by Todd Henry
Question: Are there systems you’re still using that are ineffective for your current work but that you’re using as a matter of habit rather than by purposeful choice?
FEAR: THE INVISIBLE CEILING
Humans have evolved with a set of traits that made it possible for our ancestors to form social groups, develop new technologies, and outwit their enemies. Unfortunately, these are the same attributes that can inhibit our creativity. The most damaging of these hardwired traits is fear.
In some circumstances, fear is undeniably a useful tool. For example, if I’m standing on the edge of a hundred-foot cliff, I should feel a little fear and take a step or two back. I also want my kids to have a healthy respect for traffic so that they avoid the street when playing. These types of fear are and always have been crucial to our survival.
But there are other types of fear that, when allowed to dictate our behavior, can cause us to perform at significantly lower levels than our true capabilities. We project negative consequences to our behavior and limit our engagement out of a fear of what might happen, no matter how unlikely.
In his book The Now Habit, about fighting procrastination, Dr. Neil Fiore describes an experiment he performs with his patients to help them identify when they are behaving irrationally because of fear. He asks them to imagine that there is a wood plank lying across the floor, twenty feet long and six inches wide. He asks them if they would be able to walk across this plank without falling off. Inevitably, the patients respond that walking across this plank would be no problem. Fiore then asks them to imagine that the plank has been elevated to a height of one hundred feet in the air and is suspended between two buildings. He again asks the patients if they believe they could walk across the plank without falling off. This time, however, very few of the patients are willing to “walk the plank.”
What has changed? Certainly not the technical skill required for the task. It’s the same plank. But for some reason the respondents are now hesitant to walk across it. The only thing that has changed is the consequence of making a mistake. Suddenly, a slight misstep will mean death . . . or at least several broken bones. The perceived consequence of a mistake caused the respondents to choose not to engage in an activity that, only moments before, they had deemed easy.
Sound familiar? It’s often the case that because of a fear of what might happen if they make a mistake, creatives play it safe. They elevate the potential consequences of making a mistake to unhealthy (and unrealistic) levels and, in order to avoid those consequences, do mediocre work.
For some of us, this fear is a natural result of our environment. I have worked with a few creatives who have been told pointblank, “If you screw this up, you’re fired.” But in my experience, that is a rare exception. For the most part, our fears are largely exaggerated; few of us can point to a person who lost his job because of a reasonable idea that didn’t pan out. More often than not, we simply don’t want to stand out, whether positively or negatively, because of the fear of being ostracized by our peers or managers.
This kind of fear can be corralled into two categories: fear of failure and, even worse, fear of success.
Fear of Failure
When we think of fear, this is probably the kind that comes to mind. We become risk averse because we don’t want to come up short. We’ve been doing what we do for long enough that we understand how to do passable work in a risk-free way, so why take the chance on doing something more? But brilliant creative work is always the result of risk. In order to succeed, we must reach beyond our present circumstances and take chances that our work might fail. Peter Block, author of The Answer to How Is Yes and Community, told me in an interview that we must grow comfortable “living in the margins rather than in the center.”
What are we really risking when we create? We might fear losing our job, but more often we’re concerned about being perceived as inadequate or ineffective. We’re afraid that no one will want to work with us on future projects. We’re worried about our reputation.
This fear is not completely unfounded. If we push ourselves to go beyond the tried and true, others will inevitably think some of our ideas are bad. But in the end, the consequences of never taking creative risks will be significantly greater than some of our peers thinking we have poor taste. A lifetime of mediocrity is a high price to pay for safety. Paranoia undoes greatness.
A lifetime of mediocrity is a high price to pay for safety. Paranoia undoes greatness.
You need to push through those places where it’s easier to gravitate toward comfort instead of aggressively pursuing your best work. riCardo Crespo, Senior Vice President and Global Creative Chief for Twentieth Century Fox FCP, told me that his best advice for creatives is to “know your comfort zone and to work hard to stay out of it.” Sharing from his personal experience, he said that a desire for comfort is the “single biggest factor that causes many creatives to shrink back from opportunity” and the biggest block to creative growth.
When we curtail our creative engagement out of a fear of what others will think, we are “elevating the plank.” We are exaggerating the potential consequences of a mistake. So rather than doing something that we’re wired for, something we’re passionate about, or something that we believe could really make a difference, we back away from the ledge. We settle. We accept mediocrity.
It’s conceivable that none of this is new information. We know that it’s unlikely that we’re going to be fired for a bad idea, but we’re still reserved and often hold back from bringing ourselves fully to the creative process. Fear can have a strong hold over our engagement. In Linchpin, author Seth Godin argues that this is the result of something called the “lizard brain,” the primal part of our brain that causes us to shrink back from anything that is perceived as a threat. We are hardwired to stay close to the herd and blend in as much as possible. After all, in the animal world the members of a tribe that stand out are often eaten first.
