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The Creative Process in One Brutally Honest Chart
Your entire relationship with new ideas, explained
The key thing to remember about creative ideas is that they’re usually much better in theory.
Once your idea comes into contact with the corrosive atmosphere that is reality, it is going to change, inexorably, into something else. Impurities will be introduced. Compromises will have to be made. The thing you produce will not look like the thing you imagined.
Eventually, almost every serious creative endeavor becomes an all-out battle to reconcile your idea in its pure, unadulterated form and the broken, stitched-together thing that ends up limping out into the world. There is despair as you agonize over the jagged lines and smudges you’ve introduced onto your once-pristine canvas. And then there is resignation as you realize that to make something of value, the path from conception to execution is often filled with grim and brutal work.
The whole process is, to put it bluntly, a massive pain in the ass. I like to visualize it with something I call The Infinitely Depressing Ideas and Happiness Chart. It looks like this:
