Pinterest and Instagram and all the other platforms I don’t even know about are such an incredible source of inspiration. And they’re also simultaneously eating into our ability to create on our own, from a source within us.
Recent conversations with an established interior designer were that they are utterly fed up with their younger staff creating homogenised look and feel concept boards all swabbed from Pinterest. Just look, click, save. When they were a junior designer, you sketched, you drew, you photocopied in black and white from books and with pencils coloured in over the top (whatever you felt like) to indicate the mood/look/idea. Surely the creative process is about getting our hands involved, and letting our curiosity and frustrations roam free?
A chat of late with Arran revealed his frustration about so many graphic designers not even featuring their own work on Instagram, but a mish-mash of the excellent design of other creatives, in with their own work, none of it credited correctly and all looking the same, creating confusion. And seriously leveraging their own portfolio in the process. Isn’t it better to have an authentic portfolio, even if much smaller, that speaks of your own creations?
A chef I know is exhausted with their apprentices wanting to cut every corner, be the next Jamie Oliver, like now, yet not coming up with a single creative idea of their own within their work, and simply presenting recipes of famous chefs. It’s scary to put our own ideas forward, but surely better to be potentially shut down, to learn and engage with the process than just keep bringing tears from a magazine or book.
There is a glut of information now, which I am excited to have access to, yet there is a danger in continually peering over at what everyone else is doing, at all times.
So next time you find yourself wistful and yearning for a more creative life, stop looking and start doing. When you feel overwhelmed with possibility, disconnect, and start experimenting. Looking at beautiful creative work does not actually help you create your own work.
When you are craving to be building something and are reading yet another entrepreneurial business book, shut the pages and start planning your business instead and putting the work in. Get serious, get real, and actually start.
Yes, it’s harder, sweater, more frustrating and more challenging, and about 1000 times more fulfilling than watching everyone else get on with it.
It’s time to stop being a voyeur, and instead engage within, and bring that into the world.
Sent with love,
Jac x