darren r hill

the creative minimalist

As we begin the new year of 2025, I’m excited to share my collection of journals with you in this week’s vlog. I have a new daily planner, as well as music and fiction journals, and various vocabulary notebooks.
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My word of the year for 2025 is odyssey. It both a journey with a destination in mind and plenty of wiggle room for distractions.
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I found myself thinking about how it is perfectionism created by myself, which, ironically, destroys my creativity. This week’s vlog examines how I must embrace the unknown and let creativity flow.
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Hello worlds! I have found myself in a creative rut, my creativity has become automated and feels unnatural. This week’s vlog is all about beginning to rewild my imagination and creativity.
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Hello worlds! I made a video for my song “We’re not Actors” from the album “The Same Old Fear”.
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This week’s vlog looks at how we may need to change our minds or opinions to get truly creative. And it all starts with the question, when was the last time you changed your mind?
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How Lowering Your Standards Can Improve Your Creative Work
Introduction

This one sounds wrong. Possibly even offensive if you care deeply about what you crate, which I’m guessing you do. “It’s my art and I care about it!”

Lowering your standards? Seriously?

Bear with me. What I’ve found, both in my own creative work and in talking to other creatives, is that high standards applied at the wrong moment don’t give life to your art. They kill it. The thing never gets made, or it gets abandoned halfway through, and the standard you were protecting becomes irrelevant because there’s nothing to apply it to.

There’s a time for high standards. But it isn’t at the beginning.

High standards at the wrong moment block momentum

The first pass at anything is almost never good. That’s not a failure of craft, it’s just how creativity works. The first chord progression is rough. The first paragraph is probably the wrong one. The first sketch looks little like what you had in mind.

If your standard is “this needs to be good before I continue”, you’ll stop at the first pass every time. And stopping at the first pass means you never get to the second, third, or fourth pass, which is where the actual work lives.

High standards are useful for finishing and refining. Applied too early, they become a wall between you and the thing you’re trying to make.

Anne Lamott, one of the most honest writers on the creative process, has a now-famous idea she calls the “shitty first draft”. The point isn’t to celebrate bad work. It’s that giving yourself permission to write badly early on is what unlocks the freedom to actually finish. Perfectionism, she argues, is “the voice of the oppressor”. It doesn’t raise your work. It just keeps you cramped and stuck. (Source: Bird by Bird, via The Marginalian)

Editing needs something to work with

Just think practically about it. You can’t edit a blank page. You can’t refine something that doesn’t exist yet. The raw, imperfect, unfinished thing you’re reluctant to make is the very thing that gives you something to improve.

A rough first draft of a blog post is infinitely more useful than a perfect opening line with nothing after it. A demo recording of a song, even a rough one, is more useful than a melody that only exists in your head.

Getting something out, however imperfect, gives you material. And material is what the editing process needs to do its job.

This is the bit that took me a while to really absorb: the first pass isn’t the work. It’s the raw material for the work. Once I started thinking of it that way, starting became much less frightening.

Quality improves through completion, not avoidance

Ira Glass, the producer behind This American Life, put this better than almost anyone. He talks about the gap that every creative person experiences early on: the gap between your taste (which is probably pretty good, well mine is 😉 ) and your output (which isn’t there yet, well mine is 😳). His prescription isn’t to slow down and be more careful. It’s to do a huge volume of work and put yourself on deadlines.

The only way to close the gap is to keep completing things. Not to keep starting things carefully, or planning better, or waiting until you feel ready. Completing them, even when they’re imperfect, even when they fall short of what you had in mind.

Research backs this up too. A Harvard Business Review piece on perfectionism found that it often blocks productivity and creativity, making people less likely to take creative risks. The fix isn’t to stop caring about quality. It’s to shift your focus during the early creative phase away from fear of getting it wrong, and toward the process of making and finishing. (Source: The Pros and Cons of Perfectionism According to Research, Harvard Business Review)

Our standards can absolutely rise later. But only if there’s something there for them to rise on.

