darren r hill

the creative minimalist

Tag: creative process

  • What Years of Creating Taught Me About Discipline

    What Years of Creating Taught Me About Discipline

    what years of creating taught me about discipline - text with an image of a strict school headmaster

    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

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

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  • Why Creative Constraints Make You More Productive (and More Creative)

    Why Creative Constraints Make You More Productive (and More Creative)

    Constraints simplify decisions, speed up creation and explore unique solutions

    why creative constraints make you more productive and more creative text

    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.

    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

  • Why Imperfect Creative Work Builds Confidence Faster

    Why Imperfect Creative Work Builds Confidence Faster

    Why imperfect creative work grows confidence

    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