I woke up one gray morning this past December and felt a strong craving to be part of something, part of a fellowship or team, part of a group of like-minded individuals cohering around a shared purpose. Like all my creative cravings and existential intuitions, I could not discern the details or form of this ‘fellowship’, I could only make out some nebulous object—like a cloud of light—floating in the potentiality of the future, calling me to pick up my hammer and sculpt it into being.
I get these intuitions often—little golden potentialities that seem to visit me without rhyme or reason—but usually at times of transition or liminality. For instance: as I walk off the pitch after a hard game of soccer; as I drift awake in the morning or fade into sleep at night; after I ejaculate during sex; and so on.
“Build me…” they whisper. “Create this beautiful thing…”
They can be cruel sometimes, filling me with inspirations I can’t possibly act on due to finite time, resources, or prior commitments, but making me crave them all the same.
“Purchase a farm and turn it into a community center… write a fantasy novel… record a disco album…”
After a few hours of pondering go by, I usually wave my hand through these foggy intuitions, dissipating them like cigarette smoke.
“Nah… that ain’t happening.”
However, on that December morning, this idea of a ‘creative fellowship’ survived several ponderings—several rounds of fantasizing and critiquing—and like a metal ball rolling around and around in the circles of my mind, it eventually clunked into a creative groove, and began to roll forward in a linear direction.
“This is both worthwhile and doable,” I thought. Though the ‘creative fellowship’ object was still without detail, structure, or form. How would I build something that has no instructions? How would I find my way without a map?
Designing something that—as far as you know—has never existed is a peculiar task. Even if someone else has done something similar, it’s never existed for you. I’d never gone through the motions of running a group. I possessed no muscle memory for making a meaningful opening speech, for articulating the purpose and rules and structure of the fellowship, for mediating the inevitable conflict that arises from the infinite multiplicity of personality clashes within this group of pseudo-strangers I’ve never met in real life.
So many moving pieces, so many unknowns, so many things that could go wrong. How does one approach the volatile monstrosity of a never-attempted, without-form, creative venture?
You build the pot, not the plant.
Ambitious creative ideas (especially those involving other people) can be unwieldy, overwhelming, difficult to pin down, impossible to compute. When attempting to ensure that every step of the way succeeds—that there are no failures, that all needs are met, that all goals are achieved, that everyone has an amazing time—you find yourself trying to solve an impossibly complex mental puzzle. So how do you solve it?
You cannot plan for every outcome, several months in advance. So how do you plan?
You cannot predict how every individual will respond to every interaction or discussion or workshop. So how do you predict?
You don’t. This thing-that-has-never-existed and all its complexities cannot be formulated into a definite and detailed blueprint by your solitary mortal mind. That’s impossible.
Instead, the formless creative object should be interpreted like a plant, waiting to manifest into the world by its own will—of its own life force. You don’t need to predict every leaf; it will show you what it wants to be, how tall it wants to grow, how wide it wants to spread its branches, what colors it wants to shine into the world.
All you have to do is plant the seed inside a container that can withstand its mercurial process of growth. Then you tend to it, you nurture its positive products while pruning its undesirable ones—like cutting dead flower heads off a bush—to facilitate a brilliant and beautiful bloom.
The creative object—whatever piece of art or entrepreneurial venture or crazy idea you’re working on—is no different than any other natural phenomena, any other product of darwinian evolution. You need to evolve it from the bottom-up, not control it from the top-down. If you let it evolve, the natural constraints of the physical world will apply their forces on the thing, and it will adapt to those constraints naturally, eventually fulfilling whatever purpose it’s meant to fulfill.
If you, instead, try to design every little detail, back to front—in the abstract compartments of your mind, or notes, or whatever—you’ll find that nature will defy you, show you what’s real, and break your grand design into pieces before you ever have a chance to enact it: the six weeks of workshops you had planned for your meetup group, that you spent hours designing, will simply be thrown out once you realize the group has other needs, that the project is growing in a different direction, that it wants to be something different, something you never could have foreseen.
So instead of planning out every detail of what’s about to happen—every root, branch, and leaf—simply focus on building a proper pot.
The pot you need depends on the medium. Perhaps it’s a DIY space in which to grow a punk rock scene: you don’t organize all the bands or choose each member of the audience; they will manifest on their own and show you what the scene wants to be. Perhaps it’s a tech startup: you don’t know exactly what products the market is going to want; you send a beta version into the wild and learn what people want to use it for. Perhaps it’s a novel: you don’t know where the story wants to go on the first draft, how the characters want to develop; you simply have to start writing and see where the pages take you.
You can’t possibly predict how the thing will manifest in its ‘final form,’ so it’s important—once you have a minimally viable container—to simply press play, set things in motion, and see what happens.
That’s not to say that the creative object, after being set in motion, requires no guidance or intervention from the creator—of course it does. But in moderation, in soft, gentle nudges and rinses and whispers. Knowing the proper balance point of that intervention is a skill, sometimes a talent, sometimes a form of wisdom acquired from experience. You will stumble and fall as you launch your creation, but over time you will learn how to tend it through trial and error, just like any other gardener.
So I came to the conclusion that my ‘creative fellowship’ would have only a vague explicit aim: making a change in one’s life. I decided it would have temporal boundaries of seven weeks; there would be an opening and closing ceremony with weekly meetings in between for exercises and discussion for all participants; a shared journal in which each participant jotted down their thoughts and progress; small groups of 3 or 4 individuals to keep in closer contact; and the whole thing would repeat every quarter. The final important touch was choosing a name: ‘Seasons of Change.’
That was my container.
My crop has been growing for a week, with some successes, some failures, some unforeseen hiccups and missteps, but ever maturing into the healthy tree it’s destined to become. Eventually, it may not remotely resemble my original vision—who knows what kind of seed I planted? All I know is that its next iteration will be better, more integrated, more developed, and more alive.
For now, I sit back and watch it sway in the wind, wriggle in the sunshine.
Thanks for reading.
What are your thoughts?
How do you approach creating something from scratch?
What are some other examples of a ‘pot and a plant’ in the creative or entrepreneurial world you can think of?
Have any personal stories about launching a venture? What did you do to ensure it flourished?