Art can be entrepreneurship, writing, gardening, cooking, playing a sport. Art can be as simple as hosting a dinner. It’s creation.
No matter the art, there are two sides. Consuming and creating.
Consuming
We’re bombarded with content everyday. The new iPhone’s released and there’re reviews to watch. Another war’s broken out and you now have to watch hours of analysis. Someone’s critiquing the new X logo. There’s effectively an infinite amount of content. It can be overwhelming. There’s never enough time to consume it all.
Though, perhaps we’re actually missing out by consuming.
When we’re only consuming it can feel as though we have some deficiency, in our knowledge of a particular topic, or in our lives after seeing others living a “perfect” life on instagram. Ironically, we then consume more to find that missing piece. But what is it we’re missing? We have this feeling we’ll “know it when we see it”. But will we?
Consuming is passive. We don’t make decisions while we watch a movie or read an article. The artist not only has to consider what colour the curtains should be, but they actually have to make the decision. They have to commit. Consuming is non-committal.
The artist chisels the stone of a messy idea, smoothes the sharp edges and shapes it into a beautiful sculpture. We only see the sculpture. We only see the end of the journey. In some ways, we’re missing out on most of the art. The art of the process itself.
Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.
Soren Kierkegaard
Creating
We admire creators. Writers, actors, entrepreneurs, sportspeople. These people each have a unique canvas, a pitch deck, a theatre or a football field. But they all do. They all create.
Creating illuminates our deficiencies. The sense of “something missing” becomes “it’s X I’m missing”. What was a vague sense of deficiency is now a clear and precise call to further action.
You can read all the books in the world about writing music. But making music is about doing . It’s about drawing what’s on the inside, outside. You can’t learn this from a book. You can learn techniques that may help, sure. But until you start, you don’t know which techniques you might want or need. A wheel-house of unused tools is a waste.
I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.
Bruce Lee
Creating organises. Ideas collected during consumption tend to float around, not really rooting themselves in the frameworks we have. Ideas integrate into frameworks through usage. When we apply a finger-style technique to that Ed Sheeran song we’re learning, we appreciate the technique more, we become more familiar with the subtler details of it; the details that cannot be explained in a book – we understand it.
Creating More
Creating is hard. Consuming is easy.
Creating is hard because there are no clear answers. We don’t have the privilege of looking backwards and seeing how it should be done as we do when consuming. We have to make decisions and find the answers.
It’s frustrating. You get stuck. When was the last time you felt frustrated watching a documentary? I’ve been frustrated at least thrice writing this short blog post.
Sharing an artwork means sharing your decisions. These decisions reflect you. This can be difficult. However, sharing is an integral part of creating. Sharing is what makes it rewarding. Though, the reward is not in it being received by others, the reward is the act of putting the work out there as an expression of yourself. Being received well by others is a nice auxiliary benefit. But that’s outside your control.
So create something.
