014. Unleashing Creativity: Embracing the Iterative Process

“Iteration is the repetition of a process in order to generate a (possibly unbounded) sequence of outcomes. Each repetition of the process is a single iteration, and the outcome of each iteration is then the starting point of the next iteration.” - Wikipedia

Meet Gina, the creative powerhouse in our family.

Need a catchy logo made for your new venture? Call Gina. 

Thinking of sprucing up your fireplace with some decor? Gina’s got you. 

And if your new puppy needs handcrafted, ceramic food and water bowls, guess who’s on the case? (just don’t tell her if one breaks).

Gina is what most people would label a “creative”. With a background in design, she’s been assisting brands (and family) express themselves through the media of our day for years.

All this to say, she knows a thing or two about the creative process, a topic we covered in a recent chat. 

She explained her thought process like this…”creativity is just iteration.” Meaning, you begin the work, often unsure of the outcome. As you return to your work, it continues to build upon itself and eventually your final product is fleshed out, after many of these iterations. 

To break this down further, there’s two key components: 

1. Begin the work, even when you don’t feel like it. 

Creativity is like motivation - it feeds on itself. There are plenty of days I don’t feel like writing, working out, or working on my business. However, just as discussed in this post, once you overcome the resistance to start it gets easier and you find yourself accomplishing much more than anticipated. 

Creativity comes to those doing the work, because it reveals itself during the work. So just begin.

2. Continue the work, despite knowing where it will lead.

I write these each day with a very general topic in mind, never knowing where it will lead. In a broader sense, I’m unsure of where all this writing will take me. Just like you can’t know where your creative efforts are capable of taking you. 

Don’t let the ambiguity of the finished product discourage you. Instead, take heart that this is exactly how it’s supposed to happen. The final work, say iteration #100, can never be reached without #7, #44, and #82. It will find you in the process. 

It reminds me of what Steven Pressfield calls the Resistance in his gut-punching book The War of Art. Resistance is everything preventing you from starting your journey. It’s what keeps writers from writing, sales people from making calls, and gym goers at home. It’s that “Gosh I really don’t feel like doing this right now, let me scroll on Instagram for a while on and get inspired.” 

That’s worked for precisely no one, ever. But we all feel it in our individual pursuits. Pressfield’s argument is that if you want to accomplish your goal, you can’t wait for inspiration. You have to continue to show up and do the work even when you don’t feel like it, creative pursuits included. 

Take step one, despite how you feel. Iterate as you go. See where you end up.