darren r hill

the creative minimalist

I journal. I do a mixture of morning pages, planning and general thought dumps. I write to myself. Okay, I talk to myself too but this is a little more structured. I have recently been having a discussion with myself about ‘voice’ and the broader issue around identity. It is possible both are linked and…
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The Last Emperox by John Scalzi A book review Creativity flows throughout the universe. To be creative we merely need to step into the flow and create. The flow is elusive, but it is there. Sometimes it is hard to find, other times it is clear. Creativity takes us from one place to another. The…
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I made a mixtape of songs that have been bouncing between my ears recently. They all have a vague link, in my head, with the current lockdown and Beltane, which has just passed. It’s just under 40 minutes long, so if you want to have a musical meander for a bit, scroll down. The mixtape…
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An quick update on the recording and mixing progress of Protomatic Renaissance.
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Welcome to my website. I am Darren, the creative minimalist. I have archived the previous iteration of this site.
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What I Stopped Doing That Improved My Work Immediately

Most creative advice is about what to add. A new technique. A new process. A new habit. The assumption is always that progress comes from doing more, learning more, trying more. It’s consumerism’s gift to the masses!

But what if some of the things already in your workflow are the problem?

Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, argues that the “stop doing” list is as important as the to-do list. His research into high-performing organisations found they were as disciplined about what they eliminated as what they pursued.

“They displayed a remarkable discipline to unplug all sorts of extraneous junk.”

The same principle applies to creative practice. Not everything you’re currently doing is helping. Some of it is actively in the way.

Here are three things I stopped doing that made an immediate difference. They apply across every creative discipline I know.

Switching Modes Mid-Session

There are two fundamentally different mental states in creative work: the generative mode, where you’re making something, and the evaluative mode, or evaluating, where you’re judging it. They feel like the same thing, but they’re not. And trying to do them at the same time is one of the most effective ways to miss the mark on both.

Checking your stats mid-session is evaluating. Seeking feedback before something is finished is evaluating. Scrolling through other people’s work while you’re supposed to be making yours is evaluating. All of these pull you out of the generative state, and research on context switching shows it takes an average of 23 minutes to fully refocus after each interruption. In a 60-minute session, one distraction can cost you nearly half of it. How much?!?

When I stopped checking anything during a creative session, the quality of the time in that session changed. Not the length of it. The depth.

The fix is structural, not motivational: close the tabs. Turn off notifications. Put the phone in another room. Make evaluation mode physically unavailable during the making window. I use focus modes on the Mac. I have separate focus modes for music and writing. These hide the apps, and distractions that I don’t need.

This applies equally to the musician resisting the urge to check streams mid-session, the writer who keeps re-reading yesterday’s chapter instead of moving forward, the painter who stops to photograph and post every stage, and the filmmaker who reviews rushes before the shoot is finished. All those are valid actions, but not when you need to be in the flow

Starting Before I’d Finished

Creative work has a gravitational pull toward new beginnings. The new song idea, the new chapter concept, the new project: all of them have a shine that the project currently in progress has lost. The work-in-progress is familiar. The new idea is possibility.

“Oh shiny”

The problem is the pile that builds up. Every unfinished project carries a small but persistent cognitive weight. You’re not consciously thinking about it, but it’s there, quietly occupying space. And the more unfinished things there are, the heavier the collective weight.

There’s also the lesson you miss. Finishing is its own skill — completely distinct from starting — and you only develop it by doing it. The songwriter who has started forty songs and finished three hasn’t learned what finishing thirty-seven of them would have taught. The writer who abandons chapters when they get difficult hasn’t developed the muscle that pushing through would build. The photographer with a thousand ideas half-executed hasn’t found out what a single project taken to completion looks like.

When I started finishing things before starting new ones, two things happened: the mental load got lighter, and the quality of what I completed got better. Because I had no choice but to work through the difficult middle rather than escape into a new beginning.

