Why you’re not doing creative work

I have social anxiety, and I feel like deadlines and public commitments stress me out and distract from actual work. The more work feels like non-committed play and less like social obligation, the better.

However, deadlines work best for me if I am genuinely helping someone. So setting an arbitrary deadline is less productive than asking something like "I need that tomorrow because I would like to show that to client". Possibly because helping others is always, in some sense, uncommitted.

- You've just finished reading Linchpin and come to the conclusion that you're not doing creative work because you don't have the time.

- But you can do things fast when you're already dripping in experience. (Explore/Exploit problem)

- So, you spend more time gathering experience and use some approaches from The Procrastination Equation.

- Then after all of that you realize thinking outside of the box is hard so you induce creativity using ThinkerToys.

Nice read, but am I only one annoyed by titles like this one? “Why you’re not creative” subtly implies that you should be doing creative work and that if you aren’t, you’re doing something wrong. So many self-help articles on HN in particular seem designed to inspire this sort of guilt trip.

Do creative work if you want to. Or don’t. Not everyone has to do everything. The answer to “why you’re not doing creative work” honestly could be “Because I don’t want to and I don’t have to.”

That's probably different for everyone, but

> In the exploration phase, you don’t know what the thing is going to be, you don’t have all of the information or ideas you want to have, you don’t even know if what you’re thinking about is important, and any little breeze in the wrong direction might blow you off course. In the execution phase, you are inspired, you know what the thing is, you know how to make it, it feels urgent; all you need to do is sit down and do the thing.

That's pretty much the opposite of how I work on such things. In the exploration phase there are lots of interesting aspects to think about and I'm motivated to actually work on that, while during execution all the interesting parts are already done, therefore my motivation is completely missing and there's a good chance that the "sit down and do the thing" part never happens or if I start I use every possible excuse to explore another project instead.

As someone with ADHD who has done what I consider to be quite a lot of creative work, the equation seems to be the exact opposite for me. Execution is dull and predictable, plus my brain just doesn’t care about the good/bad consequences unless they are both significant and imminent. On the other hand, during exploration I’m like a firecracker on speed and can lose hours going down rabbit holes experimenting and chasing different ideas. My brain is very happy in this state with a constant flow of dopamine but before my diagnosis, I struggled to ever finish anything of significance. For the past couple of years since though (and with the help of medication which ironically is a kind of “slow release amphetamine” as far as I understand, so quietens my brain’s constant desire for stimulation), I’ve finally been able to see a whole serious of large tasks through to completion over the course of a much longer project than I’ve ever really been able to do before. So I guess what the author describes may well be the root of why people sometimes refer to ADHD being a “superpower” if neurotypicals tend to struggle so much with the bits that come naturally to us…