel about getting it perfect on the first shot. You’re allowed to create half-finished ideas, because you’ll know that those ideas will evolve over time into something worthy of other people’s attention.

As your creating today, think about where you are within this process. Are you in the early stages of a creative project where you need to work with generic, abstract ideas? Are you in the middle stage where you’re trying to convert generic ideas into something more concrete and usable? Or are you in the final stage, where you want to apply problem solving skills to ensure your idea does what it promised?

Before ending, I want to invite you to the Kaizen Creativity Facebook group at facebook.com/KaizenCreativity to engage with other listeners and myself. The group is a place where we can both teach and learn from others. You have a valuable set of skills and knowledge that the group needs to hear. You also have the opportunity to expand the conversation by letting others know what issues you’ve run into and how you’ve solved them. You can join us at facebook.com/KaizenCreativity.

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