Welcome to Episode 5 of The Creative Life podcast. In this episode, we look at one of the biggest reasons why creative projects fail.
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In this episode you’ll discover:
- The importance and dangers of losing yourself in your creative project
- Choosing your advisors and getting feedback
- The importance of constructive criticism in the creative process
- Getting a sense of perspective
- The creative pre-mortem
- Marketing for creative projects
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Transcript
Hi I’m James Taylor.
Why do creative projects fail?
One of the biggest reasons is that as creators, whether you are a composer, a writer, an entrepreneur working on start-up, a visual artist, whatever thing you are creating, we lose a sense of perspective on the work.
This is actually an earlier stage of something you created. You actually want to lose yourself in the project. It’s part of doing any great work. If we become so immersed, we internalize what we have created. We then need a sense of perspective. This is actually very important.
However, there comes a stage when we lose sight of the truth. That is why we need to take a step back to get perspective. The best way to do that is by bringing feedback of others, or trusted advisers. If you do this point too early in the process, you will get crushed of what you are trying to create.
Be very selective on who you choose to be your advisers. Don’t bring them in too early in giving you feedback.
Essentially, you would want to find someone who will be able to provide you with constructive criticism to your project. Always remember that if you get the right people around you such as your trusted advisers, they should be giving feedback on the project and not to you, as an individual. That’s the first thing.
The second way in getting a sense of perspective is something called pre-mortem. “Creative Pre-Mortem.” This is where you are about to pre-launch something. This idea of creative pre-mortem is where you want to sit down with your team and advisers. You have to imagine that the project has failed. List down reasons why your project failed. Once you have down that, you actually have a good checklist on why your project has failed. At that point, you have two options on what to do. You can change what you want on your business model, and for those that you have a good gut instinct on, these are the ones that you want to keep. You can have two lists. One for things that you don’t want to deal with, and another list on what you want to take home and improve on. Start putting your checklist together of those things that you want to be working on.
The whole idea behind this is that in order to try to avoid for your project to fall flat on its face, you need to get some perspective. The best way of getting perspective is to get feedback from outside. The great cure on that is what we call creative pre-mortem.
