About a month ago, my family moved into a new house. This new house has a different type of shower than our last place did: it’s one of those tubs with a rectangular curtain rod that hangs from the ceiling, so we had to bring our own shower curtain. We now have one, but the trouble is that the standard shower curtain length is about a foot shorter than what I need. So, unless I’m very careful (and even if I am, truthfully), every shower taken by every person in our house results in a good amount of puddling on the shower floor. I won’t lie to you — this annoys the ever-loving shit out of me. Thing is, I take long showers. Seriously, *long*. I do this because, like many folks, the shower is where I do some of my best thinking. There aren’t any distractions, my attention is undivided (since I’ve washed myself several thousand times now, I can do it without giving it much thought). But now that I’m hosing off a portion of my bathroom every time I take a shower, I’m forced to concentrate (at least partially) on how much water I’m dumping onto the floor instead of more interesting things. One of my favorite creative sanctuaries has been compromised.
The point here is that you want to create a safe place to create, work, build - as impregnable a fortress as you can. I’m not just talking about physical objects, either; the limiting of external factors and forces while you’re doing your thing will take you a good way toward fully immersing yourself in what you’re doing (which is when the best work gets done the fastest, in my experience). The more subtle benefit, though, is that you’re protecting the outside world from your as much as you are protecting yourself from it.
Have you ever painted with a five-year-old? If so, you probably put on your filthiest old clothes, covered the floor and painting surface with newspaper and procured some water-based paint that could easily be wiped off of most anything. Why? Because you want the kid to be able to go batshit insane with that paint *and* you want to be along with him/her on the ride and not thinking about how much it’s going to cost to replace the floor that’s now covered in Purple Pizzazz. Minimizing your outgoing effects is going to be what creates a more meaningful experience for you and your young friend, so you take precautions beforehand to ensure that you’re both mentally present for 100% of the time you have. Creative work is exactly the same.
This might sound like I’m suggesting you work/build/create in a vacuum; that, in order to do really good stuff, you need to be in a plain white room with a plain white desk and drink a tall glass of plain white milk. Wrong. Your head is going to carry in all of the inspiration, understanding and -yes- prejudice that are going to indelibly mark your work as *yours*. You are the context from whence this work will come, no matter what color your beverage is.
How does this relate to technology? Like frickin’ crazy. One of the core ideas here is to build and create recklessly — to let all of what you can bring to the work come flying out of you like a fire hydrant that just met its first Buick. You’re not hampered by a finite number of parchment slabs or blank scrolls upon which to pour your genius. You have, effectively, an infinite expanse upon which to write, draw, paint, speak and even dance (if that’s your bag) and all the freedom in the world to pare, curate and massage the output later.
When it comes time for me to write something for this here blog, for example, I create a new note in Evernote and just start banging out ideas relating to the topic I’ve chosen (which, incidentally, was probably scrawled into my Field Notes notebook while I was in line at the jerk store - get a notebook), as fast as I can. I don’t pay attention to whether it’s good or relevant, I just keep typing for a couple of minutes. That big list of words/phrases/ideas gets mercilessly edited until I have my main points, which then become an outline. Then I type a few hash (#) symbols and start drafting. If, after writing, I feel that I wouldn’t line my worst enemy’s cat box with what I had, I just hit Return a few times, type a few more hash marks and start again. It’s no uncommon for me to do this 2-4 times per post. The nifty part — I’ll often recycle the turds I came up with originally and scrapped somewhere else within the final post.
Give yourself the freedom to go buck wild when you build — just make sure that you’ve built the sandbox first. And, if you have, trust that it’s doing it’s job and absolute *slather* the walls in Purple Pizzazz, if you’re inspired to do so.
Photo by Vivian Chen
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