But we must learn to identify and circumvent the impulse of our survival instinct. To do so requires both awareness and the discipline to take calculated creative risks. We must practice taking risks when the stakes are lower so that we can perform when the pressure is on and it really matters. We’ll talk about this more as we discuss best practices.
Question: Where is fear of failure causing you to curtail your creative engagement? Where are you refusing to take risks in your work? What are the perceived consequences that are holding you back, and do you think they’re real or imagined?
Fear of Success
There is a second and more subversive form of fear that I’ve seen at work in many creatives. In your head, it sounds something like this:Do I really want to knock this one out of the park? Do I really want to set myself up for that kind of future expectation? What will everyone else think? Will I be able to continue to sustain that pace? Can I continue to provide creative insight at that level? Maybe I should pace myself instead.
None of these thoughts are necessarily conscious, but they flit through our minds as we go about our work. This kind of fear plays on the paranoia that we can’t continue to perform at a certain level of expectation or deal with the ongoing execution of an idea once it’s launched. As a result we are hesitant to engage fully because we don’t want to get in over our heads or deal with the consequences of success.
Fear of success can become an epidemic within creative teams. A blind eye is turned toward subpar performance, and there’s a strong “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” ethic in which everyone rationalizes team members’ work as great in order to maintain stability and avoid stretching themselves. The rationale is that by doing this we can lower expectations across the board, resulting in less risk of sustained future expectations for us and for our team. It sounds ridiculous on the surface, but I’ll bet that if you think hard you could identify at least one instance when you’ve experienced this dynamic at work. It often begins with a single instance when the team underperforms, but the results are ration
alized as good in some way. Once the team sees that performance has become a subjective thing rather than one measured against hard metrics, rationalization for other subpar work often begins. It’s not an effort to shirk hard work, it’s simply the group’s way of dealing with its fear about increased future expectations.
Some creatives struggle with this fear of success for their entire careers. They perpetually shrink back from challenges because they are afraid that they will end up “out of their league” or with more work on their plate than they can handle. While we have to be wise about the amount of work we choose to take on, we also must be willing to ignore these subtle and destructive impulses to “coast” and “go with the flow.” If we don’t stretch ourselves, we don’t grow. Growth is uncomfortable, but without the discomfort our capacity doesn’t remain the same, it shrinks. If we’re not growing, we’re dying. In the next several chapters you will learn some very practical (and manageable!) practices that will help you grow, let you practice taking risks in controlled environments, and cultivate the energy you need to face the ever-increasing expectations of your work.
Growth is uncomfortable, but without the discomfort our capacity doesn’t remain the same, it shrinks. If we’re not growing, we’re dying.
Fear of success is often more destructive than fear of failure because it’s masked in the guise of wisdom. It sounds like our friend. It can feel like a mature attitude toward knowing your role, playing your part, and pacing yourself. But ultimately it will cause us to miss opportunities.
Question: Are you withholding yourself creatively because you’re afraid you can’t sustain the pace of your success? Have you ever held an idea back because you were afraid of the consequences? Do you, in any way, feel “unworthy” of success in your life or career?
EXPECTATION ESCALATION AND THE INHIBITING NATURE OF COMPARISON
The final assassin of creativity is expectation escalation. We allow comparisons to affect our current creative engagement. The moment we place concrete expectations on the end results of a project—this upgrade is going to double last year’s sales figures! —we begin closing off potential executions and helpful thoughts because we deem them “not useful enough” in accomplishing our escalated expectations. Doing this too early in the creative process can seriously derail brilliant ideas and prevent them from ever seeing the light of day.
The result of all this is a phenomenon I call “expectation escalation.” As our perceived expectations escalate, we become almost paralyzed with concern about not measuring up. We want our ideas to be fully formed from the beginning rather than giving our creative process time to play out. If we don’t see the idea as stacking up against the best of the best, then we don’t spend time on it. But this ignores the reality that all brilliant creative executions began as infant ideas and had to be tweaked and developed.
I’ve witnessed three sources of unhealthy expectations, and each affects our creating in the same fundamental way. Expectation escalation causes us to self-limit as a result of comparison.
Our Past Work
Have you ever had difficulty getting started on an idea because you were afraid that it wouldn’t measure up to something you’d previously done? Sometimes our expectations for our own work can get in the way of full creative engagement. It’s unfortunate that we are often our own worst critic and that we often criticize and deconstruct our work well before it’s ready.
