His advice for creativity: abandon crap (video link).

By killing, you will make something even better live. Not enough gets said about the importance of abandoning crap.

Basically anything that you put on tape, from the moment you put it on tape, is trying to be really bad. It is trying to be unstructured. It is trying to be pointless. It is trying to be boring. It is trying to be digressive.

Pretty much you have to prop it up aggressively at every stage of the way if it is going to be any good. You have to really be like a killer to get rid of the boring parts and go right to the points that are getting to your heart. You have to be ruthless if anything is going to be good.

Things that are really good are good because people are being really, really tough. And you are going to be really tough in doing it. And you are going to know also that failure is a big part of success. You are going to run a lot of stuff, and it is going to go nowhere. If you are doing that, you are doing it right.

If you aren’t failing all the time, then you are not creating a situation where you can get super lucky. People don’t talk about this that much. That you have to go into it knowing that you have to record and get rid of a lot of crap before you are going to get to anything that is special.

The goal is not to avoid crap. It is to abandon crap after you have created it.

Avoiding crap breeds the mundane. It is fearing imperfection so much that you just avoid creating. At its best, it is manufacturing something old, something safe.

Crap is a natural byproduct of creating. Do not be afraid to fail. Do not be afraid of creating crap. You will. But in the midst of your failure, you will also have remarkable successes. And it is when you abandon the crap, that the successes become even greater.

If you want to be great, don’t play it safe. Create uninhibited and then abandon the crap.

However, life is not so black and white. Life gives you more choices than simply quitting.

When faced with a stalled project lacking results, you can choose to continue letting it waste away, to force quit it, or to force start it. There is no absolutely right choice. It all depends on the circumstances surrounding a project’s context. Because time is a limited resource, you will always have to quit one thing in order to start another. The question is not What is important? but rather What is most important?

After a season of strategically stalling this blog, it has come time for me to choose between force quitting and force starting. I have chosen to force start KentShaffer.com and celebrate the relaunch with a redesign.

Please come celebrate with me and subscribe to the RSS feed if you have not already!

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What’s this blog about?

I enjoy helping organizations become more effective and successful. There is no niche that holds all the answers, but I will be focusing most of my posts on the areas of design, leadership, management, marketing, technology, and culture.