On the evening of October 31st I came up with a silly idea. Most silly ideas I have are shot on site. However, through some miraculous ruse this one snuck past the gatekeeper and on November 1st The Be Creative And Shit Challenge was born!
The idea was simple: every day of the month of November I would create and share something (a drawing, poem, sculpture, etc.). The catch was, the quality of the creation didn’t matter. In fact, the shittier the better! I wanted to set the bar so low I had no excuse not to make something everyday.
I didn’t have many expectations going into the challenge. I thought of it as a playful way to flex my creative muscle, and get a chuckle from my friends and family kind enough to care.
However, in the process I learned some things about the joy of creation, laughing at your self consciousness, and the importance of taking small, silly, but bold actions in your life.
This blog is a summation of what I learned from making shitty art for a month.
Lesson 1: You have hands for a reason. Use them!
We live in a digital world. A growing chunk of the population spends most of their waking hours slouched over Laptops and Tablets. Entire careers consist of moving lines of code, parsing through ones and zeroes. Even creative acts like photography, music production, and film making are done digitally.
These statements aren’t meant to disparage technology. It has provided many wonderful resources for people to create and share their work. But I think it has robbed us of the experience of creating physical things. Molding and manipulating objects is a uniquely human affair, it is what separates us from other lame animals without opposable thumbs.
The challenge reconnected me to the primal pleasure of crafting things with my hands. The tactile sensation of penning words on a page, brush strokes on a canvass, wet clay in my palms. I even wrote the first draft of this article with pen and paper. Check it out in its messy glory.
The digital world may be sleek and shiny but it is not a substitute for making something tangible. You’ve got hands for a reason, put them to good use!
Lesson 2: Set The Bar Low At The Beginning
The motto for this challenge is “create and share one SHITTY thing a day”. The emphasis on “shitty” was intentional. I wanted to remove any quality control from the process, and set the bar so low that failure was near impossible.
Anyone who has wanted to lose weight, save money, or work towards a goal of any sort knows that building a habit is diabolically difficult. If it were easy we would all have six pack abs and thousands more dollars in the bank. The same goes for any creative habit. That’s why I set a goal for myself that was only one step removed from “put your ass in a seat”.
The cool thing is, once you put said “ass in a seat” great things can happen. Simply showing up makes a difference. It builds momentum, strengthens the “habit building” synapses in your brain, and can lead you to create something you’re proud of.
Marginal gains aren’t sexy, but they are the building blocks that lead to something bigger.
Lesson 3: The Key To Sucking Less Is Giving Yourself Permission To Suck
Here’s the tough truth about starting anything… You suck in the beginning. It doesn’t matter if it’s playing the piano, teaching yourself to code, or learning to juggle, you’re not going to be very good when you begin.
And it gets worse! if you’re passionate about something you know what it looks like when performed at a high level, and you know that what you’re doing doesn’t compare. This is a phenomena that American Public Radio Personality Ira Glass calls “The Gap”.
Is there a way to pole vault over this dreaded gap, and skip the suckage? Not one that I’ve discovered, or anyone else for that matter. But The Be Creative And Shit Challenge taught me a cheat code you can use to lessen these growing pains:
Give yourself permission to suck!
Embrace your mediocrity with open arms. As Winston Churchill put it “success is going from failure to failure with great enthusiasm”. Starting anything is hard enough, haranguing yourself because you’re not “good” makes it twice as difficult. You’re now fighting a war on two fronts. Simply acknowledging that, at its onset, doing anything is hard and you’re going to suck a little takes pressure off yourself, and clears space for you to improve.
Lesson 4: Embrace Anonymity
Each day before posting my shitty work, my anxious mind took great joy in imagining all sorts of nightmare scenarios that would occur when I hit “send”. Sometimes my work would ignite an angry twitter mob. Sometimes it would awaken a nasty troll lurking on the dark corners of the internet. Other times it would be the object of ridicule by all the pretty girls who wouldn’t date me in High School.
To my knowledge none of these nightmare scenarios occurred. What happened instead? Well… nothing really. A friend might send a few words of support or the occasional heart emoji, but for the most part my beloved creations were either ignored, glossed over, or quickly forgotten after someone posted a more riveting picture of their dog in sunglasses.
At first glance this was disheartening. Why won’t the world shower me with the praise or scorn I so duly deserve? But upon further reflection was quite liberating!
You’ll never have as much freedom as when you’re starting out. Use your anonymity to find a voice and master your craft. Let it provide a safe space to experiment with ideas… especially whacky ones like this challenge. Some of them won’t stick, but who cares; hardly anyone’s watching.
Lesson 5: The Essence Of Creativity Is Fucking Around
I want to let you in on a little secret… Making terrible art is fun. I mean like REALLY fun!
People seem to enjoy it too. My most beloved works were often the shittiest.
There is something disarming about seeing a horrible drawing. It lowers your defenses and makes both the creator and the observer a little less self conscious. It’s a reminder to be playful in a world that often seems sad and serious.
Writer and cartoonist Tim Kreider said: “The essence of creativity is fucking around; art is that which is done for the hell of it”. I say we take this “fucking around” a little more seriously. At the end of the day we’re a bunch of monkey descendants on a rock hurtling through space. Why not enjoy the ride!
Lesson 6: If you want to be “creative” embrace the verb “to create”
In his article “The noun and the verb”, writer and illustrator Austin Kleon says: lots of people want to be a noun (writer, painter, actor) without doing the verb (writing, painting, acting). He concludes by urging people to “Let go of the thing that you’re trying to be (the noun), and focus on the actual work you need to be doing (the verb).”
For this blog I’m re-purposing his idea into: “If you want to be creative (adjective), embrace the verb “to create”.
Prior to this challenge, I fancied myself a creative person. I had some vague ideas in my head about songs, blogs, and books I’d like to write. I may have even lavished myself with titles like writer, poet, musician… all while creating nothing.
This whole silly endeavor was a challenge to myself to create something, anything, no matter how trivial it was. To do the verb “create”, even in it’s shittiest form, rather than sit comfortably and pine to be creative while not backing it up with any action.
This challenge was what I needed to get started. The blog you’re reading is me giving myself the advice I need to keep going. It’s personal but I think I’m far from alone in this struggle. If you’ve related to any of this, I invite you to embrace the verb and go out and create something!
Lesson 7: Support The Shit That Inspires You
I was going to end on the last point but there’s an immutable law of blogging that the best listicles need seven items.
I’ll keep this short and sweet. There are a lot of people out there making better art than the shit I’ve shared over the past month. These people have been some of the hardest hit by the global pandemic.
If you have money to spare, make a statement with your dollar and support people in your community making cool shit.