Practical takeaway

Next time you feel your standards stopping you before you’ve really started:
- Give yourself a first pass with no judgement. Just make the thing.
- Remind yourself that editing needs raw material. The rough version isn’t the end product, it’s the beginning of it.
- Finish something imperfect. Then finish another thing. The quality follows the volume, not the other way around.
Lowering your standards early isn’t giving up on quality. It’s giving yourself permission to reach it.

Thank you for reading this post. Please share your thoughts in the comment section below.
namaste
d
xox

If you enjoyed this post please support my writing by making a donation of any amount.

Sign up for my (ir)regular newsletter to keep up to date with my creative adventures, including special offers, and join me on Instagram | YouTube | Twitter | Pinterest
12 April 2026
The Difference Between Inspiration and Momentum
Introduction

A lot of creative people, myself included at times, talk about inspiration like it’s a tap you can turn on. As if the right mood, the right setting, or the right moment will suddenly unlock everything. I used to think the same, and sometimes still do unfortunately.

The problem is that inspiration is wildly unreliable. It shows up uninvited when you’re in the shower, and it vanishes entirely when you sit down to actually create something. If build your creative process around waiting for it, you’ll spend more time waiting than making.

There’s a better way to think about this. It’s not about inspiration vs. no inspiration. It’s about understanding what inspiration actually is, and replacing the waiting with something that works.

Inspiration is unpredictable. Momentum isn’t.

Inspiration is a feeling. It’s real. It’s useful. It absolutely makes creative work feel easier. But like any feeling, you can’t schedule it, summon it reliably, or make it last.

Momentum, on the other hand, is mechanical. It doesn’t care how you feel. It just requires motion… small, consistent actions that keep the work alive even when the feeling isn’t there.

Think of a car engine. You don’t need to feel enthusiastic to start it. You just turn the key. The car doesn’t know you’re tired or distracted. It just runs.

Your creative practice works the same way. When you show up and do something, even something small, the machine keeps turning over. When you stop, it gets cold and harder to start again.

James Clear captures this well: he notes that professionals don’t wait for inspiration to strike, they follow a schedule and show up regardless. The schedule is what produces the work; inspiration is what occasionally makes it feel wonderful. (Source: The Myth of Creative Inspiration, JamesClear.com)

Waiting doesn’t preserve creative energy: it kills rhythm.

There’s a quiet lie we tell ourselves when we skip a creative session: “I’ll do it when I’m more inspired.” It sounds reasonable. Protective, even. But what it actually does is break rhythm.

Rhythm, the habit of returning to your work regularly, is one of the most underrated creative assets you can build. Once it’s broken, restarting is harder than it sounds. The longer the gap, the more the work starts to feel unfamiliar, and the higher the mental barrier to getting back in.

Research from Scott Barry Kaufman and colleagues (published in Harvard Business Review) found that inspiration is more self-sustaining than most people realise but only once you’re already actively engaged with your work. In other words, inspiration doesn’t arrive to start the process. It tends to show up inside the process, once you’ve already begun. (Source: Why Inspiration Matters, Harvard Business Review)

Waiting doesn’t protect your creativity. It drains it slowly while you’re not looking.

Action creates inspiration, not the other way around.

This is the part that most people get backwards.

We assume inspiration has to come first, that we need to feel sparked, interested, or motivated before we can do anything useful. But in practice, it usually works in reverse. You start doing something, and the doing generates the feeling, et voila inspiration.

Start writing a song and you’ll often find the melody somewhere in the third or fourth attempt at a chord progression. Start writing a blog post and the real point of the post surfaces during the second or third paragraph. The action doesn’t require inspiration. It produces it.

This is why even a minimum viable session, just 15 or 20 minutes of turning up, is worth more than waiting for the perfect mood. You’re not just making progress. You’re creating the conditions for inspiration to arrive.

“Motivation comes after starting, not before.” Is a principle well-supported by creativity researchers and summed up simply: the emotional state you’re waiting for is often a byproduct of the work, not a prerequisite for it.

