What I Learned From 30 (More) Days of Creative Practice

This past October was Workplace Creativity Month and my company once again ran our Creative Sprint® 30-day challenge to help businesses and individuals develop a creative habit.

While it is a seriously satisfying accomplishment to complete a small creative action every single day for thirty days, a huge value of a creative practice comes from the reflection on the experience that happens afterwards. Knowing how beneficial this creative workout can be from my own experience as the creator of a yearlong daily creative project – and interviewing thousands of people who done their own – I’ve participated along with our community every time we've run one of these 30-day challenges, since we launched the Creative Sprint in 2015. Below are my responses to the reflection questions we sent out at the end of this year’s Sprint...

Day 19: Cut holes in the pages of a magazine, catalog, or book so that what you reveal beneath creates something new.

What day was most challenging for you? Why?

Day 19's prompt was "Cut holes in the pages of a magazine, catalog, or book so that what you reveal beneath creates something new". I found this one to be extra challenging to my perfectionist side, I wanted to truly embrace the randomness of the task and actually have whatever was directly beneath show through, but nothing was working for me. I couldn’t get my head out of the idea that there had to be some logic to what I was cutting out and what was seen below. This is one of those times when I found a great deal of inspiration from looking at how others approached this challenge – since we’re all working on the same task at the same time. It’s a reminder of how many different ways people can approach the same problem. And that ultimately inspired me to rethink my own approach to this task. 

Day 4: Make something inspired by the lyrics to a song that puts you in a great mood.

Did you make any surprising discoveries?

It wasn’t so much of a discovery as a reminder: no matter how much time you put into a project or how much you love the end result, it has no correlation to how an audience will respond. Since the Creative Sprint process encourages sharing (and specifically public sharing on social media) of your daily creations, you get an amazing immediate response to these little imperfect experiments. I never could’ve imagined that making a Beetlejuice sandworm from a banana would get such an over the top response (and become one of the most popular posts I’d ever shared on Instagram). Honestly I was actually a bit anxious about the possibility of getting a negative response when I first hit the publish button for this piece! Getting an immediate response to your ideas gives helps you see what resonates with people and what might be worth pursuing further. 

Day 2: Create an anagram of your name and illustrate it.

What did you do this month that you would like to continue doing?

Ink drawing is something I really enjoy, but don’t practice enough. Doing the Creative Sprint is a great excuse for me to pull out a bunch of skills I haven’t perfected, because they don’t get used much in my regular day-to-day work. By making these little experiments with them during the month I’m setting a reminder to myself that they’re worth exploring more, especially when my next professional creative challenge comes along. 

I’m already looking forward to what will happen in next year’s Creative Sprint®! Want to see everything I made this month? Look on my Instagram page HERE. Want to bring the Creative Sprint® to your workplace? Find out more HERE. 

Did these insights resonate with you? Have you participated in a Creative Sprint or other 30-day practice? I’d love to hear your thoughts, please share a comment below…