This article was going to be about student housing in Madison. Then it was going to be about pets. After that was going to be about Bernie Sanders (shocker, I know). However, it is about none of those things. What am I writing about, then? Writer's block.
Creativity is a fickle thing. It's not like a faucet that you can just turn on when need be. There's this overwhelming belief around creative people that they are just bursting at their seams with ideas. We're not, or at least I'm not. Yes, I consider myself one of these aforementioned "creative types" - and I currently am sitting at my laptop with no idea where this article is going. I know! I'll write about having writer's block!
"Many of our popular stories of discovery are portrayed as accidents or matters of luck. We love these stories as they make creativity seem easy and fun, regardless of how misleading they are," wrote author Scott Berkun on his blog.
True creative inspiration, as most people commonly describe it, is similar to a psychological idea called 'flow.'
Flow is described as a state where "focus is undistracted, and we feel a spontaneous joy, even rapture" in work. This best approaches the experience that I have felt when creativity has "come naturally."
How, then, are we to enter flow? Here are three ways, taken from Daniel Goleman's article that has appeared on the Huffington Post and LinkedIn.
First: Do what you love. A cliché, sure, but studies at Harvard and Stanford found that doing that which we love is a key component of flow because it is engaging. If we are engaged in what we're doing, we are more likely to enter a flow state.
Second: Do what you're good at. That's not to say never try new things, but have you ever noticed how the things you enjoy the most often tend to be those which we're good at? There's a reason for that, apparently. However, you must also challenge yourself. The key, as author Daniel Goleman wrote, is the "ratio of a person’s abilities to the demand of the task." What that means is that if we are asked to use the skills that we have at a higher level than we have previously, we become more engaged in the task, and more likely to enter flow.
Third: Focus. Focusing harder sounds like an oversimplification, but the main prevention of entering the flow state is distraction. Multitasking is often demanded by the world we live in, but in reality, you're preventing the most efficient portion of your workflow.
But really, inspiration is often the light at the end of a long tunnel of years of work. It is not instant. Thomas Edison is frequently quoted as saying, "I never failed. I just discovered 10,000 ways how not to make a lightbulb." The point I'm trying to make is that every one of the prior attempts in some way informed the Eureka moment. So, when you're trying to power through a paper, turn off Netflix, focus up, and even if you have to delete a few pages, you'll get there eventually.