Practical takeaway

If you find yourself waiting to feel inspired before you start:
- Set a minimum: five minutes, one idea, one sentence. Just something.
- Treat showing up as the creative act, regardless of output quality.
- Notice what happens when you start anyway. Nine times out of ten, the inspiration follows.
The goal isn’t to stop wanting inspiration. It’s to stop depending on it.

Momentum is what keeps your creative practice alive between the inspired moments. And the good news is, you build it the same way every time, by starting.

Thank you for reading this post. Please share your thoughts in the comment section below.
namaste
d
xox

If you enjoyed this post please support my writing by making a donation of any amount.

Sign up for my (ir)regular newsletter to keep up to date with my creative adventures, including special offers, and join me on Instagram | YouTube | Twitter | Pinterest
5 April 2026
Advice I’d Ignore: Why Not All Creative Wisdom Is Created Equal

There’s no shortage of advice for creative people, I mean isn’t that part of what I do here!?! Us well-meaning, so called mentors, queue up to tell you how to write, compose, create, and think. Most of it is offered with genuine goodwill. Some of it is genuinely useful. But here’s the thing nobody tells you when you’re starting out: a lot of the advice floating around the creative world isn’t really advice at all: it’s one person’s process, dressed up as a universal truth. If you follow it blindly, it doesn’t just fail to help you. It can quietly hold you back, chip away at your confidence, and make you feel like you’re doing creativity wrong when actually you’re just doing it differently. Over my copious amount of years, I’ve followed advice that helped and advice that didn’t. The difference, I’ve learned, wasn’t in the advice itself — it was in knowing when to listen and when to politely ignore it.

The Same Advice Can Be Precious or Poison

Context is everything, and creative advice almost never comes with a label telling you who it’s actually for. “Write every day” is perhaps the most repeated piece of writing advice in existence. For some people, that daily discipline is transformative. For those who work in bursts, who need space between ideas, and who do their best thinking away from the desk, it can lead to guilt and mediocre output. The advice isn’t wrong. It’s just not universal. The same applies across every creative discipline. What works for a prolific genre novelist has no business being applied to an emotional songwriter wrestling with a single poetic lyric. Before you take any advice on board, ask, who is this actually designed for?

Popular Doesn’t Mean Proven

If a lie gets repeated often enough, it must be true, is ’t it? Likewise advice. Popularity is just a measure of how widely something gets shared, not how widely it gets tested. A lot of creative advice spreads because it sounds good, it’s quotable, it confirms what we already half-believe. “Kill your darlings.” “Show don’t tell.” “Inspiration is for amateurs.” These ideas have their place, but they’ve also been applied so broadly and so bluntly that they’ve become a kind of creative folklore, repeated automatically, rarely examined. The next time a piece of advice lands in front of you with the weight of obvious truth, ask, has this actually been proven, or has it just been said a lot?

You Had to Fail With It First

One thing that took me a long time to understand, and I still struggle with, is that some advice isn’t bad, it just found me at the wrong time. I’ve returned to ideas I once dismissed and found them suddenly useful. I’ve also seen processes that used to work bring me to a grinding halt. Experience doesn’t just teach you new things, it teaches you to read advice differently. You start to recognise when something is useful and when it’s a rule that’s quietly stopping you from developing your own instincts. Don’t dismiss advice wholesale., but keep revisiting it as you grow. Any single piece of wisdom is not fixed and permanent.

Your Creative Wiring Is Not Theirs

The person offering advice, however experienced and successful, is working from their own brain, their own temperament, their own way of seeing the world: and that includes me, here and now. That’s not a flaw, it’s just reality. It means you are always, to some degree, receiving advice filtered through someone else’s creative personality. If your process is slower, messier, more intuitive, more structured, more solitary, or more chaotic than theirs, some of what they tell you simply won’t translate. This is especially true of advice that’s framed as a cure for procrastination, perfectionism, or creative block! As I have found out to my own detriment… because those experiences are deeply personal, and the solutions are rarely one-size-fits-all.