You have a great idea and, at first, you’re very excited. Soon, though, you begin to think back to previous work you’ve completed, comparing those final products with the seed you’re currently nurturing. Even though your current work is still in its infancy and so of course can’t stack up to a fully formed and executed idea, you’re not willing to give yourself that grace period. Instead, you do a quick assessment of whether the work is worthwhile based on nothing more than these artificial expectations. As a result, you don’t give the idea time to develop.
When you do this you fail to realize that (1) all your past work was once unformed and in midprocess, and that (2) you always remember past work more fondly than you actually felt about it at the time. In hindsight, recalling how a project succeeded is easy, but in midproject, there is always a lot of doubt and confusion involved. We tend to forget the angst and uncertainty we felt while doing the work and instead look only at the end results.
I don’t mean to imply that all comparison is bad. There is both good and bad in playing this comparison game. You want to continue growing in your skills, and comparing your current work to past work can help benchmark your growth. But you don’t want to fall into the trap of shrinking back from engagement simply because you’re afraid of not measuring up. The key to using comparison effectively is to withhold it until later in the process. When you are in the early stages of a project you need as many possibilities in front of you as possible. There are enough limitations in place thanks to your organization, your peers, and your client; you don’t need to limit yourself, too.
Question: Do you find yourself frequently putting past work on a pedestal? Do you think that this limits your current ability to creatively engage in any way?
There are enough limitations in place thanks to your organization, your peers, and your client; you don’t need to limit yourself, too.
Our Managers and Peers
In the same way that we can experience escalated expectations for our work based upon our own past work, we can be tempted to artificially escalate the expectations of our managers and peers when they are not communicated clearly. Because of the already complex nature of creative work, and the time-versus-value tension discussed in the previous chapter, a lack of clarity around organizational expectations will sometimes result in our going overboard in our work as we try to cover our bases. But this means that we often do extra and unnecessary work, and waste energy that could have been more effectively applied to the creative problems at hand.
Question: Do you have an accurate understanding of what’s expected from you by the organization? By your coworkers? When was the last time you had an “expectations” conversation with your manager?
Our Heroes and Competition
I love to read industry trade magazines and blogs. They can be a wonderful source of inspiration and information about what’s happening in the wide world of business. But they can lead to a sinister side effect: it’s very easy to let the work of others paralyze us.
This is a real problem in the design world. I’ve spoken with many designers and creative directors who feel the constant pressure to measure up to the work they are seeing on the covers of industry magazines. Some companies will cut these pieces out and hang them on the wall as a form of inspiration to the team, but these displays can sometimes feel more like a “why can’t you be more like your older brother?” talk from your parents.
While you certainly need to be willing to learn from the competition and from our own creative heroes, don’t let their influences cause you to condemn your own abilities. In his book Free Play, improvisational violinist Stephen Nachmanovitch writes, “It’s great to sit on the shoulders of giants, but don’t let the giants sit on your shoulders. There’s no room for their legs to dangle!”
In other words, there is a form of oppression that emerges when we allow the work of our influences or competitors to drive our creating in an unhealthy way. The creative process is a personal assault on the beachhead of apathy and a push to explore and break new ground, even when we are uncertain of a successful result. The more we try to force a successful (and derivative) result, the less likely we are to see true breakthrough. It’s only when we are free to abandon our need to measure up and instead simply trust our abilities that we will begin to see real creative brilliance emerge.
“It’s great to sit on the shoulders of giants, but don’t let the giants sit on your shoulders. There’s no room for their legs to dangle!”
—Stephen Nachmanovitch
Question: Are you in the habit of comparing your curren
t work with the finished work of your heroes? Does that affect which ideas you are willing to explore or cause you to condemn your abilities?
Tim Senff, director of ReachOut at Crossroads Church in Cincinnati, regularly leads trips for people to travel to other continents to participate in service projects. Some of these trips draw hundreds of participants. Tim finds that rigid expectations stand in the way of a good experience for these groups. His advice to participants? “We want to be expectant, but without expectations.” In other words, expect that great things are going to happen, but don’t place parameters on what those things will be; inevitably, they will lead to disappointment or cause you to miss opportunities simply because you’re not looking for them.
I think this is a wonderful description of what a healthy and productive creative process looks like. We want to be expectant without expectations. We want to be able to engage in the creative process without requiring concrete results too early. When we do this, we neutralize the effects of unhealthy expectations and allow ourselves the full freedom that is required in order to take creative risks and see our infant ideas to completion.
The creative process requires that we be expectant without expectations.
While dealing with the specter of expectation escalation within an organization can be difficult, doing so is critical to doing your best work. Concrete objectives and a clear path to completion are key, but you need to be careful to suspend your judgment until later in the project. You can’t become paralyzed by other people, by your past work, or by an unclear understanding of organizational expectations. Any one of these can cause you to perform at less than your best.