Path of Least Resistance: Learning to Become the Creative Force in Your Own Life

The result you want only needs to be clear enough so that you would recognize it if you had it.

An artist who uses an improvisory process may be unclear on how the final painting will look, but extremely clear on what he or she wants to express. In this sense the painting itself is part of a process. The final result is the power of the expression.

The conception period feels like play. Concepts are general and allow you to mentally try different possibilities. Once you have formed a concept, the next step is to crystallize it into a specific vision. How do you want to see the concept manifested? When you focus a concept into a vision, you are limiting many ways into a single way.

A common mistake is to attempt to match your concept to what already exists instead of forming the concept from scratch.

When you limit, you must include and exclude. "In order to get some of my books to work, I needed to throw out some of my best lines!"

Most people don't realize that they can treat their own life as a creation.

The art of accurately naming what you want begins with separating what you wnat from questions of possibility.

"The vision of the whole... appears more and more to be the essential act of creation." -- Roger Sessions.

Civilization and culture provide a shared framework for collaboration and creation. However, their very existence also necessarily limits the perspectives and scope of such creation. Take ancient cultures such as the Egyptians or Maya for example, or modern day capitalism. These systems all allow their participants to build upon a common framework, but also implicitly influence and limit the scope of their visions. The real danger is that this tunnel vision is difficult to become aware of for those in a particular system.