Creativity and Focus: an interview with the single-minded Dan Goodwin

I enjoyed my tea and chat with the wonderful Lisa Baldwin so much last week that I’ve decided to get my teapot out again and talk to another of my creative heroes this week.

Dan Goodwin, @coachcreative on Twitter, is a poet, yoga practitioner and author of the ebook, How to Get Focused and Create What Matters.

We ended up chatting for quite a while (and got through a few pots of tea) so I’ve split the interview into two parts. The second part will be published this evening in my microMag, Getting your Important Work Done, and a link to an online version of the microMag will be added here tomorrow.

Update: You can read part two of the interview here.

The Interview: Part One

MN: Hello Dan, thank you for taking the time to do this interview with me, and sorry it’s taken me so long to get the questions to you. I’ve been having one of my “treacle times” health wise, and have had very little spare energy for much beyond the day-to-day necessities of life. Your book has been keeping me company as I’ve been resting and recuperating.

DG: Thanks for asking me Michael, I really appreciate the opportunity to talk  with you and your readers.

Advice for people with low energy but LOTS of ideas

MN: What advice would you give to people like me who are limited in terms of how much energy (or time) they can devote to creative endeavours but have LOTS of ideas for things they’d like to do?

DG: In a few words – Pick one thing. Spend focused, uninterrupted time on it every day.

I was talking to someone the other day who was concerned they were reading a book too slowly. Friends of theirs had started at the same time and were racing through it. This person felt that if they couldn’t sit down and read at least two or three chapters in one go, there wasn’t any point reading anything. So the book sat there, unread. 

They then decided to change tack and read just one page a day. In a few months, they’ll have finished the book, and enjoyed and absorbed it at a leisurely pace, rather than skimmed through it as if being chased by a crazy monkey with a large stick. 

In 10 years they’ll have read maybe 20, 30, 40 books. Some people don’t read even two or three or four books in a lifetime. Slow, consistent progress is the key to everything. As you often say Michael – little and often.

In terms of all those ideas, or feeling overwhelmed by too many, always have a notebook handy to jot the new ones down, then close it, and carry on with what you were working on before. They’ll be there when you go back to the notebook, and you won’t be distracted by a new idea pleading for your attention while you’re trying to work on something else. 

What you also find with time and experience is that the most important ideas keep coming back to you anyway. They’re tenacious and determined, and you’re the only one that can develop them. They won’t give up. Just work on the one that feels most exciting and most important right now.

MN: I came away from reading the book with the idea that in many ways it doesn’t matter which creative idea we choose to follow through on, but rather that we should just pick one and see where it takes us. Is that something you believe?

Trusting that our best ideas wil find us

DG: Yes absolutely. As we just talked about, the most important ideas do present themselves, over and over again. They find us, we can’t ignore them. 

In the book, one of the Seven Pillars is that your most important ideas will always find you, and I use an analogy called Prodigal Sons and Breadcrumbs. 

The short version of the story is that all your best ideas were cast into the wilderness because you weren’t ready for them, but they left a breadcrumb trail to find their way back to you. They knew to return when you were ready. 

Another dimension of this Michael is what we actually define an idea as, what our expectations of it are, and our expectation of ourselves in developing it. 

If you see an idea fully formed in your head, then as you’re creating, expect it to come out exactly as you envisage, without even the tiniest margin for error or deviation, then you’re going to end up disappointed nearly every time. 

I believe it’s better to see our ideas not as a pre-determined and fixed finish point, but as the starting point of a new adventure. The place to leap off from, rather than the place we land.

When you flip your thinking – and your expectations – around like this, it takes of so much pressure to create perfectly, and it allows for detours and Happy Accidents, meaning you often end up creating something unexpectedly wonderful that you never would have done if you’d stuck to your fixed plan.

On giving up when something isn’t working out

MN: One thing I particularly liked about the book was that you say it’s fine to give up on a project or idea that isn’t working out. That is something that a lot of people find hard to do, especially if they have already given a a project a lot of their precious energy. How do you know when it’s time to cut your losses and give up on a project?

DG: That is a very good question! If I could step back a little, and again look at some of the expectations we have when we create. 

If we start a new project and our sole measure of how worthwhile it is, or how successful it is, is based on the end “product”, then you’re not only putting a huge amount of pressure on yourself to create near perfect artwork, but you’re also blatantly ignoring all the other reasons that creating is so enjoyable and so valuable. 

The alternative is another of the Seven Pillars in the book – the idea that every project you spend time on holds its own valuable learning and experience. 

A baby isn’t born talking French, Italian, Japanese and dancing foxtrot, but doesn’t mean that baby won’t learn to speak three languages (or twenty three) and half a dozen dances, it just takes time and learning and commitment. 

Similarly, each of us as artists have our own natural learning curve and evolution. It doesn’t happen in a day, it’s a continuous process that runs through everything we create for our whole lives. 

Sometimes this idea works the opposite way round to how we expect too. We try a new medium or idea, and it soon becomes apparent that it’s nowhere near as enjoyable or interesting as we thought it might be. This is great news, as it helps us narrow our focus to what we DO need to create, as you often say – Your Important Work. 

If you try mushrooms and don’t like them, it means you can avoid dishes with mushrooms in in the future, and enjoy other food that you do like. It also means you appreciate the other food more. 

Same with creating. If you don’t finish a project, don’t discard the whole experience, there will ALWAYS be something you’ve learned and can take from it, as your evolution as an artist evolves over your lifetime.

Update: You can read part two of the interview here.

Find more details about Dan’s book, How to Get Focused and Create What Matters here and read more from Dan on his blog, A Big Creative Yes or catch him on Twitter.

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