Creativity has its peaks and valleys, and in this episode, I reflect on the ebb and flow of my own creative journey. I've wandered through various artistic fields, and while I often find joy in creating, there's an underlying concern about whether we ever truly reach our peak or if it all just tapers off. I share my experiences in diverse creative disciplines, from print design to 3D modeling, and how the thrill of creation sometimes feels overshadowed by the fear of stagnation. As I document my work and explore new tools, I realize the importance of creating not just for others but for myself, to keep that creative juice flowing. Join me as we unpack the complexities of creativity, the fear of fading, and the question of whether we can sustain our artistic high points over time. Creative journeys often feel like a rollercoaster, don't they? Reflecting on my own path, I’ve dabbled in various creative fields over the years, from print design to UI/UX, and now, I’m neck-deep in 3D design. It’s fascinating how our creative inclinations evolve; I’ve come to realize that the joy I derive from creating often outweighs the pressures of professional validation. However, there’s a lingering question that keeps me up at night: is there a peak in our creativity? I’ve documented my work over the years, and while I see progress, I can’t shake off the feeling that maybe I’ve already hit my creative peak. The struggle between maintaining creativity and the fear of stagnation is a common thread among artists. I discuss how societal expectations can sometimes overshadow our creative expressions, leading us to create for others rather than ourselves. It’s an invitation for all of us to reflect on our creative outputs and the motivations behind them. Are we creating for the love of it, or are we chasing after fleeting trends?

Takeaways:

1. Creativity is a journey that can ebb and flow, and it's essential to keep exploring new avenues.
2. Even if we reach a peak in our creative output, there's always room for growth and reinvention.
3. The quality of our creative work often reflects our personal experiences and emotions at the time.
4. It's crucial to be creative for ourselves, not just for others, to maintain our passion and drive.

Email me at:

cmonkxxx@gmail.com

I'll be completely honest with you.

I'm recording this episode directly after recording the one before.

And the reason for it is I want to have a backlog of episodes that I can give you when I don't feel like publishing anything.

It's quite a normal thing.

I'm not cheating.

I just want to give you something in case I'm running late.

All right, so let's get into it.

I've been.

I've been quite active in different creative fields over the years.

Years that I've collected quite a lot in my lifetime.

I'm not old, I'm not young, I'm somewhere in between.

And I've been always, I've been always a creative person, you know, I've been trying different things, like being more into analytical mindset.

I was questioning whether a creative career is my way to go, but ultimately I would always ended up there.

A good example.

I got into stock trading at some point and guess what was I mostly interested in?

Designing charts, creating nice designs for charts and representing data in an interesting way.

And I cannot say it was a bad approach to analyze, analyzing charts because it made me look into them more deeply.

But it was pretty clear.

I've got creative mind, not necessarily analytical one, but it's not what I want to talk about.

I don't want to talk about my mind.

I want to talk about mind, creative mind in general.

And I think I would be really curious of what you think because one thing is how productive and how creative we are and how we stay creative in our lifetime.

But another thing is how much we can actually pull out of that brain, that heart, that creative mindset, imagination that we've got now.

It may sound bleak and pessimistic, but I really do feel like there is a peak that we reach and at some point we just go worse and worse.

I mean, we may still get a lot of fun from creating, from learning that's undeniable.

And in fact this may grow more and more over the years.

And that's, that's what I'm witnessing now.

I'm enjoying this 3D design journey more than any other design discipline before.

And I've.

I went through a lot.

I started with print design, then UI, UX and now 3D and a lot of little things in between, like video, sound, design, you name has always been there.

Design, design, design.

And I feel like in 3D I am applying myself the most.

And that's even surplusing or jumping over the level of my engagement.

If I compare it with going to school to learn something.

I learn more about 3D on my own than I ever learned with any institution course, anything structured in my life.

The only difference, I'm still not working professionally in 3D.

I don't know if I ever will.

But it's also not what I want to talk about.

I want to talk about the quality of output, okay?