The Skill Is in the Filter, Not the Following

Ultimately, the most important creative skill you can develop isn’t the ability to follow advice. It’s the ability to filter it. To take what fits, adapt what almost fits, and quietly set aside what doesn’t. And do this without feeling like you’ve failed or cheated. Every piece of advice you receive is an idea, not a directive. Try it, notice what happens, and trust your own results over someone else’s theory. The creatives I most admire aren’t the ones who found the right advice and followed it faithfully. They’re the ones who figured out which advice was actually meant for them, and had the confidence to leave the rest behind and walk their own creative path.

So the next time someone tells you there’s only one way to write, to compose, to create, remember they’re describing their way. Your creative journey might look completely different. That’s not a problem to fix. That’s your creative identity doing exactly what it should.

Thank you for reading this post. Please share your thoughts in the comment section below.
namaste
d
xox

If you enjoyed this post please support my writing by making a donation of any amount.

Sign up for my (ir)regular newsletter to keep up to date with my creative adventures, including special offers, and join me on Instagram | YouTube | Twitter | Pinterest

29 March 2026
Why songs, and other creative projects, stay unfinished

Why do most unfinished songs or art fail early in their creation? Most art fails early because decisions aren’t made.

Too many options stall progress

Decision fatigue can significantly hinder creativity. Each choice we make requires mental energy, and as that reserve diminishes, so does our ability to think creatively or approach problems with fresh perspectives. Researchers from the University of Minnesota note that even minor decisions throughout the day can accumulate into “psychological costs” that reduce cognitive performance and creative capacity (Baumeister et al., 2008). This means that by the time we turn to tasks requiring imaginative thinking or complex problem-solving, our minds are often fatigued, defaulting to safe or conventional solutions rather than inventive ones.

We can combat decision fatigue when we create. Limiting options by streamlining routines, or even utilising A.I. tools (Yes, I know there are energy and other issues with A.I. so feel free to ignore that bit) can lighten the mental load. Incorporating playful or random decision-making strategies—such as rolling dice, drawing lots, or even picking a tarot card—can free up mental energy by replacing deliberation with a system. These small interventions reduce the cognitive cost of everyday decisions, leaving more energy available for creative thinking.

Early commitment helps

Knowing the route saves reading the map; in creative work, this means that understanding your style or genre gives you a natural direction to follow. When you are clear about the kind of story you want to tell, the type of painting you want to create, or the music you want to compose, you have already made an early commitment to the journey. This clarity helps you avoid the trap of endless wandering and second-guessing, which is where so creativity fails. By knowing how you plan to express your ideas—whether through tone, structure, or medium—you create a framework that keeps you moving forward, rather than circling in indecision.

Finishing requires limits

We only have a finite amount of time, and our resources are inherently limited, whether in terms of hours in the day, mental energy, or budget. Creative projects often become trapped in a cycle of revisions precisely because these constraints are either ignored or poorly defined. Think about filmmakers like George Lucas, who release multiple Director’s Cuts or re-edited versions of their work… these refinements only occur after the initial release. This is a critical point: they establish a clear endpoint first, complete the project, and only then return for further iteration. Without deadlines or self-imposed limitations, creative projects can drift endlessly as we chase a moving target of perfection. Establishing non-negotiable milestones, such as release dates, exhibition deadlines, or personal cut-off points, forces us to confront the reality of finishing. Clear creative endpoints are not obstacles; they are structures that allow a project to be completed and shared with the world, rather than languishing in a perpetual state of ‘almost done.’

Staying Inspired and Motivated

It is easy to feel motivated when an idea is fresh, but as soon as the work shifts into the first draft or rough version stage, energy can fade… we lose enthusiasm beyond the initial spark… or I do. Drafts feel clumsy and are naturally incomplete, and the excitement of the initial concept seems distant. This is a potential creative stall point.

It is crucial to find ways to keep your creativity engaged. Rather than seeing early versions as a chore, treat them as opportunities for experimentation. Visual artists can photograph their work in progress and play with the colours or composition in a digital editor to discover new dimensions. Writers breathe new life into a draft by rereading it from a different narrative viewpoint—switching between first, second, or third person to see how the story transforms. Musicians and composers experiment with tempo, instrumentation, or arrangement to uncover fresh emotional tones.

