Giving people enough rope to find something better

When you’re making something you’ve never made before, trusting the process is paramount.

Because there’s no creative precedent for what you’re doing. The medium and the tools and output are all novel to you. You’re suddenly using all these new types of words to describe your art, and it feels like walking through the dark with a sharp knife and no torch.

That’s how I felt during the design and development phase of my software product. As a right brained creator who typically makes things using words, music, movies and stories, it was intimidating and challenging to suddenly be working with the left brain world of code, numbers, interfaces and functionality.

There were moments when my brain didn’t quite know what to do with itself. Wait, what does this green box do again? Why does the icon move like that? Can’t the user search results populate faster? Where did all of my fancy words go?

But this tremble of uncertainty is healthy and productive. It means you’re taking creative risks. It means you’re stretching as an artist. And it means there’s a certain degree of surrender you have to acclimate yourself to.

Especially if you’re partnering with third party contractors to execute work outside of your skillset. You really have to trust them. Liberating those other creators to do what they do best. Giving them enough rope to find something better than what you came up with.

Even if that means letting go of certain pieces of the initial project vision that are no longer tenable, now that the idea is becoming a reality.

Now, all of this surrender this won’t pull you clean out of the swamp of uncertainty. But it will make swimming a bit easier.

My graphic designer’s words come to mind, which ring inside my head in such moments of surrender. Jeff, anytime we’d be working on our seventeenth iteration of the cover image, would lovingly say to me, dude, let it be.

Next time you’re making something you’ve never made before, accept that there’s no precedent and just let the work teach you.

Because if you can’t trust the process, and the people shepherding you through it, then your mind will become obliterated by a maelstrom of anxieties, uncertainties and doubts.

And you already have enough to worry about.

What’s your plan for managing the tremble of creative uncertainty?