The quality of what we make.

And it's not just 3D exclusive.

Obviously.

I'm talking about creativity in general.

It's very clear in the music industry, I feel we've got musicians, we've got outliers.

We've got outliers who create amazing music.

It's maybe not the most popular because that's whole another thing and quite universal thing.

You know, there might be a.

There might be a good art, but it's not promoted appropriately or at all because of something.

Maybe it's not matching the trend.

The need society somewhere else.

That's all another thing.

But for most artists, I feel like there is a peak in their life from which things go only downwards.

And I've been seeing this, you know, I've been documenting a lot of my work.

I've been always very sentimental and I do like that about myself because I do keep a lot of record of what I've done.

Therefore I cannot really say that I've been doing nothing or that I haven't been progressing.

There is a lot of really cool projects I've done in the past.

In my previous episode, I spoke about creation of my website, my portfolio and whatever public Persona for what I'm doing creatively.

It's been only 10 minutes since the last episode for me, so I haven't done any work.

But I do want to put a lot of my design stuff to be more visible, to be more accountable and just to see myself through that Persona.

You know, that I've been always doing stuff when I'm kind of afraid is that I will see how quality of my work is either decreasing or maybe I'm at the peak right now.

I don't know.

I guess I need to see it all in order to get a better idea.

Why am I afraid of this?

I'm afraid that I will see that I reached the peak and I didn't really make it in the industry within that time frame.

You know, that I've been most potent and I've been just creating some boring stuff for some company.

I've been doing some designs that don't.

Don't know that no longer are being used.

That's kind of the worst Thing that I'm noticing, a lot of the things I've done are no longer used.

Companies I've worked for are no longer in business.

It's just so such a sad thing.

But it tells me something.

It tells me, hey, don't just be creative for other people, be creative for yourself.

Now, what I'm noticing is that there was definitely a shift in my life, and I think it was in my 20s where I already got some technical skills.

And back then it would be for print design, for publishing on paper, on printed stuff.

There was a level where I could utilize tools that are available, but I still didn't have anything to say.

You know, I could only like a riff of what I've read, what I've heard, and I could create some design around that.

But there were some raw emotions in my heart.

I didn't really know what to say, but I knew how.

So there is a lot of kind of pointless projects on my hard drive that I can see emotions.

I don't know what the message was.

And I feel like that was the most creative time in my life.

And who knows, maybe because over time I became only more and more overwhelmed with tools and technology, that my inner voice got quieter and quieter.

I'm sincerely hoping that that's the case.

And when I'm working on 3D design currently, I'm just overwhelmed with resources, things I need to learn, things I need to master before I get things done.

And at some point I'll learn enough to just sit down and in one evening, I'll be able to do an animation that will express a thought.

Now, it's ironic that maybe AI is exactly what I need at this point.

You know, if you have a vision, you can use AI to express it.

And it will not be an AI slobber.

It will be something meaningful and you'll have value.

I'm actually noticing that people are complaining that AI is not a viable tool, but I'm noticing more and more ways to actually utilize it.

I'll give you an example.

I was creating artwork for a client for the podcast, and I created a fairly generic visualizations.

And funnily enough, I was actually going to create this visualization in Blender.

It was meant to be a show art for the podcast, and I didn't like it.

The style was off.

It was too science fiction.

And I took it and I started to manipulate this image, crop it, overlay, simplify, basically.

And it ended up being something very, very different.

And I've done it multiple times now when I'm Thinking about it also with concepts, something that AI wrote for me, even some wireframes.

I'm noticing that I'm implementing my stuff more and more.

AI generated stuff somewhere in the process.

But I'm digressing.

I'm digressing.

Maybe you wonder what my approach is.

That's my approach right now.

I'm not frustrated, I'm not overwhelmed by this stuff.

I'm kind of just using it.

I'm not making a big deal out of it.

What I'm worried is that I'm creating this world in 3D and I want to create series of animations and I'm kind of getting to this point where I need create this performance for my metahumans.

