The Creative Purpose
Or, why I've not written anything for a little bit of time.
Well, this is a bit of a left turn on the generally straight road of business advice, which I’ve been serving up with a side of fries for the last broad number of posts. That said, the pace of my written-word exports has slowed recently. Let me explain.
As an avid, exploratory reader, I’ve hoovered up the output of many great writers on a broad range of topics, including lots of Substack subscriptions. What happens is common to any creative person out there: at some point, you start to think that your output is just a rehash of what everyone else has written and, to boot, is a B-grade version of those who have more time, inclination, and ability than yours truly.
This feeling is what Austin Kleon addresses in Show Your Work! when he reminds us that “nothing is completely original.” Every creator stands on the shoulders of those who came before, remixing, reinterpreting, and adding their own voice to the eternal conversation. Yet knowing this intellectually doesn’t always quiet the internal critic that whispers: What’s the point?
Nothing is more likely to stop you writing or creating than the feeling that the value of the exercise is roughly—or precisely—somewhere near zero.
The general debunking of this paralysis is that the process is somewhat cathartic: you, as the creator, get to explore, change, and rationalise ideas. The payload is internal, not external. You grow by doing. The creative act serves as a mechanism for self-discovery, a way to work through what you think and feel.
Certainly, this is true. The terms and conditions of such an approach, however, are that you can become too centred on yourself and become either boring, egotistical, or head down some rabbit hole so deep that you become tied up by your own self, stuck in your head, if you will. The danger of purely internal-facing creativity is what David Foster Wallace warned against: being trapped in the prison of self, unable to see beyond our own immediate concerns.
Anyway, this has been the general upthrust of my much-reduced output. I didn’t want to be that quiet, but off-tune, voice in the choir of those possessing more angelic, soul-moving renditions.
Until this morning. The rain beat down on the windows, the room was dark in the early hours, and my eyes were fixed on another Substack article about someone’s personal journey. And then it struck me like a politician being taken out by a protester’s egg.
The creative purpose is not to discover new, uncharted lands of business, creativity, life, community, and the soul. All this has been sneezed out before.
Ecclesiastes said it millennia ago: “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” Even breakthrough innovations are rarely singular eureka moments but rather slow accumulations of knowledge, each building on what came before.
The purpose, then, is to remind us. To grab that slice of time that you have allocated to read and to remind you of what’s important.
As Kierkegaard wrote, “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards”—and the creative act serves as one of those backward glances that helps us orient our forward motion.
It can take many shapes, nudging you to reprioritise your business thinking or to take a different path in shaping your future strategy. Or to reconsider an approach you’ve been taking. Or to finally act on something you’ve been postponing. The power isn’t in novelty; it’s in recurrence, in the gentle (or sometimes forceful) redirection of attention at precisely the moment it’s needed.
For me, today, the right thing is to remind you, dear reader and distant friend, to continue doing whatever for you is “that thing” because it has value both internal and external—for you in the doing, and for others in the receiving.
Being reminded of something we already know helps us take our gaze from the plodding path our feet are taking and take note of the flower we were just about to walk obliviously past. It’s a Road Runner-like beep-beep to help you retune and refocus.
The creative nudge.
This is perhaps the most honest description of what most of us do when we write, design, build, or create: we nudge. We don’t revolutionise. We don’t typically unveil unprecedented insights. More often, we’re the gentle elbow in the ribs, the tap on the shoulder, the voice saying, “Hey, remember this? You needed to hear it today.”
And here’s the paradox: in trying to remind others, we remind ourselves. As E.M. Forster wrote, “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” The creative act forces us to articulate what matters, and in doing so, to confront whether we’re living in alignment with those values.
Wishing you all a fabulous day on planet earth. I’ve already written my next business-focused post, so I’ll tidy it up and zip it out to you shortly. Thanks for subscribing, and it’s a pleasure to have you along for the ride. Until next time.