The Creative Myth

Fear and Creativity - The Ultimate Odd Couple

June 03, 2021 Sirjana and Ben Season 1 Episode 4
The Creative Myth
Fear and Creativity - The Ultimate Odd Couple
Show Notes Transcript Chapter Markers

What if we could show you that we are all born creative? Creativity is often thought of as a mythical quality that some of us are just born exuding, and those not lucky enough to have the "creative gene" are doomed to live their life as accountants and car salespeople. But have you ever considered that accounting and sales are creative journeys in their own right? Welcome to the Creative Myth with us, Ben and Sirjana. We are two humans in love living a 'traditionally creative' life as internationally nomadic elopement and adventure photographers under the moniker of Tinted Photography. 

In this episode of the Creative Myth, we discuss fear and it's powerful relationship to creative endeavours and all endeavours in general really. We talk about how as creatives we encounter the fear of failure and judgement in our daily lives and how we acknowledge it and work with it to strengthen our creative outputs. 

Hello, you beautiful people and welcome to the creative myth. The podcast that inspires the uninspired by attempting to unfold, break down and distill that mythical force of nature and or nurture, known as creativity. We're here to bust the myth that creativity is only the birthright of the few. In each biweekly episode, we either find a new and engaging, self confessed, creative and strike up a dialogue, or surgenor. And I sit down to discuss a topic to do with creativity that's near and dear to us. Our goal, to find out just what creativity means, and how it's channeled into the passions of creatives around the world. So let's get to it. Today on the creative myth, Ben and I are catching up to discuss something that as far as we can tell, affects everyone making a living off their creativeness and basically, the rest of the world as well. This is a topic very near and dear to our hearts. And that is how fear has and does affect our work and our art, even this podcast, and what we do to combat that fear. So with any luck, this week, conversation will be a useful one to you beautiful people. Before we get into that, though, it might help to have a little background on who we are, and why this is a topic we're all excited to discuss. You see, when we are busy being a new favorite podcast hosts, we are the two halves of tenor photography. We've been making a living from our creativity for a decade now and gain international recognition with names like Junebug weddings blog, rangefinder magazine, shutter magazine, and the Sony alfre awards. We are what we call adventure photographers, for couples in love. We plan and photograph adventures and elopements for people in all corners of the globe. And before COVID struck, we lived nomadically in some pretty incredible places. Yeah, we also run multiple Instagram accounts, mentor other photographers and creatives and also small business owners. And before all that I got an honors degree in graphic design with a side of photography and filmmaking, and work in house as a graphic designer and editorial photographer for a multinational company. sojourner has landed three degrees in two countries, those being clinical psychology, organizational psychology, and marketing. She's a painter, a dancer, a poet, and was once in charge of company culture at a tech firm. It always feels like a job interview when we rattle off all that stuff. But now that we have all that out of the way, hopefully you're satisfied that we might know a thing or two about today's topic, just a thing or two. So let's start. Maybe you identify as creative or maybe you find yourself saying I'm not a creative, I can't ride or dance or I don't know, sing or whatever, or however you decide. Yeah, however you define creativity. Or, you know, you think that you're a logical thinker and not a creative one. We all at some point have faced that start stop phenomenon, where we come up with an idea or a desire to do something, only to find that we stopped suddenly, for one reason or the other. That reason my friends under all disguises is fear. That's right, because, you know, you'll come up with some idea and you're like, Man, this could change the world. I know. But I don't know the right people to get this sword. You know, what do I do? Like, if you didn't have no fear you I sometimes link people's names and be like, hey, what can we do about this? Can I invent? Can we make this thing happen? And sometimes I even have that moment where I have an idea of some photo or some way of creating something for tinted. And I don't even turn around and tell you that idea. Because I've already in my head discounted it. And yeah, it's fear. Oh, man, it's a shame. It is. It is. And sometimes I do tell you that idea. And you shoot it down. justified fear. Sorry, anyway, fear creativity. These are two words that have a long and sordid history together. Now, we when we're talking about fear, we're not talking about fear for your life. Obviously, this is kind of more that fear that Susan Jeffers means but she tells you to feel the fear and do it anyway. I mean, it's good advice. Yeah. In 2010, University of Pennsylvania