Bonus thought: capturing the new idea somewhere safe so you don’t lose it, then deliberately returning to the current project, is a simple system that works. It might take a moment to get back into the “zone” (see above) but that is better than ditching the WIP

Trying to Make Each Piece Do Everything

This one is subtler and took me the longest to notice, and something I still struggle with. Every creative piece has a natural scope. A song does one thing well. A photograph captures one moment. A chapter moves one part of the story forward. The piece is what it is.

The temptation is to load it with everything you want to say. The song that needs to be the definitive statement. The painting that has to contain every idea from the series. The blog post that tries to address every angle of the topic. The result is almost always a piece that does many things adequately and none of them well.

Stopping this means accepting that the current piece doesn’t have to say everything. The other ideas belong in future work. Letting a piece be exactly what it is, without forcing it to be more, is one of the most practically useful things I’ve learned. It simplifies the making, and it improves the result.

Removal isn’t always about eliminating bad habits. Sometimes it’s about releasing the expectations that are weighing the work down.

Making Your Own Stop Doing List

The habits worth stopping are different for everyone. What gets in the way of your particular creative workflow is personal. But the question is worth asking directly: what am I currently doing in my creative process that isn’t actually helping?

Not what you should add. What you could remove.

One session spent honestly auditing what’s in your workflow, and what it’s actually doing, is often more useful than a new technique or a new tool. The friction that’s slowing you down might already be there, waiting to be identified and removed.

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.

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19 July 2026
What Consistency Taught Me That Talent Never Could

Talent is a seductive idea. It explains success cleanly. Some people have it. Some don’t. And if you’re not sure which category you’re in, it gives you a reason not to create, not to practice, not to be persistent, to hold back and wait to find out.

The problem is that waiting to find out if you’re talented enough is exactly the thing that ensures you never will be. I mean, “if you have to ask?”…

The Formula Nobody Talks About

Psychologist Angela Duckworth spent years studying what actually predicts achievement across disciplines, from music to sport to academic performance. Her conclusion, backed by research across multiple fields, comes down to a simple formula:

Talent + Effort = Skill. Skill + Effort = Achievement.

Effort counts twice. Talent only counts once.

Which means that between two people of equal effort, the more talented one will develop skills faster. But between two people of equal skill, the one who works more consistently will achieve more. And crucially, consistent effort applied over time can produce skill that raw talent alone, sitting idle, never will.

Duckworth puts it plainly: “Without effort, your talent is nothing more than your unmet potential.”

The implication for anyone who has ever told themselves they’re not talented enough is uncomfortable but clarifying: it might not be talent that’s missing. It might be reps, the practice, the hard work.

What Volume Teaches That Talent Can’t

There’s a story in David Bayles and Ted Orland’s book Art and Fear about a ceramics teacher who split his class into two groups at the start of the year. One group would be graded purely on quantity: fifty pounds of pots by the end of term gets an A. The other group would be graded on quality: produce one perfect pot.

At the end of the year, the best work came almost entirely from the quantity group.

While the quality group had spent the year theorising about perfection, the quantity group had been making pots. Failing, adjusting, trying again. Learning what worked and what didn’t through direct, repeated experience. That repetition, and each iteration, produced the quality. Not the planning.

This is what consistency teaches that talent never can: how to work through problems in real time. Talent might give you a faster start, but it doesn’t necessarily teach you how to push through the hard middle of a project, how to recover from a version that didn’t work, how to finish when the energy has gone. Consistency does. Every single time.

A writer who shows up every day learns things about their own process that a naturally gifted writer who only works when inspired never encounters. A musician who practises through the difficult passages learns more from those passages than one who skips them because the easy parts come naturally. The difficulty is the education.

The days when it flows easily are a gift. The days when it doesn’t are the lessons.

The Compounding Effect

Here’s the part that takes longest to see and matters most. It’s also the bit I struggle with the most!

Consistent effort compounds. Each session builds on the previous one. Skills stack. Patterns become intuitive. What was difficult becomes baseline. The ceiling moves. Slowly at first, then faster.

Inconsistent talent doesn’t compound in the same way. A gifted musician who plays sporadically never fully builds on any given session: each one partly starts from scratch. That great writer who only writes occasionally doesn’t accumulate the momentum that makes the next piece easier than the last.

