[As the year thundered] to a close, we took the time to have a tiny breather and look back at our year and some of our most epic moments, which of course started a discussion about creativity… Being a team made up of women we naturally dissect every single thing that we do, how we did it, why we did it, and did we do it well enough….
So, after this discussion, the only conclusion that we could come to is that being creative is like trying to find the perfect pair of shoes. Sounds easy right? Well it isn’t.
When we buy a pair of shoes, there is an entire art to the matter. Before we even hit the shops, we have checked out a whole selection online, this is called mental preparation. We then mentally (or even physically in most cases) go through our wardrobes – what outfits will match, how will our legs look in them, will I have a bag to match, omg what will my friends say… etc. etc. We decide on colour, style, heel height, how we will look when we wear them in the dim light of the next lunar eclipse….
And then the day arrives – we go to the mall. We go to seek out the perfect shoe that we have so carefully crafted in our minds eye. There’s only one problem, that shoe doesn’t exist. Despite this, we will search, trying on shoe after shoe, pushing through exhaustion, diminishing options and sales people who are minutes away from certain death. Through all doubt and reason though, something miraculous happens: we find a shoe that somehow meets or even exceeds our unreasonable expectations, it’s a euphoric experience.
Like our shoe shopping process, the best creative ideas start out with unreasonable expectations. We see what we want the finished product to be before we have even begun, and the pressure that we put on ourselves is insurmountable. Even the most amazing teams can’t see past the limitations that they themselves set, we’re all guilty. The wild ideas are easy, but no one in their right mind, wants to encourage them. That’s difficult! Wild ideas are, by their very nature, unreasonable, and that’s what makes them seem so completely overwhelming when we begin.
We have had many, many wild ideas about some of our fabulous projects this year, agonised over the creative, beaten ourselves up during the process, tried over and over to climb that impenetrable wall of creative bricks that we ourselves put up… It’s like the famous glass slipper that Cinderella so casually kicked off as she did her duck – how do we squeeze our smorgasbord of ideas into the tiny slipper (um… think budget) that the client is holding out in front of us, hoping against all hope that we are the ones? And then, just like that, our foot slipped in perfectly, as if our own fairy godmother had a glittery hand in it all. The perfect campaign came together, the perfect launch was created, the perfect corporate identity was developed. And yes, it was a euphoric experience!
So, I suppose the crux of the story is that we will always, as creatives, set unreasonable expectations on ourselves, because we see the big picture in our minds. But if we don’t get lost along the way inside the big picture and focus on enjoying the journey with no expectations, our creativity always wins… and our shoes are always stunning.
