Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about my creativity, as I feel it’s been getting more and more sluggish and inhibited over the years. Seems to me that the problem behind this is a lack of a proper motivation, as I become increasingly focused on creating for the purpose of achieving things instead of the sincere motivation to create value, beauty or just have plain old fun, which I would refer to here as “pure” creativity. So I dedicated a half of hour yesterday to step back and think how I had gotten into this, and went as far as back to my childhood in search for a demonstration of pure creativity.

Now  I was a very curious and creative kid, in terms that I was taking all my free time (which is, when you’re a kid, all of your time) to learn things and make stuff on a daily basis. In that early days I enjoyed passing time obsessively drawing, making games on paper and of dices, and later, by the end of 80ies doing computer coding to create small video games and a kind of visual presentations that were at the time known as “demos“.  All this activity was highly introvert and I was innately motivated to make stuff just for the sake of having fun, enjoying the results of my work as well as the work itself.

The screw up came later when I gotten into my early teens, when I accidentally started showing stuff I did to friends, who would normally like it. As it goes with that age, I also developed my first frustrations and longings, and I guess I started to expect that the stuff I did could have been a solution to my teenage drama. At the same time, the good feedback that I was getting from showing off, was starting to inflate my newly born teenage ego, a process that would culminate in college.
What I remember from these days of vain creativity is that suddenly I was passing a lot of time sitting alone, painstakingly whipping myself to create >whatever<, completely isolated and inhibited, with my motivation shifted outside — basically I started to copy what people that inspired me were doing, in order to become like these people myself. Instead of dealing with my own frustrations, I projected ideal images as my goals, and the stuff I create as a means to get me there, and when >naturally under these conditions< my imagination started to fail me that frustrated me even more.

Later on I got to overcome most of my frustrations, but the pattern of imitation-based inspiration remained, as well as notion that I should create stuff to get me places. Under these conditions it is easy to lose focus off the things you are doing, because one day you might like one thing and next day get really blown away by other thing that you see, and because you don’t have a sincere motivation to create and finish thing but just to get yourself somewhere, it’s easy to scrap away whatever you do and start doing other thing.
This is exactly what I was doing for the past many years, which left most of my ideas and self-initiated projects unfinished. In fact, only work that I have managed to finish, was the kind of work that I have done for others, not for myself. At least I got lucky for being a REALLY responsible person when it comes to client work, but once I become client myself, I start to fail deadlines and drop projects.

So I came to realize that my ideas are usually not so bad really, and I’m not a kind of a person that’s lazy, irresponsible or incapable of developing and finishing them, it’s just that by always motivating myself in a wrong way, I doom them to fail.

Ok, now that I’ve written all this pulp psychology, let’s see what I can do to revert the process…