The Power of Creativity (Book 3): How to Conquer Procrastination, Finish Your Work and Find Success: The Power of Creativity, #3

The Power of Creativity

How to Conquer Procrastination, Finish Your Work and Find Success (Book 3)

Bryan Collins

Contents

Preface

1. The Bond

2. Immerse Yourself in Your Creative Work

3. Seek Out Solitude

4. Be Obsessed

5. Root Out Perfectionism like a Weed

6. Practise Your Craft Deliberately

7. Cut the Cord

8. Fall Forwards

9. Shipping Your Most Important Work

Afterword

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Tools For Becoming More Creative

Get The Power of Creativity Series

Get the Become a Writer Today Series

References

For A.

By Bryan Collins

Copyright © by Bryan Collins. All Rights Reserved.

Edited by Command+Z Content.

Reproduction in whole or part of this publication without express consent is strictly prohibited. The author greatly appreciates you taking the time to read his work. Please consider leaving a review wherever you bought this book, or tell friends about it, and help the author spread the word.

This book uses British English.

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Become a Writer Today

Preface

Do you want proven and free advice that will help you become more creative and find better ideas?

If you sign up at becomeawritertoday.com/pocbonus, I’ll send you a free video lesson based on this book. You’ll also get exclusive excerpts from my next book about creativity.

1

The Bond

I pay no attention whatever to anybody's praise or blame. I simply follow my own feelings.

– Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

It seems impossible . . .

Austrian composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote his first symphony when he was eight years of age. American writer Stephen King has published more than 55 novels and 200 short stories.

Painter Pablo Picasso created over 50,000 artworks, including 1,885 paintings during his lifetime.

American choreographer Twyla Tharp has produced or choreographed more than 100 ballet and dance shows for the theatre and for multiple films and TV shows, and she has written three popular books.

Their accomplishments are bold, their ideas big and powerful and their creative habits prolific.

Do these creative masters possess an abundance of talent the rest of us can only dream of? Or have they found a lost, powerful secret about becoming more creative or productive?

These questions troubled me.

So I set out to understand how creative masters like Mozart and Tharp finish so many creative projects with so much success. I found that while talent is important – Mozart was a genius – it takes hundreds if not thousands of little ideas to create a single big idea.

If you find the prospect of finishing hundreds or thousands of small things off-putting (or exhausting), don’t worry. Each little idea you complete accumulates like molecules inside a cell. They bond together until they possess a life of their own.

The best part is everyone has what it takes to finish their little ideas. You can finish a little idea today.

You just have to start.

Who This Book is For

This book is the third in a three-part series about creativity thatI wrote for new writers, musicians, filmmakers and artists.

The first book, The Power of Creativity: Learning How to Build Lasting Habits, Face Your Fears and Change Your Life, was for writers, artists and musicians who felt adrift.

The second book, The Power of Creativity: An Uncommon Guide to Mastering Your Inner Genius and Finding New Ideas That Matter, focused on where to look for great ideas.

This third book is for anyone who has a great idea (or even just a little one), but they’re finding it difficult to act on it, go deep into their work and finish their most important creative projects.

Over the proceeding chapters, you’ll discover how to unlock a mindset for finishing your ideas, shipping your work and moving on to the next thing.

As in the previous books, I’ll pull studies from academia and the business world and mix these findings with contemporary and personal examples so you can get your ideas over the finish line.

At the end of each chapter I include Creative Takeaways you can use to nudge your work towards its inevitable conclusion.

A Finished Creative Work

In a sentence: How to take a great idea and act on it.

But let’s go deeper.

Extroverts thrive when working in the company of others, while introverts do their best work alone. So it’s no surprise that many accomplished creative masters are introverts who go to great pains to work in a solitary environment.

Now it takes a degree of focus and, yes, even obsession to sit by yourself in a room in front of the blank page, canvas or a computer screen and work on an idea for hours, days, weeks and months.

Sometimes, it takes extreme measures to get your ideas over the line.

Does this sound alarming?

Well, know obsession is something you can embrace rather than fear with the right approach.

You can conquer your fear by testing your ideas, showing drafts of your book, album or art to an inner circle and getting constructive critical feedback. Or sell early versions of your ideas to beta or first customers and use their feedback to improve your craft.

As you draw towards the end of a creative project, it’s natural to spend time polishing your idea into something that shines, and this is where many people get stuck.

They spend ages working on an almost-ready idea without shipping anything. They get stuck on one little idea when they should let what they have bond together and then move onto the next one.

I’ll reveal the different kinds of perfectionism you must watch out for and give you practical strategies for overcoming each one so you can finally get your work out there.

Things might get a little unpleasant before you find success. So I’m going to talk about failure and mistakes (mine mostly).

They’re a critical part of deep creative work. If you find these little dark moments off-putting, understand that learning from your failures and mistakes will help you improve the quality of your finished ideas dramatically.

Besides, whatever kind of success or failure greets you at the end of a creative project is about your work and not about you.

Now, there’s one thing creative people with a good idea never have enough of – and that’s time.

Let’s begin.

2

Immerse Yourself in Your Creative Work

You’re using force. You’re using your hands. You’re creating. You’re making that white dance.

– Ronnie O’Sullivan

There must be some mistake, I said.

My Irish teacher took the exam paper from my hands, flicked quickly through the pages, frowned and gave it back to me.

There’s no mistake, she said tapping the large F on the front page. You’ve failed your end-of-the-year Irish grammar exam.

But I worked hard at this…

I don’t have time to argue about it, and you have another class to go to, she said. Take your books and get out.

In Ireland, we sit exams like these because even though Irish or Gaeilge (or Gaelic) is our native language, the majority of the country speaks English.

The Irish mostly speak Gaeilge in rural parts of Ireland known as the Gaeltacht and to prevent the death of our native tongue, secondary school students (the Irish equivalent of high-school students) study Irish.

The class was awful. Everything about the system, my classmates and even my teacher bored me. She was more interested in clipping her red nails and getting us to recite Irish grammar rules than inspiring a love of the language in her charge.

Looking back to 1998, I can’t blame my Irish teacher. There’s no worse place to learn or teach a language than being forced to do so for an hour a day in a sweaty classroom. As a pale and spotty fourteen-year-old, I lacked the motivation and the curiosity required to excel anyway.

After school, I went home