Tenet 7: Execution is Everything

In your creative journey, execution is vital. I wish that I had learning this much sooner. I used to think that I was creative. I wasn’t. I was only good at coming up with ideas. Creative people come up with ideas, but this only a small part of what they do. Creative people bring their ideas to life. That is the creation part. Ideas rattling around in your head are useless. They aren’t creative. You, if you are this way, are not creative. I know that this is harsh, but the reality is, its true. I wish someone had helped me realize this much earlier. I didn’t become creative until I started getting my ideas out of my head and onto paper, onto the web, into other people’s hands.

Your creative work doesn’t matter until it is shared with other people. It can be personal and if it affects your life, sometimes that’s enough. That’s a personal choice I suppose, but I tend to think of creative work as most powerful when they go out into the world and make change. Think about characters in a story. When is the most dramatic story told? Where is all the action? When characters interact with each other and conflict emerges. You might think about why you don’t want to send your work out into the world. Why does it satisfy you but not others? Maybe you haven’t truly challenged yourself with the work and maybe you are afraid. Either is crippling you.

You need to send your work out into the world. This will help you identify whether or not you are actually solving problems in new ways. Some people say ‘fuck it’ to originally. That’s okay, but they are not creative. They likely know this and choose to do a craft for relaxation. Creativity and relaxation are incompatible. Most days. Donte let yourself be convinced that you are being creative if you lounge around all day. It often takes real work and real focus to bring your work to fruition.

The corresponding tenet is that you must be selective with the ideas that you choose to pursue. If you are like me and coming up with the ideas is the easy part, then you need to be especially attentive to this. It’s difficult but not all your ideas are worth pursuing. Maybe they are and your special.

Execution is everything

About this time, a year ago, I was stuck in a cycle of learn, learn, learn. I felt that the books I read made me confident. The more I read, the more I knew about how to do business. It was true, but I was stuck. Instead of doing, I was reading and studying. But… that was doing wasn’t it? There are various levels of execution. I am glad that I spent that year doing nothing but learning and reading. I learn an absolute ton about very relevant topics and am prepared to take on the task at hand because of it.

I reached a certain point, a tipping point, though, where it hit me. If all I ever did was read, I would cease to be on the path towards achieving my goals. I was stuck in a loop and I had to get out. Fast forward a year. Now, even on days when I feel unproductive, I realize that I am huge steps closer to achieving my goals because I spend my time every day doing. Creating. Executing.

If you want to cultivate creativity in your own life, you need to master execution. If you don’t execute on your ideas, why have them? Now execution is not easy. We have talked in detail about why its important. But the harder question to answer is how. How do I know what it is that I should be doing at any given point? What is important to work on? What isn’t?

What details matter and what don’t?

Its challenging and great responsibility, being in charge of your creative mission. Often, there is no one to turn to in order to ask questions or get things on track. There will be no one who values your mission like you do and knows the details like you do. And so, you must realize that you are the only one who can be truly responsible for your vision.

So how do I go from being an ‘idea’ person to actualizing my creativity? To becoming a creator in the truest sense? In order to execute well, you first must choose. What will you do? What will you not do? Saying not to the maelstrom of possibilities is often the single hardest thing that I have to do every single day. The more you say ‘yes’ to, the less that you are likely to accomplish. It’s a simple rule of human productivity that prevails. It is especially important in regard to how you spend your time. You may thing that the decision is between working on x or y projects. No. the decision si really between x or y projects or getting distracted by this game or that family issue. Or whatever. That is life. Life bombards you with opportunities to do so many things besides what you are choosing to do. What you really want to do. Life provides without hesitation the opportunity to keep working your day to day job and spend your hours building someone else’s empire. You have to choose otherwise.

Sometimes, you have to be willing to let you miscellaneous list of to-dos grow uncontrollably in order to get your primary list accomplished. An old Steve Jobs trick that I now find myself applying constantly is to ignore an issue until it eventually goes away or takes care of itself. This obviously doesn’t apply to everything. Least of all your health and wellbeing. But generally, I have found the cost of ignoring certain things to be minimal relative to the rewards of having more time.

The point is, be active in your choices of what to participate in and what to spend your time doing.

You must measure. If you are not tracking your time, you have no idea what you are spending it on. And you will have no basis on which to make corrections. If you’re not making corrections to how you spend your time, you are not getting better, closer to your goals. Time is of the essence. Get yourself into the habit of tracking every hour. I track the working ones right now because I know that if I start right away by tracking every single hour, I will end up not tracking any at all due to sheer overwhelm. But if you incrementally increase the range of tracking… you will find that you are much more informed about where your many hours are going. Use simple tools. I find that excel works perfectly. After completing a session working on a task, I open the window, enter my hours, and then minimize. The app stays on when my computer is on. It makes it dead simple.

When in doubt, use Pareto’s principle. You can likely get 80% of the results by doing a few choice tings. So, you must ask yourself. What are those things? What are my high leverage actions?

It doesn’t have to be difficult to execute. I find myself constantly making to much more difficult than it actually is. This difficulty is perhaps a myth that we create to soften the blow at the end of our lives when we haven’t quite got it all done the way we wanted. This brings me to my next point, a nasty point of contention. Perfectionism.

I hate perfectionism. I hate the grip that it has on my creative life. I wrestle with it constantly. I bet you do to. Why? Because we want our work to be great. We want it to match up with the creative vision that we have. We creators often have a very specific vision in our heads for what our end goals is for a project. The reality is, this is very hard to achieve in actuality. And the reverse pareto will dominate you. The last 20% of the details will cost you 80% of the time you would spend on the entire project. You must not get caught in the trap of perfectionism. You must set appropriate expectations and will yourself to let go. Let go of your need for the project to satisfy your egotistical desires. Would you rather create a single perfect work of art, or ten slightly flawed, but still magnificent works? The latter will be considered prolific. Also, you are likely not honing your skills truly if you spend most of your creative time nitpicking at the minutia. We will come back to the details later. It is a major challenge because as we will see, the details are the design. So back to the question. Which details matter? This, it turns out, is the essence of expertise. Knowing without doubt, which details matter. This collection of relevant details is what makes you masterful. This collection is what you should strive to obtain- for once you have it, you can most effectively a lot your time while retaining the results.

Which details matter??

An experimental approach works wonders. Before mucking about in the details of anything, paint in broad strokes. Exceedingly broad. Change variables at a the highest level the coarsest knob, until you have sorted out the best path. If you do not, you will find yourself spending hours and days of your life only to scrap the work later when you found that you weren’t on the proper path at all. (this maybe in the details tenet).