12 Steps to Create a Life You’ll Love to Live. Step 11.
How do you get from good to great?
Okay so you’ve created your product. You’ve got a first draft or a prototype or a template, or some first something going on. You’re excited about it. You want to put it out in the world. But you’re not sure if it’s quite ready.
You have to decide once again what you’re committed to. It might be enough for you to bring your project to this point and let it go. You might recognize: “This is something good, but it’s not what I want to be doing now… or it’s not worth it to me to invest more time.”
But if you are committed to see it through, this is the work there is to do.
This post is #11 in a series of 12 which takes you through the 12 stages of the creative process as I describe it in my book, The Wheel Of Creativity: Taking Your Place in the Adventure Of Life.
Step 11: Cut. Cut. Cut.
The 11th step in the creative journey is to cut, cut, cut. Station 11 in the Wheel of Creativity is Pruning.
This is the place where you eliminate everything that’s not essential to the final product. You might be cutting words. You might be trimming branches. You might be rearranging musical notes. You might be simplifying a dish. Or you might be testing your product for bugs.
Whatever you’re working on this is where you make it better. You refine it, develop it, edit it or cut it. But before you take it out into the world and expect it to be successful this step is required.
In gardening the act of pruning is an integral part of creating healthy plant. And it’s less traumatic and more nourishing to the plant to make a clean cut, in a finite period of time.
My experience in this station is that you can get stuck in two key ways.
- Perfectionism. If you have issues about perfectionism you can stay here too long trying to make it better and better and better, eventually perfecting the soul out of it.
- Fantasy. If you have a bit of fantasy going about your project you can try to skip this step altogether, thinking it’s going to be a best-seller as is.
As Albert Einstein said:
“Everything should be made as simple as possible but not simpler.”
There is an important balance between eliminating what’s not necessary and knowing where to stop. but the work must be done. And when it’s done, it brings you to Step 12, the final step in the process, which I’ll cover tomorrow.
Learn more.
We’re almost there. Just one step left in the creative process of your life. If you’ve enjoyed this series and you haven’t done so already, move your cursor up the sidebar on the right and type your email address into the box beneath “Don’t miss a post! Get blog alerts.” I’ll email them to you.
Free Discovery Call.
This Sunday, on September 15th, I’ll be offering a free half-hour Discovery Call in which you can learn more about the Wheel of Creativity and my next in-depth course I’ll be offering this Autumn.
