Learning New Creative Techniques:
How to embrace failure, find your style & shape your mindset through the absurd
Shitty Paintings: Creative Learning and Why It Matters
Over the last year, I’ve been teaching myself how to draw and paint landscapes. I’ve run creative experiment after creative experiment, testing new techniques with familiar materials, and exploring what happens when I create in new places and spaces.
From small sketches made while hiking Colorado’s tallest peaks, to large paintings done in the warmth of my studio, one thing is abundantly clear: I have a big pile of shitty paintings and drawings.
Creativity is core to our humanness.
It’s part of our core psyche, has roots in our biological development, and is key to how we relate to ourselves and the world around us. Without it, we’d never have discovered how to make fire, or anything else for that matter.
Through creative learning, we empower the expression of the capabilities we already have within us while expanding our capacity to create for impact and with intention.
We also make a lot of shitty work. It’s part of the process.
The Benefits of Embracing Failure & Finding Your Own Style
What’s the best way to jumpstart any kind of learning? Learn from someone else.
Watch a tutorial, read a book, listen to a podcast . . . and then jump into experimentation.
Trying the thing.
And failing.
Failure can be a great teacher if we let it. Embracing failure helps us learn from experience and find our own unique style or way of doing the thing that wants to express through us.
This means embracing the absurd, the ugly, the hot mess, whatever you want to call the thing you make that isn’t the thing you meant to make but you totally spent hours or days or whatever amount of time making.
Embracing the absurd and learning from our failures expands our perspective and our adaptability, often leading to unexpected and exciting results. Embracing the absurd and learning from our failures is how we develop the ideas, techniques, and approaches to our work that will set us and our work apart from others.
New Mindset: Finding Inspiration Through Absurdity
I’ve been painting for something like 25 years at this point. I know how colors respond to each other, how to build composition, and use layers and light to bring ideas and experiences to life. I know how to paint.
But if you looked at these landscapes I’ve made . . .(shakes head)
It’s absurd that everything I know seems to disappear when I try to do this new thing. Absurd that I have to re-learn what I already know so I can do the new thing.
But what exactly am I trying to do?
Here’s where I pause with the absurdity . . .
Breathe with it.
Hold space with it.
And listen instead of criticizing or shutting down.
What I hear in that space is this: I’m not trying to learn how to paint landscapes.
I‘m learning how I paint landscapes.
And suddenly, with space and curiosity, the absurdity of creative learning opens up to the untapped inspiration that will fuel whatever comes next.
The Best Resources for Finding Creative Inspiration and Learning New Techniques
Tapping Into Our Own Experience
When we’re learning something new it’s easy to get into a scarcity mindset that says we should or have to look outside ourselves for the thing or person that will initiate the breakthrough we’re looking for. The truth is, our own experience can be an invaluable source of insight and wisdom!
Look for ways you can:
• Connect with sensory experience in the moment
• Get familiar with your own non-verbal feedback (emotions and mood, physical sensation)
• Invite meaning and purpose back into your internal conversation
• Observe and gain insight from your thoughts and then let them go.
Linking with Teachers and Mentors
Remember solid breakthroughs are usually influenced by a wide range of teachers and mentors and rarely by one single expensive unicorn. We create a lot of constraints and definitions around what and who we believe can effectively teach us the thing we’re trying to learn.
By opening up our definitions and constraints of what and who our teachers are, we tap directly into inspiration available in each moment, often at little or no additional cost. With this approach, creative learning becomes more accessible, meaningful, and efficient.
Connecting with Other Creators
Use joy as the new metric when choosing who you want to connect with creatively. Instead of looking for who’s killing it in the numbers game—selling at top dollar and getting all the likes—look for who radiates joy through their creative process and work.
Joy, while not necessary for inspiration or creative flow, is one of the strongest creative catalysts we can access.
Find someone who’s joyfully doing their thing, whatever that thing is, and connect.