Think of it as the difference between simple and compound interest. Talent is a high starting rate. Consistency is the compounding. Over a year, the high starting rate looks impressive. Over ten years, the compounding wins.

This is what “longevity wins” actually means in practice. Not that the most talented people fade. But that the most consistent ones tend to catch up, and then keep going.

What to Do Instead

Stop auditing your talent. It’s not the variable that matters most.

Track the reps, the creative practice instead. Not whether each session was good, but whether it happened. The good sessions take care of themselves. The mediocre ones are where the skill is built. The difficult ones are where the character is.

Show up on the days you don’t feel talented. Especially those days. Because the gap between how it feels and what it produces is one of the most reliable lessons consistency teaches: feelings about your ability are temporary. The work accumulates regardless.

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.

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12 July 2026
What Perfectionism Has Actually Cost Me

I used to think perfectionism was a virtue. A sign that I cared. That I had standards. That I wasn’t willing to put out work that wasn’t good enough.

It took a long time to recognise it for what it actually was: Not caring about quality, but a fear of being judged for not having it.

The Disguise

Perfectionism is good at pretending to be something else. It wears the costume of high standards and attention to detail. It sounds like: I want this to be right. It sounds like: I’m not ready yet. It sounds like: just a bit more work and it’ll be there.

Brené Brown has spent decades researching and studying shame and vulnerability, and her finding on perfectionism is worth sitting with: “Perfectionism is not the same thing as striving to be your best… Perfectionism is the belief that if we do things perfectly and look perfect, we can minimise or avoid the pain of blame, judgment, and shame.”

Not a quality standard. A defensive response. Armour.

The crucial distinction is in what drives the behaviour. Healthy striving is internally driven: you want to make something better because it matters to you. Perfectionism is externally driven: you’re protecting yourself from how it might be received. One pushes you forward. The other keeps you still.

And because it disguises itself as caring, it’s easy to live with for a long time without noticing what it’s actually doing. “My perfectionism is only like that because it cares for me.”

What It Costs

The immediate cost is obvious enough: delay. The project that sits at ninety percent for months. The song that’s been “almost finished” for longer than you’d like to admit. The piece of writing that never gets sent.

But the longer-term cost is harder to see and harder to recover from.

Research on the perfectionism-procrastination loop shows something that feels almost cruel: the avoidance that perfectionism produces is most likely to guarantee the very failure it’s trying to prevent. You delay to avoid the judgment that would come from imperfect work. But the delay produces no work. Which is a worse outcome than imperfect work would have been.

Beyond the individual project, there’s confidence. Every shelved piece of work quietly confirms a story: you’re not ready. You’re not good enough yet. The work isn’t there. And since perfectionism keeps you from finishing, the evidence for that story keeps mounting. Not because you’re not capable, but because you never find out.

Then there’s the creative identity. Creatives need output the way athletes need reps. Not because every piece has to be good, but because making things is how you develop. Perfectionism starves that process. The songs that never get finished don’t teach you what finishing them would have taught you. The chapters that stay in draft don’t develop the skill that getting them out of draft would develop. The work compounds. Or it doesn’t.

The perfectionist’s shelf: a graveyard of almost-finished things, each one slightly more discouraging than the last.

The Long Game

The cruelest part of perfectionism is how invisible its cost is while it’s accumulating.

You don’t feel the missing output in any given week. You don’t notice the confidence slowly draining. The creative muscles aren’t obviously getting weaker: you just gradually stop reaching for the work.

Over years, the pattern settles in. Not a dramatic failure, but a quiet narrowing. The range of things you’re willing to try gets smaller. The gap between what you can imagine and what you’ll actually attempt gets wider. Brené Brown’s research notes that perfectionism is “correlated with depression, anxiety, addiction, and life paralysis: missed opportunities.” Not because it means you care, but because it means you stop.

That’s the long-term cost. Not any single unfinished project. The accumulated weight of a creative life spent waiting to be ready… an uncreative life.

What to Do Instead

The shift isn’t lowering your standards. It’s separating the generating stage from the evaluating stage.