In essence, the secret is to avoid stagnation by creating multiple versions and perspectives of your work. Instead of letting your enthusiasm wane, use creative remixing to reignite your interest. Don’t allow boredom to halt progress, treat every stage as a chance to explore, adapt, and rediscover the joy in your project. But, remember the earlier points, only version your work if inspiration is waning.

Clarity beats polish

All art doesn’t have to be perfect and pristine. Clarity in what you want to say is always more important than polish and perfection in how you say it. If the message, or what you want to say, is clear, then the rules for your creative medium can, and perhaps should, be broken.

This is often where creative projects remain unfinished. We trap ourselves in the pursuit of perfection, spending endless hours trying to follow every rule or polish every imperfection. Yet, as Picasso once said, “Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.” If your what you want to say is clear, any so‑called imperfections may actually serve your message, not hinder it. Rules are tools, not chains.

The danger of never breaking free from these rules is that art remains unfinished. By insisting on perfection, you risk never finishing, never sharing, and never letting your art live. Creativity thrives when you allow yourself to break the rules to serve the idea, trusting that your message will connect with others more than any flawless technique ever could.

In conclusion

There are many reasons our art stalls early on and remains unfinished, but there are also many ways to push through and complete our creative projects.

Decide what you want to say, use simple routines and systems, set a clear goal and stay inspired. But above all else, it’s not perfection it’s art, your art; create.

Thank you for reading this post. Please share your thoughts in the comment section below.
namaste
d
xox

If you enjoyed this post please support my writing by making a donation of any amount.

Sign up for my (ir)regular newsletter to keep up to date with my creative adventures, including special offers, and join me on Instagram | YouTube | Twitter | Pinterest

22 March 2026
Waiting to feel ready just keeps you stuck

Feeling ready is usually the result of starting, not the cause.

Readiness is emotional, not practical

In the western world, there are times when our shoulders slump and we say, I am ready for a holiday, or a break, or just the end of the working day. We’re tired, worn out, brain dead (perhaps that last one is just me). We feel like a holiday. It’s an emotional thing. We’re ready, but that doesn’t mean we can start a holiday. There is plenty that needs to be done. If we get to this feeling stage and the holiday isn’t planned and the tickets are literally in hand, then we remain where we are, stuck.

Feeling ready to be create and be creative is similar. And waiting for an emotion to arrive just as frustrating as not having the tickets. We don’t wait for the feeling to need a holiday, we plan, book and take it. We shouldn’t wait for the feeling to create, we should pick up the pens or pencils and create.

Starting creates information

If we want to create, whether writing, painting, composing or something else, then starting the creative act provides us with the information we need to get going. The same as planning a holiday leads us to seek a destination, buy the tickets and pack a suitcase, starting the creative act leads us to explore what we can create, save money for, or buy, certain equipment and so on. Starting t create provides us with questions to ask and answers to find.

Confidence follows action

You don’t know if you can do something until you try. Creativity is the same. The more we try something the better we become at it. That may require a lot of practice, and learning, but without the action there is no way we can improve.

As we create, our confidence grows. The more we create the more confident we become, and the more confident we become the more we will create. By creating we create the environment to experiment with confidence.

Waiting delays learning

If we wait for when we feel like being creative we won’t learn. Just as starting builds confidence, waiting, delays learning. If we don’t learn we say, I don’t know how to do that. A danger for someone wanting and waiting to be creative is the cycle of passive tutorials. I have been through countless circles of thinking I need to know how to do this and that before I can start. So I open the YouTubes and watch, and sit, and watch, and sit… and don’t learn.

Now, there are great tutorials out there, but don’t fall into the habit of just watching and hoping to learn by the power of osmosis, we are not plants. We learn by doing. And if we wait, we don’t realise what we really need to learn. It’s no good learning 101 ways to use watercolours if you discover, by doing, that your medium is acrylic.

