At the beginning of this year, I started writing about creativity without a clear thread running through any of it. Constraints. Fewer tools. Finishing. Consistency. Perfectionism. Shortcuts. On the surface, thirty separate ideas.
It was only somewhere around the middle that I noticed they were all circling the same thing. And somewhere in there, I started asking myself one question before starting anything new, and it’s quietly become the most useful creative habit I’ve built out of all of this.
Here it is: What is this actually trying to do?
Not what could it include. Not what would make it impressive. Not what would equal the last ten things I made. Simply, what is this one creative piece of art actually trying to do?
Why One Question Beats a Vague Sense of Direction
Gary Keller built an idea around what he calls the focusing question: “What’s the ONE thing I can do such that by doing it, everything else becomes easier or unnecessary?” He argues that most of what fills our to-do lists is a distraction from the single thing that actually matters, and that narrowing focus to one clear target produces better results than spreading effort across many vague ones.
And there’s good research that backs this up. Locke and Latham’s goal-setting research, built over decades of study, found that specific, clear goals consistently produce higher performance than vague ones or generic instructions to simply “do your best.” Specificity (the trouble I had in one vlog trying to say that word!) gives you something to measure your decisions against. Being vague gives you nothing to push back on the small choices that come up in any project.
A single guiding question does the same job for creative work. It’s not a rule. It’s not a checklist. It’s a filter you can run every decision through, from the first idea down to the final edit.
What Changes When You Ask It
Before this question, or thought, became part of my creative practice, I made decisions project by project, mood by mood. Some days that meant adding more, chasing the shiny new idea, trying to make one piece do everything I’d ever wanted to say. Other days it meant abandoning things because I’d lost the thread of what I was actually making.
Asking “what is this actually trying to do?” at the start changes the whole shape of the process. It becomes a lot harder to load a piece with everything, because everything isn’t the answer to the question. It becomes easier to finish, because you have a clear target to check the work against rather than an open-ended feeling of “better.” And it becomes much easier to say no to good ideas that belong somewhere else, because you already know what this particular “art thing” is for.
The question doesn’t just clarify the finished piece. It clarifies the decisions along the way. Every plugin, every edit, every added element gets tested against the same simple standard: does this serve what the piece is actually trying to do, or is it something else wearing a disguise?
This question works across every discipline I’ve covered in this project. A song asks it. A photograph asks it. A blog post, a painting, a short film, all of them.
One Question to Rule Them All
Looking back across everything covered in this set of thirty ideas, I think this question was quietly underneath most of them, even before I’d named it.
The case for fewer tools was really about protecting attention for what a piece needs, not what it could technically have. The case of perfectionism was about recognising when a piece had done what it needed to do. The case against over-tweaking was about not letting a piece drift away from its own intention through sheer repetition. Even the case for copying early was about learning to recognise, eventually, what your own work is actually trying to do, once the influences settle.
One clear question, asked honestly at the start of a creative project, tends to answer most of the smaller questions that would otherwise eat the whole process.
What to Do Instead
Before your next project, whatever the medium, ask it directly: what is this actually trying to do? Write the answer down if that helps make it concrete.
Then use it as your filter. When you’re deciding whether to add something, cut something, keep revising, or call it finished, run the decision past that one sentence.
It won’t answer every creative question you’ll ever have. But it will quietly answer most of the ones that get in the way.
Thank you for reading this post. Please share your thoughts in the comment section below.
namaste
d
xox
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