I made a post earlier this week detailing the five general steps of the creative process.

Everyone goes through the same creative process regardless of whether you’re conscious of it or not, but after learning more I found incredible interest in one aspect: time. Most notably called the incubation stage, it’s ingrained in creating anything. The creator needs time to walk away, recharge, and simply forget about the current task at hand.

During the incubation stage, your mind is working on your desired problem on a subconscious level. Which is why you may have a sudden illumination or insight when you least expect it.

This led me to think more about the relationship between time, creativity, and resiliency.

Starting a creative endeavor is hard.

Whether it be sharing your work for the first time, diving into a new medium, or starting from scratch. It can undoubtably be uncomfortable, but that’s actually the easiest part.

The hard part is the years that follow.

Here is a quote from Ira Glass sharing his advice to new creatives:

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, and I really wish somebody had told this to me.

All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But it’s like there is this gap. For the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good. It’s not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not that good.

But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you. A lot of people never get past that phase. They quit.

Everybody I know who does interesting, creative work they went through years where they had really good taste and they could tell that what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be. They knew it fell short. Everybody goes through that.

And if you are just starting out or if you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month you know you’re going to finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you’re going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions.

I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It takes awhile. It’s gonna take you a while. It’s normal to take a while. You just have to fight your way through that.

—Ira Glass

Time, in its many forms, is the hardest part of the creative process.

Stay in the game