released a study which found that people often reject creative ideas, even when espousing creativity as a desired goal, quote, We are intolerant of uncertainty in general, the more creative something is, the more novel it is. And the more novel it is, the greater the uncertainty we are likely to have about its feasibility and court. That's really cool, right? I know, but I like the idea that we're on the edge of like, novelty. I hadn't thought about creativity as being I don't know. I haven't made that connection before. It's disruption. Yeah, creativity is absolutely on the edge of novelty. Oh, you know, it's not creativity. I feel if it is not changing something. Oh, bumper stickers are bound So how can we like, like, when we come across a problem like this, you know, we think, okay, like one of the biggest like, boxes we have to work in is that as photographers, we have couples who are kind of expecting something from us a little bit. Some of them come in with preconceived ideas, and it's our job to try and make sure that we are as free as possible to create what we want. But there's always that fear that you may not be pleasing them with what you're creating, maybe you're too far out of the box. Yeah, you know, and one of the things we do is to educate them that in our work, it's four of us, those them and two of us a team effort, yeah, that we create together. And sometimes there are things that they have to do and they might not be open for. Because again, fear, and then sometimes we are not performing, because we are wondering, is it going to be a good photo after all that effort. So we discuss all of that in advance, and let them know that we are not going to let fear stand in our way. So whenever an idea comes, we are going to jump on it, and we're going to do it anyways, and then figure out what the results are going to be like communication is the key. But that's an arfield, what do we do outside of our fields for like, day to day life? You know? Yeah, I mean, I know that, like, Well, okay, when I was working in graphic design, I would have fear through each step of the creative process, because unlike right now, my fear is at the very end, when we deliver to the client, I don't know about you, but through the creative process, I was reporting to the marketing manager, right. So I would make a few changes and bring it back to them. And I'd be like, Oh, man, they're going to understand what I've done, as too far out of the bounds of the guidelines. You know, when we had to recreate the brand guidelines, it was a really interesting process, because we could go anywhere with it. But then in the end, it turned out to be reined right back, again, to almost where we started. Because there's so many people further up the company, who were, I guess, afraid of what we were creating at the bottom end here. And it was just so new and so different? Yeah, we were getting in a different way with color and font and packaging and styling and everything, that it round up, kind of almost back in the beginning, again, just a different font and a little bit of a gradient on the color. So yeah, yeah, fear is definitely something that puts the cog in the works. Because for true creativity to come out, we need it to be no. And for novelty to come in, we have to recognize that fear exists and will exist, and it's a good thing. And failure is part of the creative process. It is actually right, it is not something that exists, because we did something wrong, or because we missed a step, it is a step in the creative process. So how do you define that failure? You know, is that something that somebody else is putting on you? I guess, sometimes when we have already set an intention in our head to produce something, and we are not able to produce that thing. That might sound like a failure. Or we put out the work in the world. And we think it's amazing, but it gets a very lukewarm reception. That might sound like failure, or sometimes when we think of an idea, and it starts sounding after five minutes late. preposterous, if that's the right word, and we just already consider it as a failure. Like, oh, this is stupid. I mean, that's the thing. I mean, you got to follow some some ideas down a rabbit hole, but only so far, cuz you're like, wait a minute. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So I think if we have to give our audience's two answers, because we've been discussing that in the car before we started recording this, like, how would you get over the fear of failure? And then I'll give my answer. What is your answer? I already know it because you've taught me that. Why am I blindside you here? Because I don't remember what we said in the car. was too busy driving. No, but you've already always said that to me, like forever? How do I get over it? Yeah. So the way I deal with, you know, this fear of failure is that I follow through on that first idea that I have morning, you know, like, I make sure that it's at least written down, you know, then I can do something about it. And if you can follow it through enough, it often leads to some new sort of path, something new and creative that you can follow as well. I never believed in Ed before I met you. I remember our first meeting as tinted. I don't know what we were discussing. But