The Downside of Obsession
Monday, 11. July 2016 0:11
There have been a number of posts discussing the fact that many artists are obsessed and probably need to be (for example). There is, however, a downside to that same single-mindedness, and it manifests itself in at least two areas.
The first is tunnel-vision. When an artist, or anyone for that matter, is pursuing some goal obsessively, that person develops tunnel-vision. There is nothing that exists in his/her world except the object of the obsession. This, of course, can be a good thing; no distractions exist. If that artist enters flow, then all the better because his/her whole consciousness is turned to the creative project at hand. The problem comes if the artist is experiencing tunnel-vision and is not in flow. That means that there is a single-minded effort but the whole consciousness is not involved. That means that ideas that should feed into the creative process are kept out. The objective and reaching it becomes far more important than the process.
The second aspect is, for lack of a better term, drive. In this case drive means pushing toward the goal as hard as the artist can go down a single path. And that’s the problem right there: the push. Again, this is a much more serious problem if the artist is not in flow. What happens is that the artist is moving toward the goal so hard and so fast that it doesn’t occur to him/her that there may be other paths to the same goal, easier paths, paths that would lead to greater creativity, paths that would lead to a more complex and interesting result. And if the movement toward the goal is not successful, the artist continues to try harder rather than considering input from other paths or another methodology, both of which would occur to him/her if he/she were in flow. This is akin to the artist beating his/her head on a rock; the harder he/she tries, the less successful he/she is likely to be.
This happened to me recently. I spent four hours on a project that should have taken twenty minutes (I’m thankful that it was not a more complex problem; I might have been at it for days.) It was at the end of the day, and the push to finish the project took on a life of its own; no matter how hard I tried, the goal was still out of reach. What finally stopped me was exhaustion. After I stopped, decided that maybe when I started on the project the next day, I would take a different tack. And that is exactly what I did; after some rest, the project looked a little different. I tried approaching the problem a different way and success came within thirty minutes. The problem had been that I was trying so hard to get to the goal, I missed other approaches that would yield success much more quickly.
So while obsessive behavior is probably necessary to be successful in the arts, improperly directed single-mindedness can be detrimental to the creative process and a huge waster of time and energy. That kind of obsession can be detected easily. Does it feel like you’re beating your head on a rock? If so, it’s time to change your approach. Flow doesn’t feel like that; flow almost removes you from the world, so that you have very little, if any, self-awareness. Our goal should be appropriately-directed and managed obsession. And that will appear when we merge the self and the creative process.
Category:Creativity | Comment (0) | Autor: Jay Burton