darren r hill

the creative minimalist

Category: Creativity

All posts relating to creativity in general. How to be creative rather than specific creative projects.

What Years of Creating Taught Me About Discipline
Introduction

For a long time I thought creative discipline was something you did or didn’t have. The people who showed up every day and consistently created, they must have something I lacked. More willpower. More commitment. A stronger sense of purpose.

So I’d try to force it. Push harder. Tell myself this time would be different. And for a while it would be. Then it wouldn’t.

What I’ve learned, slowly and not without a fair amount of failed attempts, is that discipline isn’t about force at all. The people who seem most disciplined aren’t necessarily trying harder than everyone else. They’ve just built better structures around themselves. And those structures, those creative practices, do the heavy lifting that willpower, or certainly my willpower, can’t sustain on its own.

Willpower fades. Systems don’t.

The research on willpower is pretty humbling. The American Psychological Association summarises it well: self-control draws on a limited mental resource that depletes through use. Every decision you make, every temptation you resist, every moment you push through resistance costs something. And the tank runs dry.

What’s more interesting is what the research says about people who seem highly disciplined. They don’t have stronger willpower. They’ve structured their lives to need it less. They’ve removed friction, built routines, and designed environments that make the right behaviour easier and the wrong behaviour harder. They’ve taken the decision out of it. (Source: What You Need to Know About Willpower, American Psychological Association)

This was a significant shift for me. Discipline stopped being about trying harder and started being about designing better.

Small commitments, consistently kept, build more than grand intentions

One of the most useful things I’ve picked up over years of creative work is that small consistent commitments beat big ambitious ones almost every time.

A daily creative session of twenty minutes that actually happens is worth infinitely more than an hour-long session you keep intending to have. The small commitment is achievable. You keep it. You build evidence that you’re someone who shows up. That evidence compounds.

BJ Fogg’s research at Stanford backs this up. His Behavior Design work shows that motivation is the least reliable factor in building lasting behaviour. Instead, he advocates for making habits so small and easy that they don’t require motivation at all. The habit gains its own momentum once it exists. The size of the commitment is less important than the consistency of it. (Source: Tiny Habits, BJ Fogg, Stanford Behavior Design Lab)

Environment matters more than intention

Here’s something that took me longer to really absorb: your environment shapes your behaviour more than your intentions do.

If your creative tools are put away, you’ll procrastinate more. If your notebook is on your desk, you’ll pick it up. If your guitar is in its case in the corner, it’ll stay there. If it’s on a stand in the room, you’ll play it. My guitar is within touching distance of my desk as I am typing this!

James Clear puts this plainly: “You do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems.” And the environment is a core part of that system. Making the thing you want to do obvious and easy, and making the distractions less visible and less convenient, is one of the most effective forms of discipline there is. Not because you’re forcing yourself. Because you’ve designed your space to support the habit rather than compete with it. (Source: Atomic Habits, James Clear)

Discipline feels lighter over time

The other thing worth saying is this: it does get easier.

Not because you develop an iron will. But because the habits become automatic. The decision to sit down and work stops being a decision you have to make each time. It’s just what you do at that time in that place. The friction disappears.

What felt like discipline at the start, showing up, starting, keeping going, starts to feel less like effort and more like rhythm. And rhythm, once you have it, tends to sustain itself.

Practical takeaway

If you’re trying to build more discipline in your creative practice:
- Look at your structure before you look at your effort. Where are the friction points? Where do you reliably stop?
- Make one small commitment you can keep consistently. Smaller than you think you need.
- Change something in your environment that makes the habit easier to start.
Discipline isn’t a character trait. It’s something you build, one small decision at a time, in a structure that supports you rather than fights you.

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

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3 May 2026
Why Creative Constraints Make You More Productive (and More Creative)

Constraints simplify decisions, speed up creation and explore unique solutions

Introduction

Most of us assume that more freedom equals more creativity. Remove the limits, open up the options, give yourself room to explore. It sounds right.

But spend any time actually making things and you start to notice something strange. The projects with the most open briefs are often the hardest to finish, or even start. The ones with tight constraints, a fixed tempo, a word count, a single instrument, a limited palette, tend to move faster and sometimes come out better.

This isn’t a coincidence. There’s a lot of evidence, both from research and from centuries of creative practice – and no I’m not that old, I’m talking about other creatives – that constraints don’t hinder creativity. They focus it.

Fewer choices, less overwhelm

There’s a well-documented psychological phenomenon sometimes called decision fatigue. The more choices you have to make, the more mentally draining each one becomes. Given too many options, people either freeze up or make worse decisions than they would with fewer.

Barry Schwartz laid this out clearly in his book The Paradox of Choice, and it applies directly to creative work. When you sit down with no constraints at all, every decision is open. What tempo? What key? What length? What tone? What structure? Each choice requires mental energy. Multiply that across a whole project and you’ve spent most of your creative energy just navigating options before you’ve made anything.