I asked some question. I was like, this is a problem. How can we come up with some solutions? And you started coming up with this random ideas that had nothing to do with the question I'd asked. And I was getting very impatient with you and you were like, this is my process. I have to think about everything that is in my head. I have to get it out first. And then you know, something's going to spark here. These are all stones that are going to rub together and start a fire. That's a cool way to put it. Yeah, that's it. much. It's something that I learned. I think the second year of design school, when we were learning how to design a logo, how to do I was like, okay, you want to design something unique, you have to do 50 sketches, come up with 50 different ideas, and then throw them out that 51 through 60 are gonna be unique ones, they're the ones that aren't based on anything you've seen before and stuck in your subconscious. And that's where you'll start getting into the good stuff. I mean, realistically, it's really hard to do in real life. But if you have ideas like that, you've got them somewhere on a notebook, or you've got them on your phone. And each idea is potentially ridiculous, or cliche, even if you Mull on that idea, and then a new ideas box from that new one from that, then you can, it can lead you down some interesting routes, and how I got it in my head. To understand what you were saying and respect, what you were saying was that we have to respect the ideas that come to us, we can't just shoot them down. And sometimes in the process of shooting them down, we are really letting go of some golden opportunities and golden tickets. Because yes, we might not be able to solve the problem at hand right now. But we probably are creating like this wealth of ideas that we can townebank Library. Yeah, exactly. So that was something that was great. And the other thing that I really like about this exercise that you do is that the fear of failure completely goes out of the window. Because right now, what we are doing is just spitballing ideas and respecting them and not calling them preposterous or crazy. We're just letting them hang there, and then see what we can do with them. Also, I mean, it helps mitigate future fear too. Because again, if you've got a library of ideas that you can reach back on, somebody says, Hey, I want this thing, it's way out of the box, you can be like, Oh, wait a minute, I'm gonna look at my out of the box section of my library and see what I can start with. But here, there is an important caveat to remember. And that is, if you are going to follow that advice, follow it to the tee and actually write those ideas. Something then doesn't do those do get lost. Yeah, so the fear compounds. The thing that I have done from a very early age, and I was doing this, unknowingly was giving myself poetic license. So English being my second language, the words, the vocabulary, grammar, was not something that just came to me as easily as a mother tongue, you know, as writing in mother tongue word. But because I was writing poetry, I had the poetic license to just explain my emotions convey my emotions, rather than worry about the comma, you know, the grammar or anything like that. It's not writing prose, it's writing poetry. It's about conveying the message rather than being bogged down by details. You take that idea, and you put that through to your paintings and your photography and everything else you do. Yeah. So I'm not a perfectionist, basically. Yeah, definitely not. Yeah. So that is my way of fighting the fear of failure. I am all about getting the word out there. And then worrying about how perfect that is, or your failure is based off of what other people would perceive it as, no, my failure is of not doing stuff in first place. So not doing it and seeing somebody else has done it. Yeah. Yeah, so waited too long on an idea, man, yeah. So my thing is, don't worry about how other people are going to perceive it right now. Because failure is going to exist, like we discussed is going to exist, it's never going to not be a part of the creative process. You cannot have 100 on 100 every time and it's through actually practicing. And through failing that we actually understand our path, our way of doing things, our brand, our own voice. So that's part of the process. So my thing is to give yourself a poetic license and get your ideas out in a way that your body flows, and your heart speaks at that point, rather than worrying about the details. Just a quick aside here, if you don't consider yourself creative, how cool is it when you get to a point where your body flows and your heart? Oh, did you say pumps? Like, I mean, yeah, this is what what being creative is about and this is like where you want to aim for this is the Z and I feel it's a mystical dance that thing you know, when athletes say they reach a point where where it's like this, this, this Hi, are you running and you can't not run? You're in the last 100 meters of the 400 meter race and your legs won't stop even if you wanted to. You've reached a slight Yeah, physical Nirvana. Yeah. For creatives. It's a little bit like that. Only. You know, you're just, it's hard to explain. Really? Yeah. It's a state of flow. It is. Yeah. But