Make the imperfect thing. Finish it to a reasonable standard. Share it. The judgment you were protecting yourself from is almost never as damaging as the paralysis. And the work that exists, with all its flaws, is more useful to you and to anyone watching than the perfect work that stays inside your head.

Progress is the practice. The imperfect output teaches you what the withheld output never will.

Share something this week that isn’t quite ready. See what happens.

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.

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28 June 2026
Stop Waiting for a Free Afternoon: Why 20 Minutes Is Enough to Create

There’s a perfect zone where creative work only happens when the conditions are right. A clear day. A tidy workspace. A long, uninterrupted stretch of time with nothing else pressing. Creative heaven.

And there’s a place that it happens anywhere. In the gap before the school run. On a lunch break. In twenty minutes before the rest of the house wakes up.

Many of the people who consistently make things are the second type. Not because they have more time. Because they stopped waiting for the right conditions and started using the ones they had.

The Myth of the Long Session

The assumption that creative work requires long, uninterrupted sessions is one of the most effective ways to never make anything.

Because long, uninterrupted sessions are rare. Life doesn’t schedule itself around your creative ambitions. And when the window doesn’t open, the work doesn’t happen.

What fills the gap is a specific kind of guilt: I should be working. But the logic running underneath it is: I don’t have long enough to make it worth starting. So nothing happens.

The belief that short sessions don’t count is costing more creative output than almost anything else. Not because short sessions are ideal, but because they’re available while the long session often isn’t.

And here’s the thing: science suggests the short session might not be the compromise you think it is.

What the Research Actually Shows

The well known landmark study by Baddeley and Longman from 1978, trained postmen to type using different session lengths. Those taught in shorter sessions spread across multiple days didn’t just keep up with those who had longer, massed sessions. They outperformed them, with better accuracy and speed, and the advantage grew over time.

This is distributed practice: the principle that many short sessions, spaced across time, consistently outperform fewer long ones for skill retention and development. It’s been replicated across dozens of skills and contexts since, and it holds up.

The reason seems to be consolidation: the brain processes and integrates what it has practised during the rest periods between sessions. A long session can accumulate a lot of repetition without giving the brain time to absorb it. Short sessions, by contrast, force exactly the kind of spaced repetition that produces durable skill.

This applies directly to creative work. Twenty minutes of focused writing, playing, drawing, or editing, done consistently, will develop your skills faster than the occasional marathon session that gets squeezed in when life allows. Find these 20 minute creative habit nooks.

Bonus thought: twenty focused minutes beats two distracted hours every time. The constraint forces the focus.

The Hemingway Trick (And the Science Behind It)

There’s a practical technique that makes short sessions even more effective, and it’s been in use since long before anyone had a name for it.

Ernest Hemingway famously stopped writing each day at a point where he knew exactly what came next. Not at the end of a section. Not at a natural stopping point. In the middle of something. Sometimes mid-sentence.

The reason this works is the Zeigarnik effect: a 1927 discovery by psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik showing that the brain holds on to unfinished tasks far more persistently than completed ones. Incomplete things create a cognitive pull. They stay active in the background.

Stopping in the middle of a session, with clear momentum still in the work, means the creative thread stays live between sessions. You’re not walking away from a completed creative idea; you’re leaving a door open. And when you come back, you’re not starting cold. You’re completing something that’s already in motion, already in the creative flow.

This transforms the short session from a frustrating limitation into a deliberate technique. You’re not squeezing in twenty minutes. You’re setting up the next twenty minutes before you leave.

What to Do Instead

Three practical shifts that make short sessions work:

Make the session specific before you start. “Work on the song” is too open. “Finish the chorus melody” or “write the next 200 words” gives the twenty minutes a clear edge. You spend the time on the work, not on deciding what the work is. And provides a tangible outcome.

Start before you’re ready. The warm-up is part of the session. The first five minutes of any creative session are usually the most resistant. Push through them rather than waiting for inspiration to arrive first: it rarely does.