Imperfect starts are normal

I have spoken about the need to ask the right questions, to grow in confidence and to learn as we create. This all means that our creations, especially those initial scribbles and sounds might, to use one of my favourite BlackAdder lines, be “utter crap”. I can’t say enough to potential authors that first drafts exist for a reason, and that reason is to be a first draft!

Unless you are a one in a billion genius, your first attempt at creating anything will not be perfect. Our art will go through iterations, from drafts through edits, from doodles and sketches to versions on canvases, from demos to rough and eventually final mixes. This is the way for all creativity.

so…

Waiting to feel ready to create is not practical. Our feelings are an emotion, and our emotions are best poured into the creative act itself. Don’t wait to feel ready, create now. And as you begin to create, you’ll realise you were ready, ready to learn, grow and become confident in your art.

Thank you for reading this post. Please share your thoughts in the comment section below.
namaste
d
xox

If you enjoyed this post please support my writing by making a donation of any amount.

Sign up for my (ir)regular newsletter to keep up to date with my creative adventures, including special offers, and join me on Instagram | YouTube | Twitter | Pinterest

8 March 2026
What I believed about creativity that turned out to be wrong

Some creative beliefs only make sense in hindsight. I believed in perfection, I needed faith in the imperfect.

Beliefs shape behaviour

Believing something is impossible means we will not even try to do it. If we think we will never be a writer, a painter or a composer, we will not even attempt to be one. However, if I think I can write a sentence, a paragraph, then I will. If I believe I can add a brush stroke I will. If I know I can hum a tune, I will compose.

Early assumptions often wrong

My personality type means I like to see the big picture. I like to see a perfect, complete creation. I thought something I created, a song, a drawing, a story, needed to be perfect. If the idea in my head had little to no relation to what I was creating then I’d lose interest. I didn’t create.

It wasn’t until later I learnt that this was something I could address. It was part of me, but I didn’t have to let it control my creative output.

Experience changes perspective

I spent years as a commissioning editor for a publishing house. I was always encouraging my authors to think about small chunks of their work. They didn’t have to “worry” about the editing, the layout, the cover… their primary focus had to be the words they were writing.

It is often a fact that it is easier to see the mistakes others are making while ignoring ourselves doing similar. It took me years to learn that. Perhaps it won’t take you as long.

Just to add, once those words were written by the authors, then they could engage in editing, marketing and cover discussions.

Growth requires revision

It isn’t just about one belief. We pick up many beliefs as we develop our creative practice. We listen or watch others create. We learn from tutorials or are taught at schools and universities. We learn. However, some things that are learnt, may not work for us, or they may take us down a wrong path. For years, I had believed music had to be structured in a certain way. I had failed to understand that rules underpin, they create frameworks for us to hang our creative acts upon. Rules and beliefs are also there to be broken, when required. There is nothing as liberating as breaking a creative rule and discovering something beautiful.

Creatives do this all the time. We should always be revising what and how we create; as we revise we grow.

Learning never stops

I mentioned being taught. There is nothing wrong with going to college or university and learning a creative process or skill. We all “learn” to some extent. Our challenge is to keep learning. Just like breaking rules and growing through revision, we should never stop learning new techniques, skills or creating in unique ways. Those of us who use technology as a creative tool need to constantly keep our eye on software as it develops. There is also the use of A.I. What is our stance on using it? More and more software, and hardware, is integrating it. Perhaps we currently steer clear because the energy cost in data centres. But A.I. will soon be portable, using only the battery charge on our phones, tablets or laptops. I’m not advocating for or against its use, but it is an example of how things change, and change means learning, or adapting, how to create within such environments.

So…

I believed my creations needed to be perfect. I was wrong. Learning that has enabled me to create, and enjoy creating.

Do you have any beliefs that are stopping you from creating?

Thank you for reading this post. Please share your thoughts in the comment section below.
namaste
d
xox

If you enjoyed this post please support my writing by making a donation of any amount.

Sign up for my (ir)regular newsletter to keep up to date with my creative adventures, including special offers, and join me on Instagram | YouTube | Twitter | Pinterest

3 March 2026