Blog 6: When Flowing, Keep Going
I ended my last post with a Rick Rubin quote from The Creative Act. I’m starting this one with another gem:
“Ride the wave as long as it can be ridden. If you are fortunate enough to experience the strike of inspiration, take full advantage of the access. Remain in the energy of this rarefied moment for as long as it lasts. When flowing, keep going.”
A few thoughts from my own experience of going with the flow.
On overcoming ruts
Like most creators, I create in bursts. Sometimes I find myself producing set after set, blog after blog, even multiple times a day, every day of the week. Other times I go for days or even weeks barely able to place a single pixel.
Creative ruts are hard. During those times, when I opened my website to remind myself why I loved creating, it often had the opposite effect. It reminded me how long it had been since I made something. And that became a self-fulfilling prophecy. The longer the gap, the worse I felt, and the longer the rut lasted.
That’s where scheduling helped. By creating in a state of flow and publishing at a steady cadence, I could trick my mind into believing I had never really stopped creating. It helped me shorten the gap between ruts and get back into my flow state faster.
When flowing, keep going.
On patience
By creating in waves, am I compromising patience? Am I giving my ideas enough time to breathe?
I think patience actually comes before flow in the creative process. Let me explain through photography.
There are photographers who pore over every detail of a single photo. Even if an entire shoot produces just one image they are happy with, that is enough. “Quality over quantity,” they would say. These are creators inspired by the art itself. That one photo is their art, and they will refine it until it feels complete.
Then there are photographers who draw inspiration from the moment. They try to capture every nuance of that moment through different lenses, filters, and compositions. For them, the art is a vehicle to preserve the moment forever.
Both approaches demand patience. It takes patience to find the right photo and also to wait for the right moment that sparks inspiration.
And when that inspiration strikes, you enter the flow state.
When flowing, keep going.
P.S.: Flow state is a psychological term, coined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, that I first came across in another all-time favorite book of mine, Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.