No drawing board needed, thank you very much

During the second world war, there was a famous editorial cartoon that featured various military men and ground crew racing toward a crashed plane.

The frustrated architect with a roll of plans under his arm huffs away and says, well, back to the old drawing board.

That was the first time the phrase had been uttered in popular culture.

Arno, the cartoonist who first produced this image, had no idea that his phrase would gain idiomatic currency. By the late forties, the mainstream media adopted this drawing board idea as the way to describe any creator’s acceptance that their design had failed and a new one was needed.

How often do you experience that feeling of frustration in your creative process? Do you ever throw your hands up in resignation and announce to yourself that it’s time to go back to the old drawing board?

If so, it’s possible that you’re being too hard on yourself and not trusting the process.

That’s one of the benefits of personal creativity management. The tools help you avoid the stress of starting from scratch. Even when your plane crashes into the ground and explodes into a ball of flames, you very rarely have to go all the way back to square one.

Not if you change the way you think about the process.

One tool you might try is called forestation, a system for cultivating innovative ideas systematically rather than sporadically.

Instead of starting your project with an intimidating blank canvas, trying to will innovation into existence, you begin the work by reviewing all the current materials you already have.

Parsing out any words, phrases, ideas, concepts and other assets that have their own energy behind them.

I personally use this tool on a daily basis, and it’s critical for building creative momentum. No drawing board needed, thank you very much.

Here’s one other tool that’s more conceptual, but equally effective. It’s called baselining, aka, figuring out where you’re already been trusted for a history of delivering quality, and using that to your advantage.

Imagine you’re working with a new team and coworkers are sabotaging your momentum, either intentionally or unconsciously. No need to rebuild your confidence from scratch.

Instead, take a moment to motivate yourself by remembering where you’ve already been successful. Remember some things that are true about your own abilities.

You are creative, you are organized and you are knowledgeable. And this team hired you for a reason. You’ve done this kind of work before, and you are going to do it again.

Mantras like these have personally been a lifesaver for me. Because they remind me that I’m starting from a place of experience, not from scratch. No drawing board needed, thank you very much.

Remember, just because your creative plane crashes, doesn’t mean an entirely new one must be delivered. Start where you are. Trust the process.

Don’t make it harder on yourself by starting from scratch.

What if you aggregated so much experience that you could no longer fail?