This post is a rerun. I post occasional reruns as a kindness to myself and to unearth old posts for new readers. You can read about reruns, too.
Today’s rerun is Creative Constraints, and I’m really only re-running it because something has changed and I wanted to talk about it. You can read the original post, but this should basically stand alone just fine.
When I started my daily art practice, I added a bunch of constraints to help me show up every day and just do the work. Fewer decisions to make; fewer excuses. At some point in the past couple of weeks, those constraints stopped serving me, and started having the opposite effect.
I put the constraints in place because I didn’t know what I wanted to make, nor which medium and materials I wanted to use to make it. Of course, once you start making anything you start to find things that work for you, and you want to do more of those things (and more often).
At first, I didn’t allow myself to move on because my rules told me that it hadn’t yet been 30 days. I’d committed to a medium and material for one month, and I wasn’t quite at the end. When I sat down to do the work though, I didn’t really want to do it. The purpose of the constraints was to motivate me, not to sap my motivation.
As fellow completionists and perfectionists might know, you can become beholden to your own rules even when it makes no sense. Even when no one else is holding you to those rules, and there are no negative consequences to changing them (or simply not fulfilling them). Against the desires of my subconscious, I just… stopped following them.
Immediately, my motivation sprang back. I was excited to sit down and make my small piece of art every day, and started to think more about the larger pieces of art I’d like to make with the mediums that had most resonated with me. I didn’t need the rules to help me make art every day—it had already started to feel strange not to make art.
It wasn’t very long ago that I started making art every day, and more recently still that I wrote so confidently and publicly about the power of my creative constraints. Letting go of things that no longer serve us is almost always the right thing to do, though, and this is a gentle nudge to consider whether you can retire any rules that no longer serve you.