How opinion affects creativity and how to deal with it ?
Tags: Opinion, Deal, Life Lessons, Creativity, Art

There’s a disastrous plague in the world which not only consumes human beings but also ideas and businesses. This plague goes by the name of opinions. Although opinion seems good at first but later turns out to be the hurdle in the path of success.

A complete stranger can form the strongest opinions about you. It seems that your existence makes them feel angry and peevish in nature. They always have something to rant about you. You’ve never even shared the same air, and yet you’re involved in a deep personal relationship.

This makes a person vulnerable to the outside changes thereby making the person feel pain on a prolonged basis a prolonged basis.

The Haters love thinking their opinion matters. They want credit for making someone quit something they love and this makes their fuel burn from inside.Maybe it’s the only thing that gives their life any meaning.

Get to know your Haters.

You can always spot a hater because they’ll normally come to you.They pry on the very success they failed upon and see to it that others fail too. That’s what they do. They love any chance to make someone give up and loose hope. Their services are free of charge but pays a heavy duty on people who are targeted at.

The most blasphemous comments don’t deserve your attention. Life is not an episode of X-Factor. Most actual talent scouts and agents don’t want to insult you. There’s no money in crushing people’s dreams.

Turning up an opinion’s volume doesn’t make it any more relevant. Or accurate. So you know to ignore the loudest critics.

Know which opinion really matters

Advice from experts doesn’t just wash up on your shore. If you want their advice, you have to earn it. The fact that they’re giving you any feedback at all? That’s probably a compliment by itself. If you really want something from a person you need to do some type of an output before getting any type of feedback.

If you don’t impress someone worth impressing, then they’re just indifferent toward you. You have to beg them to explain why. Or pay them. Maybe they’re not right, but they don’t want you to quit. They either want you to succeed, or they don’t care.

Ignore the amateur advice

The most obvious haters come in the form of Internet trolls. But there’s plenty of others who secretly don’t want you to succeed. It’s only personal in the sense that they see your rise as a commentary on their shortcomings. To them, you’re proof that they don’t have what it takes. In order to avoid such people understand the art of creating more content. As more hate comments start coming, try exceeding the positive comments by giving more good artistic contents.

Nobody can ever really predict their success. You won’t become the next superstar just because your friends say so, but you’re not doomed because someone else says the opposite.

In truth, no single person’s opinion matters. Not your mom’s. Not your spouse’s. Nobody’s.

Develop a sense of maturity.

You have to grow your own inner critic. Build your own standards. It’s the only way to succeed as any kind of artist. Also, it’s the hardest part. But when you’ve trained yourself, then you’ll know quality in your own work. And you’ll know what doesn’t measure up.

You get there by exploring your own tastes and pushing on them. A writer has to read a library. A musician has to listen to one. You have to learn to recognize talent — even across styles and genres you might not personally like. It’s called artistic maturity.

Focus on the work, not the reception.

One local singer I knew used to agonise over mediocre reviews. He’d spend all night reading them, over and over again, hounding his girlfriend for her interpretation. Finally, she got sick of his self-centered insecurity and dumped him. He could’ve written a song about it. But no. Just kept obsessing over everyone’s opinion.

You can imagine what happened to his career. Even I can’t remember his name anymore. He’s just the guy who worried.

He thought of himself as the next Enrique Iglesias. It bothered him that nobody else agreed. He didn’t realize that you can’t become what everyone else wants. Or even what you want.

You have to figure out what you already are. You aren’t great or terrible. Just inevitable. You can’t be or make anything else. When you accept that, reception doesn’t matter anymore.

You have to learn how to listen to yourself, not to the exclusion of everyone else, but as an equal voice. You don’t need to think of yourself as some undiscovered genius. Just good enough for now.

Learn to have absurd deadlines.

Death is what gives life meaning. Deadlines are what gives art meaning.

Why can you deliver freelance work on time, but not consistently ship your own? Deadlines. Why do you pay your phone bill but not order the mic you need to launch your podcast? Deadlines. Why do you show up for your doctor’s appointment, but not your daily writing time? Deadlines.

Deadlines awaken our inner panic monster, which is why they work. If we can’t get that monster to wake up, bad things happen.

While you’re wondering how to resolve this issue, how to crack the code, the pros simply take the mechanism that works from one arena to the other. They create their own deadlines, no matter how irrational or ridiculous they are.

Learn to create daily

In front of a deadline-backdrop, daily creation makes a lot more sense. You don’t just have to write, you have to publish. You don’t just have to record, you have to release. The professional knows that once she schedules the exhibit, she’ll pick up the brush. The amateur tries to sync his art with inspiration. The pro knows that inspiration will sync with him once he sits down in his chair.

And while pressure gets you going, habits keep you going. They allow you to dance with the deadlines. Suddenly, the question is not if you can deliver, but how much. To prevent this question from becoming yet another problem, pros don’t try to answer it in advance.

Creativity is not a shelf that’s empty as soon as you take off all the books. It’s a river to which you can walk at any time, grab a cup, and scoop out some water. It’s just easier to access it at a random point in the middle than to find the source. Innovation is never a singular event. Great ideas might be the gold in the river, but they too are the result of a long, methodical, meandering process. That process is always running, so you can tap into it whenever.