Do you want to be an expert at something? Expertise is important, but don’t spend too much time thinking about it. Focusing on getting better and better and constantly evaluating your work against some external standards, or worse, taking other people’s evaluations as objective truth, can slow or stop the creative process entirely. Some activities are not primarily creative: think golf or playing a Mozart sonata or coding a table-free website. In those activities, it seems important to keep external standards in mind and to regularly check one’s performance against them. For more expressive pursuits–painting or blogging or writing fiction, for example–constant judging blocks creative expression.
For me, blogging here at Anne 2.0 is primarily a creative pursuit. I have other blogging opportunities that are about other things: Web Worker Daily is about page views and advertising profitability and tech decentral is about promoting my work and RedMonk’s work as industry analysts. I keep up with Anne 2.0 because I like playing with ideas, connecting with other thoughtful people, and learning new things. It serves all those purposes, but not so well if I’m blogging with one eye towards the Technorati ranking and the other on what people are saying about me and my writing.
In her book On Becoming an Artist: Reinventing Yourself Through Mindful Creativity, psychologist Ellen Langer emphasizes the importance of separating yourself and your creative work from evaluations:
The tyranny evaluation holds over us is the most important roadblock we need to overcome to achieve a personal renaissance. The most common reason we hesitate when presented with the opportunity to express ourselves creatively is our fear of other people’s negative opinions.
She goes on to point out how judgments like good/bad, right/wrong, valuable/worthless, and smart/dumb are context-dependent and subjective. What’s most interesting (and a little Buddhist) is her idea that paying too much attention to compliments and other “good” evaluations sets you up for a creative stumble. Why? Because if you attribute some objective truth to the good evaluations then you can’t help but listen to the bad ones too.
Unfortunately, blogging is too often treated like it’s mostly about expertise and rankings instead of creativity and connection. I’m not going to say it’s not about expertise and rankings… lots of people have made lots of money by being experts and A-listers in the blogosphere. But I’m also not going to let you think it’s all about expertise and rankings, because the more you feel creative and connected online, the less your alleged expertise and rank will matter for your own satisfaction.
5 Comments
I don’t know if you’re familiar with Natalie Goldberg’s writing books, but they focus on very much the same theme of reserving judgment, so that you feel free to create. I think the way she phrases it is “give yourself permission to be the worst writer in the universe”.
Audrey - I love Natalie Goldberg! I haven’t read her stuff in years, though… I will need to pick them up at the library and reread them. I know she’s big into Zen Buddhism, on which the whole nonjudging idea is based.
I’m suffering from a bit of writer’s block right now, so this is a good reminder. “Give yourself permission to be the worst writer in the universe.” Perfect. Exactly what I needed.
I’m new to this blogging world and when I started out I was thrilled with the concept of sharing. My blog is about learning, devoted to people like me who are passionate about horses. But after putting up the adsense and watching the stats I quickly became consumed with that aspect of the blog. But the holidays and family kept me away from the PC (along with my 2 teenage siblings who hogged it while visiting) and I was rejuivinated to post and write, not analyze and track. I am excited about what I can share (and learn) in 2007. This post is a nice reminder.
Jerri, I’m glad it was helpful. I wrote it partially as a reminder to myself that both good and bad external judgments and statistics can be stifling. It’s easy to get caught up in the stats and lose the joy of it.
I had a discussion very similar to this post with my 19 year old brother the other night at dinner. He really struggles with being too self-aware, and you stop being creative the moment you start to think about what other people think. It’s so painful watching him ride his skateboard or show off the graphic designs he created for class. He’s so self-critical. At least he’s young enough that he has some time to grow out of this. I hate to see him struggle to meet some external (phantom) standard. It takes the enjoyment out of life.