it's something that I mean, this is what this podcast is about. It's about making sure that everybody knows that man, humans we can do this. All of us are creative. Don't be shy, don't shy away from it. That's the point of this. That's all just fear. True. I want to come back to my poetic license, though, it wasn't a sign. If you are ever feeling that you have lost the meaning behind what I was saying about giving yourself poetic license, pick up a book by E. Cummings, you know where you can read his beautiful poems, and you will see how he is really not bogged down by language barriers. Or the way of writing or the right words or the commerce or anything, he's literally letting the words flow. He won't even add point words, capital letters where capital letters need to be or comma comma needs to be he literally let the idea come on the paper and the music of it showcase the meaning behind it. There is this beautiful verse by him which says, even if it is Sunday, May I be wrong? For whenever men are right? They are not young? Did you do that for memory? No. Are you reading it there? Okay. Yeah, one more time. Come on. I just totally so the moment afterwards. And even if it's Sunday, May I be wrong for whenever men are right, they're not young. It's cool, right? Yeah. So failure is going to happen, we are going to be wrong. And the other thing about it is that maybe when we are wrong, it provides our audiences away where their assumptions are questioned, where they are shocked, where they are confronted, and it leads to our culture evolving to our art and our fields of art evolving, because without us actually creating something that is jarring. That is, you know, makes people go like what? On the edge of? Yeah, what do we say earlier? on the edge of novelty? Yes, yeah. Without people thinking, what the heck was this? You know, it doesn't start a discussion, a dialogue. So maybe we are doing a good service to our audiences by? Definitely. I mean, the society we know, wouldn't be what it is, without people being creative. And being on the edge of novelty and making mistakes. Yeah, that's what we're talking about, like without making mistakes without creating jarring content. That which is jarring for our audiences, not that we are creating jarring content just for the sake of creating jarring content out there to do such a thing. Yeah, no. But also, as creators, it's good to make mistakes. And it's good to get things wrong from time to time. Because we will be able to smoothen our rough edges by making those mistakes. And by creating through those mistakes, were able to find a true voice. Yeah, that's that's 100%. Sure. Yeah. So good. For all. Good for us. You can't be yourself if you're not failing from time to time. Yeah, yeah. Because that shows that you are constantly trying something different and something new, and, frankly, that you give a damn Yeah. So to sum this up, fear of failure is going to remain with us as creatives, let's not fight it, let's not find ways of mitigating it. It will remain with us. And it's a good thing that it will remain with us. The ways to work through it is by one Ben's way. which is which is to make sure you follow through on an idea that you have write it down, create a network create a web of cool and crazy out there ideas. Once you can look back on and when you've got a library of cool ideas, you know, you're you're mitigating that fear, you're not going to get caught with your pants down. Yeah. And also that would mean by extension that you are not standing on the door of the ideas being all judgy like, Huh, you are not that awesome. Yeah, this is the idea pile. Yeah. You are proposers. Why do I even have you? So let's not be that judgy person just standing on the door of the ideas, let them roll and rumble Yeah. And to that, take some poetic license in your work and create so that their emotions are conveyed, so that the meaning is coming through your work. And don't worry about the details that you can work on later. Get it on the paper first. Basically, what both of us are saying is get your beta version out. Yeah, what Susan Jeffers said basically feel the fear and do it anyway. Yeah. So there you have it peeps. If you'd like to discuss and or add any ideas to the ones we've used here today and you're feeling in a generally supportive and friendly mood, we would love to hear from you. Or if you know someone you think would be awesome to have here on the creative myth and perhaps you can get her foot in the door. You can dm us on Instagram or Facebook. You'll find us at at Tinder photography or at Turner photography.com. Now make sure you mash whatever button you need to mash to subscribe to the creative myth because next time engineer and I are talking to Stacy crolla, the badass founder and CEO of pepper and the creative spark behind conference and show a virtual photo gathering that in their Woods brings photographers from all over the dang world together to get their learning on and share some belly laughs and beers in the process. So I can't wait for that. But until then, if this is the first episode, you've heard by us, make sure you give the others a listen. And in the meantime, stay read. Stay tuned and be creative.

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