Stop with something to return to. Take the Hemingway approach. Don’t finish the thought. Leave a note for your next session: where you are, what comes next, what you were trying to do. The Zeigarnik effect will do the rest.

Twenty minutes, done consistently and deliberately, is not a substitute for longer creative work. But it’s not a consolation prize either. It’s a different shape of the same thing. And it’s available today, even if, or when, the free afternoon isn’t.

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.

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21 June 2026
Copying Isn’t Cheating. It’s How Creativity Starts.

There is a belief about being creative that treats imitation as some sort of failure of originality. Both by ourselves and by those “outside” watching. Copying is something to be embarrassed about. A phase to rush through and never mention.

I want to make the case that this is completely backwards. Not just as encouragement, but as a description of how creative development actually works. Copying isn’t the shameful opposite of real creative work. It’s the foundation it’s built on.

Everyone You Admire Started This Way

Hunter S. Thompson, one of the most distinctive voices in American journalism, spent years typing out other writers’ novels word for word. Not paraphrasing. Typing. He copied F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in full. He copied Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. He later explained: “If you type out somebody’s work, you learn a lot about it. Amazingly it’s like music… I wanted to learn from the best.”

The Beatles spent years covering Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and every American rock and roll record they could find. At least fifteen Chuck Berry songs were in their set at various points. Paul McCartney learned his vocal style directly from Little Richard, who actually taught him the technique in person. They weren’t hiding the influence: they were studying it so thoroughly it became part of them.

In visual art, copying the masters is still a formal part of training. Students in art schools spend hours in galleries reproducing works by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Velázquez: not to produce replicas, but to understand the choices behind them. The brushstroke, the composition, the light. You can’t learn that from observation alone.

T.S. Eliot put it plainly, in a line that’s been repeated enough times to feel like a cliché but remains true: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” He meant that the deeper engagement, the one that actually moves your own work forward, is when you take something from another creative and make it genuinely yours. Not just a copy. A theft.

Why It Works

Copying forces you to understand the decisions, not just the results.

When you listen to a song you love, or read a paragraph that works perfectly, or look at a photograph that lands exactly right, you’re experiencing the end product. The choices that created it are invisible. You feel the effect, but you don’t necessarily see the mechanism.

When you copy, the mechanism becomes visible. You discover that the sentence works because of a specific rhythm, not just the words. The musical phrase works because of the note in the bass, not just the melody. The image works because of what’s out of frame, not just what’s in it.

That discovery is the education. And it’s one you can only get by doing it, not by analysing from the outside.

Bonus thought: copying with your hands is different from copying with your eyes. You learn different things depending on how you engage with the work.

How You Stop Copying (And Why You Can’t Force It)

So when do you stop imitating? When does the imitation phase end? Well, it’s not an exact science. You don’t decide when it ends. It ends when your influences have been so thoroughly absorbed that they stop showing up in your work as recognisable sources and start showing up as something else.

Bob Dylan arrived in New York in 1961 sounding almost entirely like Woody Guthrie: same vocal style, same guitar approach, the same folk repertoire. He even visited Guthrie in hospital, learning directly from the source. The imitation wasn’t hidden or apologised for. It was thorough.

Within a few years, Dylan had transformed that absorbed tradition into something that had never existed before: literary, surreal, electric, entirely his own. You couldn’t have predicted the destination from the starting point. What came out the other side was so distant from Guthrie that it barely seemed connected, yet it grew directly from that immersion.

The Beatles absorbed their influences so completely that what came out the other side was something entirely their own. Thompson copied Fitzgerald and Hemingway so thoroughly that when he wrote, what emerged was unlike anything that had existed before. Not despite the copying. Because of it.

The mistake is trying to skip this stage in the name of originality. Originality isn’t found by avoiding influence. It develops through it, over time, through enough output that the absorbed influences stop being visible and become something harder to name.

What to Do Instead

Stop hiding your influences. Name them, study them, engage with them seriously. The writers and musicians and artists you admire aren’t evidence of your lack of originality. They’re the raw material your originality will eventually grow from. I did this with David Bowie’s Heroes when I recorded my track We’re not actors. I think the influence is still a little raw, but I hope you might find a little art there if you listen.

