Process is Everything

29 Nov 2020

In a recent post on his blog The Process of Being my friend Diego Gonzalez argues that process can sometimes inhibit creativity:

When you try to constrain and optimize that which is inherently messy, unpredictable and serendipitous to a process, you miss the point of it and strip the humanity away.

Diego is thinking of the wrong sort of process.

A process, the noun, is the repeatable, predictable, task-driven thing that he’s discussing and it can be stifling to a person who’s stuck. I’d argue that the best creative process has some slack in it and accounts for noodling around and sitting with uncertainty, but this isn’t my point.

If we think of process as a verb, the friction Diego describes disappears. The act of processing is messy, unpredictable and serendipitous.

It’s working through it, it’s getting to the bottom of it, it’s the reason why Seth Godin famously doesn’t believe in writer’s block: doing the work makes the work easier.

If we’re stuck or struggling (and it’s not because our life is in upheaval or we’re struggling to make rent) it’s likely that we’re waiting for perfection to be visited upon us.

Perfection isn’t coming. Like Elizabeth Gilbert says,

Embrace the glorious mess that you are.