Creative Life:
Navigating Through the Noise
‘Efforts to deepen your focus will struggle
if you don’t simultaneously wean
your mind from a dependence on distraction.’
― Cal Newport
”I can’t ever find the time, so my creative life just goes around in circles, and I never feel I’m achieving anything meaningful,” ever had that thought?
If we are to live a fully engaged, creative life, pursuing the passions that give us the purpose we seek, we may need to do one of two things: choose to negotiate with our loved ones and or ‘crop out’ some of the existing time-consuming activities out of our lives.
Life is full of choices, and while ours at any given point in time might seem restricted by our current life situation, remember that we created that ‘life situation’ and can re-create it. As the Dalai Lama wrote, ‘Judge your success by what you had to give up to get it.’ While aptly put, it is more than just giving up stuff. If we’re unhappy and want to do something about it, we need to apply self-discipline and even step out of the comfort zone we have established and re-work our schedules. It may be painful at the time.
I have met many highly acclaimed and very talented creatives from many disciplines throughout my career, and all had one thing in common: they have had to build simple, uncomplicated lives, each with a primary focus on their Creative Life Purpose. As much as possible, they had removed themselves from distraction. In the work that I do, I need to be especially vigilant. My creative life purpose incorporates numerous interests. So how do I stay focused? Two words: self-discipline. In saying that, I don’t want to portray myself as a saint. I have had my fair share of failures where discipline has failed, both in my personal and business lives.
Let’s look at the everyday distractions. Socialising with people who don’t share your life values is a big time waster. It can also drain you spiritually. Luckily, that’s easy to change. If you don’t come away feeling uplifted, well, you know what to do next time! Then there’s the digital world – streaming movie channels, mobile phones, an ever-expanding internet filled to overflowing with amazing content. Then, of course, fast-growing access to free video via Youtube, not to mention social media and never-ending emails desperately trying to sell you yet another connection – where will it end? Well, not all of it needs to end. Some can benefit our creative lives as long as we manage the time. There is always a way to manage distractions. We have to start looking carefully at our everyday life schedules.
IMAGE ABOVE – At one time or another, most Australian east coast backyards are investigated for food by the delightful yet very noisy rainbow lorikeets. These birds live in an incredibly competitive environment; however, just watch them in action when in a competitive feeding situation – they know how to focus at all costs!
QUOTE ABOVE – Cal Newport is the author of ‘Deep Work – Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World.
I recommend this TED Talk, ‘How to Eliminate Self Doubt Forever & the Power of Your Unconscious Mind ‘ with Peter Sage
Managing Time
If the content of your life is not integral
to your Creative Life Purpose
then crop it out!
– Steve Parish
If we consider all the time-absorbing elements of our lives as spokes in a wheel, we can start to appreciate better that without equal management and constant adjustment that it does not take much for our lives to go into something of a spin. Add family, relationships, the things that matter, and anxiety soon ramp up, and we all know where that can go!
The panting dog beside a spoked wheel is symbolic of our need to review our busy lives from time to time. My research confirms that time – or the perceived lack of it – is the number one challenge faced in relation to the ongoing nourishment of our creative life purpose.
Ultimately, we may find we need to delete some activities from our schedules to make room. Think of it in photographic language; you may need to do some ‘cropping’.
We all know that when we photo-compose and or crop post-capture that our images are enhanced. Yet removing/deleting – those elements that are not conducive to us living our full creative life potential remains one of the most ‘hard-to-get-around-to-doing’ life challenges. Wrong job, wrong partner, wrong place to live, wrong friends, wrong, wrong, wrong.
Finally, when we sharpen our cropping tools and take action, we soon discover that we should have acted a whole lot sooner.
Right?
Remember, our creative life purpose should not be seen as separate from our everyday life situations. Our real-life purpose can only be fulfilled when body, mind and spirit are in balance.
Images above: In-camera composition directly relates to the analysis of the story you wish to tell. In this case, the ‘tear-shaped’ feather patterns seemingly falling from the eye of this frogmouth were my story. The beak and the body shape had nothing to do with my story, so they were removed. So, next time you are confronted with making a hard decision think of feathery tears and this gorgeous frog mouth.