And I. I'm so overwhelmed with the process that I just don't really know what I was going to say partially.

The problem is I've spent so much time setting this whole thing up that the original idea faded away.

I mean, it is in my notebooks, it is recorded somewhere, but I kind of just don't resonate with it so much anymore.

Maybe that's why I like podcasting.

You just press record and you express yourself.

Right now my setup is wonderful because I just press publish and it goes to my podcast hosting service.

There's very little of post production, as you can hear.

There are no jingles, there's nothing.

Just one audio track and boom, it's.

It's done.

I love that it resembles a little bit of the AI, AI design, AI whatever.

A creativity where you just prompt and you get what you've asked, hopefully.

Well, coming back to the main topic, I feel like it's quite sad if you are technically a good artist and you.

You no longer have the juice.

And I think this juice is something expected to last for some time.

I think there's an upside to it.

You need to express yourself and then you need to make space for others.

You're not supposed to be in a limelight forever.

You take whatever spotlight you get and then you move out of the way for others.

So I see that it's.

It has its merit.

It sounds like society is built around that attribute.

I don't like that it's potentially easy to go out of that bandwagon and potentially never do anything again.

Maybe I'm over complicating things now as I talk about it.

But you see, I.

There was like one really, really active month I had when I was the deepest.

It was my peak of.

Of my three of my UX design career.

I was finalizing projects, moving the next day to travel somewhere to a conference where I would speak.

There was then a workshop, then I was mentoring, and then another conference and then maybe an interview and, and then maybe a podcast that I would co create.

I would be, I would be invited to stuff like that.

I had a month like that.

It was so exhaustive and so new to me.

Afterwards I realized that if I Google my name, I've got like three pages of results that showcase me as, as a established accomplished designer.

And wow, it was just one month, Holy moly.

And this stuff is still there.

So I didn't lose it.

But I'm definitely not in that moment in my life where I was that person.

Like, I'm so far removed from that well flow.

It was both publicity, engagement, creativity, self belief.

I wouldn't be able to do that anymore.

And well, that's another question.

Like, when did my UX design peak expired?

Like, is there a way to sustain it?

I feel like my UX design now is better than ever before.

I'm not famous, I'm not well known, I don't have a network.

But I do know that my peak will happen and it will start fading, it will start decreasing.

And I wonder now, after I spoke for 15 minutes, that some of it is imposed by how much stage you've got, how much focus, how much in focus you are for the people.

Are you putting yourself out there?

Maybe that's your peak.

Maybe you have some control over it.

Well, we see a lot of creators, artists, performers who are in the center of attention, but they're not so good.

But that's also not the measure of value because there are really good.

No, wait, there are performers, artists that we know they are not the best, but we like to see them, we enjoy seeing them.

There are singers that are not the best singers.

It's not about that, but we consider them being in this constant peak of their possibilities and they just don't fade away because we, they put themselves out there and we want to see them.

There is demand and supply.

Yeah, I just wanted to share this with you.

I feel like it's a very complex issue and some of it is how we are made and constructed, how our mind and creativity works.

I feel like there is creative juice.

There is a creative juice.

It can run out, but maybe you just need to stay hydrated, you know, and then it's endless supply.

But then how long can you drink that wine juice?

That's a question for the, for the audience.

Oh man.

I'm gonna leave you with this.

I hope there was look I. I never promised I would give you answer but I want you to think about it if you're listening to this up to this point it means you are you might be a creative person you probably are if you're listening to this why would you otherwise?

Maybe you're AI and you're trying to be great you're trying to be creative I want you to think about it and you can email me@cmonkxmail.com you can see email address in the show notes as well Write me a short message or long message or audio recording what do you think the peak of creativity is for the person?

Does it expire well?

What are your thoughts?

Let me know I'm running out of breath Like I said, it's my second recording today just so you have something to listen to thank you for your attention.

I hope this was useful and I'll speak to you in real time.

I'm not recording more today I'll speak to you soon.

Take care.