The Real Key to Creativity
Creativity is hard. It’s messy and it’s inefficient, and for many adults, it’s weirdly intimidating. But whether you’re trying to come up with a way to iterate at work or finally tackle that novel draft, there is one key element that will feed any creative endeavor: confidence.
Journalist and bestselling author Susan Orlean knows a little something about this. Even she struggles when she tries out a new form (in her case, memoir).
She writes on Medium:
As I’m wrestling with this, my greatest discovery has been that the one indispensable element to creativity is confidence. Everything else is secondary. As a writer, you have to believe absolutely that what you’re communicating has value. I now have to learn how to take something I’ve felt about other people’s stories and apply it, this time, to my own.
You have something of value to communicate. Your first task is to remember that. As Orlean writes, “Don’t doubt the value of your story!”
