Safety, Bravery, Aha!: The Creativity Pyramid

Okay, I lied. The Creativity Pyramid is more like four layers. Or, three-ish, with a pedestal.

Here’s 95% of what I do, summed up in one little image.

The Creativity Pyramid

Foundation

It’s not just an Isaac Asimov novel. Foundation comes before anything else.

Read: If you want to climb Everest, you need ropes and a plane ticket first.

Do you want to write the great [national] novel? That’s great. Will you write it long-hand or on a computer? In Scrivener or Microsoft Word? At what time of day? How long? Two hours, from 5-7am before the kids are up? Is your chair comfortable, and can you comfortably sit for two hours?

The foundation isn’t exciting or sexy, but not having a foundation is like having the pedestal kicked out from under you before you even start.

Safety

If the foundation is the tangible, safety is the intangible. Do you feel safe expressing yourself? Have you faced your Inner Critic? Do you have any nopers in your life who shit on your creativity?

Bravery

Here’s where it gets juicy. Creativity is hard work. If it was easy, everyone would do it and it wouldn’t elicit the awe that it does. Once you feel safe expressing yourself, then you gotta express yourself. When you’ve faced your Inner Critic and decided your need to create trumps your Inner Critic’s need to keep you safe, you have to just do it.

Aha!

This is Carnegie Hall, winning an Oscar, or finally painting with watercolors for the first time. It’s whatever it was you heaved yourself up on your Creativity Ladder up the Creativity Pyramid (to the Creativity Apex? I’ll stop now) to do.

I mean this in the nicest way possible: I don’t care about your Aha! moments. I don’t even bother talking about it when I teach. Because when you get there, you will know. You don’t need to think about the Creativity Pyramid anymore; you’re off running without training wheels.

But, in a twist, this is the part of the pyramid everyone gets stuck in. Well, well before they’ve even reached it. They imagine, fear, fantasize, fret, fawn over what it might be like to be there, what it will look like to be up at the tippity top, or what fames or fortunes will be coming their way. Or they don’t want to go through the struggles or boredom of Foundation, Safety, and/or Bravery to get there.

But you don’t have an option. You don’t get to have your Aha! moments without putting in the work. (I know, I’ve tried playing the creativity lottery, too. Someone has been discovered at the mall, right??)

Just show up

Woody Allen (boo! hiss!) has a great quote: 80% of success is just showing up. If you aren’t willing to climb the pyramid step by sometimes-excruciating step, you run the risk of what-iffing what could have been.

But here’s the secret: You never have to show up in Aha! Or even bravery. Or even safety. You can start in foundation. But you do have to start.