Pick one piece of work you genuinely love and study it closely. Not just how it makes you feel, but how it works. Copy it, if that’s the medium. Transcribe the chord progression. Sketch the composition. Type out the paragraph. See what you discover that you couldn’t see from the outside.

And when your copy doesn’t quite match the original: pay attention to the space you have created. That’s not failure. That’s the beginning of your own thing.

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.

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14 June 2026
The Mistake I Made Trying to Sound Professional

Early in my creative life, I was convinced that the gap between where I was and where I wanted to be was a technical one, a skill issue. Everything would be perfect If I could just get the sound right. Get the production to a certain standard. Write with more precision and polish. Sound more like the people I admired; Bowie et al.

So I kept trying to sound professional before I had anything to say. And it nearly killed my output entirely.

The Trap

Here’s what “trying to sound professional” actually looks like in practice: you start a project and immediately start judging it against a finished standard. Every rough note, every awkward sentence, every imperfect first take gets filtered through the question “does this sound like the real thing?”, or “does this sound like x, or the xx or Charlie XCX?” And when the answer is no, which it almost always is early on, you tighten up. You second-guess. You redo. You abandon.

The pressure to perform professionally before you’ve had the chance to play loosely is one of the most effective ways to grind creative output to a halt. Not because the standard is wrong, but because the timing is.

This isn’t just music. Writers do it too: drafting with one eye on how a published author would phrase the same thought. Painters and illustrators comparing their rough studies to finished work. Photographers chasing a polished aesthetic before they’ve worked out what they’re actually drawn to. Filmmakers trying to match production values they admire before they’ve found their eye. The specific discipline doesn’t matter. The pattern is the same.

The Gap (And Why It’s Normal)

Radio producer Ira Glass has one of the most honest things I’ve ever heard anyone say about early creative work. In a now-famous interview, he described what he calls the taste gap: the space between what you can see and what you can make.

When you’re drawn to creative work, it’s usually because you have taste. You know what good looks like. And that taste is exactly what makes your early work so frustrating to you, because you can hear and see the gap clearly.

But the only way to close the gap is volume. More work. Rough work. Work that isn’t trying to be professional yet. Glass’s point was that every creative person he knew who ended up making genuinely interesting work went through years of this phase, and the ones who got through it were the ones who kept going rather than stopping to polish.

The professional sound, or voice, or eye, develops through the accumulation of output. Not through trying to skip the messy middle.

Style Is a Side Effect

There’s a related idea in Austin Kleon’s book Steal Like an Artist. His argument is that style doesn’t come from trying to find your voice: it comes from working, imitating, failing to copy your influences perfectly, and discovering what’s left over when you can’t quite pull it off. Those imperfections, those places where your version diverges from the thing you were trying to make, are where your actual style lives.

Your failed attempts at professional polish are more authentically yours than the polished imitation would ever have been.

I would even say that, art is found in imperfection.

Think about the creative voices you find most distinctive: the writers with a particular rhythm, the musicians with an unmistakable sound, the filmmakers with a visual signature. Almost none of them got there by aiming for it directly. They got there by making a lot of work and finding themselves in the gap between what they were trying to do and what they actually did.

Bonus thought: looseness in early drafts often produces the most interesting ideas. The pressure to be polished cuts off the unexpected detour that might have led somewhere good.

What to Do Instead

The practical shift is simpler than it sounds. Give the early stage of any project permission to be rough. Not forever, but for long enough that the ideas can develop without being filtered through a standard they can’t yet meet.

Judge early work by volume, not quality. The question in the first draft, the first session, the first sketch, is not “is this good?” The question is “did I make something?” The refinement comes later. The polishing comes later. The professional standard can be applied at the editing stage, not the generating stage.

And when you feel the pull to tighten up before you’ve loosened off: that’s the moment to notice. It’s usually fear dressed up as standards.

The most professional thing you can do early on is keep going.Sources:Reuse notes: Early creative work, style development, perfectionism, all creative disciplines

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.

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7 June 2026