The thoughts that will propel your life… you can’t think yet.

Photo by Gaelle Marcel on Unsplash

Let’s cut to the chase: the reason you can’t think your most life-defining thoughts yet isn’t because you haven’t chanced upon enough inspiration or knowledge.

It’s because your brain is still learning to “chunk” the details into the building blocks of bigger ideas. (Literally, learning science calls this process “knowledge chunking”)

What you need isn’t a sudden breakthrough you can achieve only if you’re “talented enough” — it’s a slow, beautiful process you can only do bit-by-bit every day.

Let’s explore that idea (and maybe think some thoughts we couldn’t have thought before 😉)

Stop trying to find *the thing* where you can achieve my full creative potential. Look instead for small, consistent engagements where you can build up the building blocks to think new, bigger thoughts.

I often wonder “When will I find the thing I can pour my creativity into?”

Typically, I’d imagine this thing was a singular outcome: landing a job, building a project, achieving the right connections or external validation.

It was very stressful. And totally misleading.

I don’t need to find a magical thing that “lets” me think big, creative thoughts. I need to create spaces that demand that I consolidate my current thinking into bigger structures and concepts. This active & expanding learning process, whether done at a shiny job or on the train to work, is what gives me the capacity to think big & creative.

A personal example: learning to code so I could build creative things

When I set out to create data visualizations & interactive stories with code, I was endlessly frustrated that I wasn’t as skilled as I needed to be. It took hours to make a tiny change on the screen. I couldn’t realize my visions.

Constantly falling short of my vision, I threw blame every which way:

1. My job wasn’t creative enough and I spent too long on coding things that weren’t relevant
2. I needed a mentor
3. No one valued creativity around me
4. I was a fraud and didn’t put in enough practice & dedication because I wasn’t truly dedicated

At a particularly low point, a well-meaning friend told me that getting marginally faster at coding was pointless. There would always be someone faster, so my energy would be better spent on the larger creative visions I had.

This couldn’t have been further from the truth. If I could speak to my past self, I’d tell him:

Dear Past Me,

Getting “marginally faster” at coding can be a key sign that you’re intuiting coding’s esoteric details & rising to think on a bigger, more creative plain. This is awesome! Putting in the slow, painful work to make coding intuitive is exactly where you should be right now.

Coding will often feel foreign to your creativity. But later, its larger ideas will light up your creative world, and make the process of using code more beautiful and easy.

So lighten up on the blame, you’re doing fine:

1. Yes, it’s ok your job isn’t “creative”: it’s drilling you in fundamentals that’ll make space for creativity down the road.

2. Mentors are great, particularly if they help you synthesize your learning, but you can also do that without one. Also, yearning for a mentor is often just yearning to cheat ahead to those bigger thoughts you’re yearning for. There’s no shortcut there, though, buddy. :)

3. It’s true: you entered a craft filled with technically-focused people. They don’t yet value the creativity you’re working to harness. Take a deep breath, it’s totally fine to immerse yourself in the fundamentals: ultimately you’ll emerge understanding & applying them beyond what you see in those around you.

4. It’s true you’re failing to live up to your vision … for now. That’s part of the early journey. Be gentle with yourself.

You can sense the sorts of ideas & creations that come from deep inside you. But you don’t yet have the foundation and higher-order thoughts to do them yet. That’s ok. It means you’re reaching for something bigger than you.

All the best,

You

Don’t worry that you haven’t found the thing or built the skills.

We put so much emphasis on finding what’s “calls to” us: What’s your passion? What career do you want? We forget we also need the language to have more and more sophisticated conversations.

So start small. Learn to speak with what calls to you. Don’t worry about saying the perfect thing. Just keep growing your vocabulary. Your imagination will grow with it.

There are thoughts you can’t think yet. But they are made of what you’re learning right now.