How to create

Originally, this was a part of my last piece on Consuming vs. Creating, but it got over 1000 words long and I decided to break it into a separate article. These two combined are biggest thing I ever wrote, bare with me.

I wanted to write this for myself first, to force myself to start taking my own advice.

This is something I’m struggling with daily. The first obstacle was to to limit the time for consuming. The hard part begins when you open a blank canvas.

You spend your time looking at other peoples’ work and admire how can they create those awesome graphics or beautiful prose and text with ease. And a simple thought pops into your head, “Yeah, this was much easier in my head.”

Then, if you’re like me, spend one night drinking, and after a few beers you start typing. When morning comes, you check what you did last night and you’re ashamed of half of what you wrote. But the work is there. The deed is done, and it can’t be undone. First time it happens, you’ll probably most definitely delete almost all of it. But the second time it happens, you’ll decide that maybe it’s not that bad. And suddenly creating will become easier.

First thing you should remember that creating gets easier with creating. You’re able to put aside your fears and make something. Second obstacle crossed.

Now on to the next thing.

Take my writing for example. First essay I published online was about Progress bars in CVs. And it was terrible. It made its point, but it was just bad writing. After that, I started observing other peoples’ work and tried reproducing it, reading and rewriting. Same thing I did when I originally got in web design.

Then I stumbled across this TED talk and it explained it all.

As Kirby Ferguson eloquently puts it: “Creativity is a remix.” The basis of creating anything new is to copy, then transform and then to combine.

If you haven’t watched the video, the point is this: You start (learning) by copying; Get better with transforming; And then combine everything to come up with something of your own.

If you’re looking to read more about ideas and creating, I suggest you check out David Kadavys’ newsletter.

I personally am at the transform part. I’m still figuring out my style, but I’ve learned a few things.

In no particular order, these are a couple of advices I picked up along the way. There are other, and there are better, but these ones helped me.

• Take notes all the time, of everything.
• Surround yourself with creative people of any sort.
• Cut the sleeping time if you have to, you’ll sleep when you’re dead.
• Stop paying attention to haters. Even the negative comments mean that somebody read what you wrote.

To those few who are brave enough to create or are thinking about it, I say do it. Do it because not many people do. Do it because it’s easier than it looks. And if I could publish this site and this article, then everybody can do it.

Thanks for reading!

Have something to add or comment? Feel free to email me or write me on Bluesky.