A constraint removes a category of decisions entirely. Pick a tempo and stick to it. Write in a fixed structure. Limit yourself to three colours. Suddenly you’re making the work, not managing the options. (Source: The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz, TED Talk)

Constraints force focus and push you toward new solutions

There’s a deeper creative benefit too. When you remove the easy paths, you have to find different ones.

A peer-reviewed meta-analysis of 145 studies on creativity found that moderate constraints consistently boost creative output, both in individuals and teams. The reason: a limit is perceived as a challenge rather than a barrier, which increases basic motivation and pushes people toward more original solutions. Total freedom, by contrast, tends toward the familiar. When anything is possible, we tend to reach for what we already know. (Source: Creativity and Innovation Under Constraints, Journal of Management, 2019)

You can see this in creative history. Monet’s decision to paint light rather than line pushed art toward impressionism. Stravinsky famously wrote: “The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees oneself.” These weren’t people working around limits. They were using limits as a creative engine.

Temporary constraints work best

The good news is you don’t have to impose permanent rules on your creative work. A constraint is most useful as a temporary tool, something you pick up for a session or a project and put down when it’s done its job.

Try giving yourself one rule for your next creative session. Write only in the second person. Record using only one microphone. Finish a piece in under an hour. Use only three chords.

The constraint doesn’t have to be logical or even particularly meaningful. Its job isn’t to make the work better by being a good rule. Its job is to reduce the decision space and get you moving.

And, once you’re moving, the constraint has done its work. You can keep it or drop it.

Practical takeaway

Next time you’re stuck or overwhelmed at the start of a project, don’t try to solve it by opening up more options. Try closing some down.

Pick one constraint. It doesn’t matter much what it is. Apply it for the session and see what happens.

You might be surprised how quickly a limit turns into momentum.

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 April 2026
Why Imperfect Creative Work Builds Confidence Faster

Introduction

There’s a version of confidence we imagine before we share our work. It’s calm, assured, ready. It knows the work is good. It doesn’t flinch when someone looks.

Most of us spend a lot of time waiting for that version to arrive before we share anything. And often, we wait… and wait… and wait…

The problem is, it doesn’t work that way. Confidence isn’t something you develop in private, in theory, while you wait for the work to be ready. It’s something that comes from doing the work, sharing it, hearing back, and doing it again. It’s built from experience, not from preparation.

And that means imperfect work, shared, is more useful than perfect work withheld.

Confidence comes from action, not readiness

The research on self-efficacy, our belief in our own ability to do things, is pretty consistent on this point. Confidence grows through experience of doing, not through thinking about doing. Each time you complete something and put it out, even something rough, you add to a body of evidence that you can make things and survive the exposure.

Waiting until the work is ready doesn’t build that evidence. It just increases the pressure on the thing you’re waiting to release, because now it has to justify all the waiting.

Brené Brown’s research on perfectionism makes a related point: perfectionism is a self-protective strategy built around shame avoidance. We hold back because we’re afraid of being judged. But the holding back is itself the problem. It prevents the very experience that would actually build resilience and confidence over time. (Source: The Gifts of Imperfection , Brené Brown)

Feedback beats speculation

Here’s something I’ve learnt, and I suspect you have too. The version of criticism you imagine before sharing your art is almost always worse than the response you actually get (trolling not included!).

Waiting gives your brain a lot of time to speculate about what people will think, as the saying almost goes… the devil will find thoughts for idle brains to have. And speculation, left unchecked, tends toward the worst case. The actual feedback, even when it’s critical, gives you something real to work with. It tells you what’s landing, what isn’t, what to keep, and what to change.

Imperfect work that gets shared generates real feedback. Perfect work that never gets seen generates nothing except anxiety.

Seth Godin puts it simply: ship the work. Not when it’s perfect. Not when you’re ready. Now. The act of shipping is itself what builds the creative muscle, and the feedback from shipping is what tells you where to improve. (Source: Seth Godin on Creative Courage, The Marginalian)

Done work teaches more than planned work

Every finished thing, even an imperfect one, teaches you something that planning never could.

You learn what decisions you made under pressure and whether they worked. You learn what you’d do differently. You learn process. You learn that you can finish something. You learn what your work actually sounds or looks or reads like when it’s real, not imagined.

Planned, unfinished work teaches you almost nothing. It lives in a protected space where it never has to face reality, and so it never gives you any useful information about what you’re actually capable of.

Psychology research on perfectionism consistently shows that those who take action, even imperfect action, develop confidence more quickly than those who strive for perfection before acting. The mechanism is simple: doing creates small wins. Small wins build self-belief. Self-belief enables more doing. Waiting creates nothing but more pressure and more doubt. (Source: Perfectionism as a Confidence Killer, ThinkYourself)

Practical takeaway

If you’re waiting until your work is ready before you share it, ask yourself honestly: what would “ready” actually look like? And how long have you been waiting?

Pick something you’ve been sitting on. Share it, in whatever state it’s in. Notice what actually happens. Social media is a great place for creative work in progress.

The confidence you’re waiting to feel before you share? It comes after. Not before.

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

19 April 2026
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.

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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