The balance between creating and marketing
If you really open up to it, it all starts to flow through at a very fast rate.
Creativity comes from your experience, and there’s constantly a ton of information flowing into your experience.
You can increase your creative output by decreasing the filter between what flows into your experience and what flows out of your creative medium.
The problem is, with less of a filter, what you create is all over the place.
It’s still somewhat contained by the borders of your experience.
What flows into your experience is limited (you’re a finite entity experiencing spacetime), so what flows out of your creative medium is also limited.
This focuses your creativity, to an extent.
But sometimes you have to do more focusing, organizing, and editing to get your creations into a form that is consumable by the market.
But that is no longer creating. That is business.
Business disrupts creativity. Don’t do business at the same time as you’re creating.
Get all the creating done and out and then set aside a block of time to do the business.
For some creatives, it’s difficult to stay in business mode. Your creative impulses pull you back into the vortex. You have an experience or an idea, get inspired, and want to break from the business to create.
In almost all cases, it’s probably better to follow the inspiration and do the creating when you’re inspired.
But this can make it difficult to get the business stuff done if you’re constantly being pulled into the creative vortex.
One solution is to hire a team to do the business stuff for you. For example, a writer who has an editor and a publisher.
However, this isn’t an option for many creatives, until you’ve surpassed a certain threshold of commercial success.
Until then, it’s a tough decision:
Keep creating and ignore the business stuff.
Stifle your creative impulses to focus on the business stuff.
If you go with option 1, you may surpass the threshold of commercial success just by sheer force of creative output. If you just keep creating and publishing somewhere, the market might eventually find you.
If you go with option 2, the market might find you sooner. Then again, you might stifle a creation that could have been the breakthrough that gets the market to find you organically.