What Making Babies Can Teach Us About The Art of Loving Creation
By: Michael Neill
Tags: Creativity, Project Management, Productivity, Business, Children

What Making Babies Can Teach Us About The Art of Loving Creation

Four lessons about creation that we can learn from the process of having children

Photo by Troy T on Unsplash

“Making the decision to have a child — it is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.” -Elizabeth Stone

I am, by most people’s measures, a “creator”. What that means is that over the past 30+ years I’ve been involved in a number of projects that have gone from a vague, formless possibility into a “thing” that people can see, hear, taste, touch, and smell. Those things include more than a dozen books, radio series, screenplays, and thousands of blog posts, videos, podcasts, and more.

While it would be neat to think that I’m in some way different or special from anyone else, I know from years of working with students and clients that absolutely anyone can learn to unleash their inner creator by gaining a deeper understanding of what creating is and how it works.

Although there are a nearly infinite number of metaphors we could use for the creative process, one of my favorites is the process of bringing a child into the world. While (spoiler alert) I’ve never had a baby in my tummy, I do have three children and have watched the process of their going from nothing to something with great fascination.

Photo by Piron Guillaume on Unsplash

In each case, there was:

A fun bit A boring bit A painful bit A wonderful bit

The fun bit (at least for me) was messing around. In the case of our children, that messing around came with a greater or lesser degree of awareness that the kind of playfulness my wife and I were engaging in has a tendency to produce babies somewhere down the line. Since we never knew which bit of fun might lead to a baby, we mostly let our fun be purposeless — playing to play instead of “to win”.

In the same way, knowing that playing around with ideas, possibilities, and other people will often result in some “thing” coming from nothing encourages you to play more often. The more we play, the more playful we become, and the more things seem to inadvertently get created along the way. As the legendary French actress Sarah Bernhardt once said, “Life begets life, energy begets energy. It is by spending oneself that one becomes rich.”

Photo by Robert Collins on Unsplash

The boring bit (at least for me) was waiting for our creative projects to emerge in some kind of recognizable form. Six weeks or so into the process my wife’s tummy began to gently round; twelve weeks or so in we got to see an ultrasound image of what was going on underneath the surface. But it was more than nine months into the process before our little creation came out into the light of day and began screaming its little lungs out.

While the incubation period for a human baby is pretty predictable, a creative project can be quietly forming in the background for anywhere from a couple of minutes to decades. John Lennon and Paul McCartney apparently wrote some of their biggest hits in ten minutes. Bruce Springsteen spent over six months perfecting the lyrics and drumbeats for his signature hit “Born to Run”. James Cameron spent over 15 years bringing one of the highest grossing films of all time, “Avatar”, from concept to screen.

The simple truth is, we don’t know how long something is going to take. If we think it should be going faster than it is, we’re liable to feel bored and frustrated in equal measure, sometimes even to the point of losing patience, losing heart, and losing hope.

The painful bit (at least for my wife) was the time spent pushing the baby out into the world, literally kicking and screaming. I have certainly heard reports of babies just “popping out” with little effort on the part of the mother; I have also had the experience of sitting down to write and a piece emerging fully formed in the thirty minutes or so it took to type the words out of my head and onto the page.

Our first baby took 56 hours of labor to emerge. When I asked my wife how she kept her spirits up during the process, she said she was so excited to meet whoever came out that she could mostly put up with the pain and discomfort.

Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

Similarly, my first book took thirteen complete drafts between writing the first words and delivering the final manuscript, but I was so excited to see where it finished up I barely noticed. That’s why when people ask me if I love writing, my honest answer is “sometimes — but I always love reading what I’ve written”. The point is, understanding that even bringing the most beautiful of creations into being may involve hard work and even some pain helps us keep going when the going gets tough.

Which brings us to the wonderful (at least for me) bit — watching our children take on a life of their own. We used to marvel at the fact that we could watch our babies sleep and our toddlers toddle for hours on end without ever once getting bored. And while I may have entertained fantasies of how my kids would turn out, I quickly realized that they had minds of their own and life had plans for them that have only become clear as they’ve played out in their lives.

In the same way, there comes a point in any creative endeavor where you have to give the creation its head and let it take you where it wants to go instead of oversteering it in one direction or another. Some of the creative projects I was most excited about it didn’t survive their first encounter with the outside world; others that seemed almost like casual whimsy have formed the basis of my business and career.

Photo by Piron Guillaume on Unsplash

Here’s a nutshell summary of some lessons for creating learned from having babies that have proven equally helpful when it comes to creating in the world: