How to Stop Procrastinating for Good - André 3000, Little Simz, Virgil Abloh

try to jot down ideas and lyrics none of that excited me it it kind of felt like I'm trying to do a thing we all know those special days the ones where it just seems to come naturally maybe you've just got over that Savage breakup and you're about ready for your heart to open up or you slept 10 hours and the coffee you had is hitting just right whatever it is on those good days you slip easily into that creative Flow State and the idea of time and external pressures fade a long way into the background but yeah if you're anything like me those good days they don't come every day and some days when you feel stuck or the inspiration just isn't coming that's what this video is about the fear in the process lies around the fact that you don't know whether you're going to be able to do it at that particular moment or not so I got very used to overriding that and having to to be ready to work however I felt if I could sum up the reason for procrastination in my own work it's not that I feel lazy or unmotivated or stuck without any possible roots to go down in fact I think it's something like the direct opposite to that for me that feel of procrastination is more like the overwhelm of too much possibility on those good days then those inspired days it's not that my mind's open to all the different Roots I could go down but more that there's a clear limited path in terms of what I'm trying to execute in their book on inside the Box creative thinking boy and Goldenberg argue that powerful creative thinking doesn't come from sitting around and waiting for that moment of inspiration to strike but by looking deeply at the material or ideas that we already have and using a systematic approach to rearrange these components and play with them to create something [Music] new and this is actually an Air Max 90 that's turned inside out that got jammed back into it and I was like stop no one do anything else it's done that shoe exists because we were just like cutting around in and making this cutting around and making this and making [Music] this so I wanted to start with the artistic form of hip-hop sampling or sampling culture in general because it sits quite close to home with How I build these videos and is a great example of how by using the inside the Box creative thinking approach we can constrain and limit the idea space around our work and avoid that over overwhelm and procrastination in Dan Char's book on Jay Diller time the writer gives us details on Diller's monkik creative approach to his process every day no matter how late Jay stayed up he rose at 7:00 a.m. from 7 to 9: a.m. he swept wiped and dusted every inch of his Studio whilst listening to music he didn't just skip through the records needle dropping for interesting Parts he listened to entire songs listened and listened his vigilance was almost always rewarded by an element deep within the track the key thing here in terms of procrastination is that Dylan never has to sit in front of that blank page or hover over the MPC as that metronome ticks over expectantly I um go to the page when I already have a thought or a a sentence or a no note that I want to make so it's very quickly not blank it could be a line of dial or it could be something I overheard and I'll revise it even if I'm not intending to do anything with it I want it to be as good as it can the symbol of the blank page sits at the heart of ideas and myths around creative block and procrastination and it's the overwhelming amount of possibilities that that blank page puts in front of us that we're going to focus on Heming down when we meet procrastination in our own work but I think it's important not to be precious that's what this whole thing is like another dream project for me and I was like I have to hit this out of the park but I was only interested in restraining myself and only editing it 3% when we're sitting in that moment of procrastination we can ask ourselves that simple question what constraint and limitation can we look to apply to get that engine of creative inspiration started now there's endless examples we could discuss of this in popular culture but in order to give you something solid to take away here I thought it might be more useful to demonstrate using one of my own projects in terms of Music Creation I can be quite all over the place in regards to my process and the open possibility of different Pathways to go down has led to many experiments in style and form over the years but nothing that has really felt cohesive in the way that I'm looking for so the basic approach to the new planning method that I'm trying to employ here is this idea of building a plan based on the things that we're not going to do as opposed to looking at all the possibilities of things that that we could do I've always wanted to write a play because uh a play seems like the ultimate form of minimalism every aspect every element in a play the characters the settings the time everything is so limited and you have to do so much with such limited stuff so we're going to be looking at three different prompts that I've built in terms of limitations and constraints for my project and all these prompts along with another one that I'm developing at the moment are going to be put into this week's newsletter if you fancy using them in your own work or just taking a look at how I'm approaching this plan because you think it might be useful for you so prompt number one is about limiting what I want from the project and instead of thinking about the lofty goals of creating a polished piece of final work that represent everything that I've learned and wanted to communicate through music in the past 15 years I just wanted to give myself a chance and propose something simple instead the outcome of this project being constrained to just trying to overcome the creative block itself and gather some momentum to push forward in the future if I want to just coming up with that limitation for the aim and outcome of this project already I felt some pressure lift off my shoulders in terms of how good ideas needed to be to move forward with them or what I was asking myself to pluck out the air here when inspiration comes what I do is yes I lay it down but I don't say oh how genius I am I have it today I actually said okay that's a good first idea always when I'm adding something I'm visiting and revisiting and revisiting so in a way I like to work in layers and layers little things here and there is what I think I enjoy more by the way that is like Eternal shaping of something the second limitation and constraint that I want to introduce here is one that I hope will be useful to a lot of artists out there and that's the idea of taking a project that we're procrastinating on or struggling to move forward with and making a limitation around the tools that we use to complete that project I think other times I've been very much like oh let's try to produce the album as well but sometimes I might be introvert I was so into like no I need to focus on the one thing I know I can do with my eyes closed and in my sleep and that's right hone in on that and really trust the process this limitation could be around the painting material you use illustration methods or the Daw you operate in to produce your music but for me it was about limiting the instruments at the moment in my journey with that I actually have a bit more songwriting dexterity when working on the piano but by extracting the piano as a possible tool I recognize that I can close down thousands of possible creative decisions that I might have to make around completing this project by only using the guitar as the instrument then I'm going to be able to focus F us my energy and time on the lyric writing which I see is the heart of this project and what I want to do with it like a graffiti artist organizing their tag around recognizability and speed or rapper who switches over to the flute in order to remove the imposition of his analytic mind and focus his project around feeling when we make a clear decision and build a limitation around what our true project goals are we can recognize where we should focus our resources and understand those areas that can be stripped back and simplified but you decide to show Paris in black and white when was that decision made we I made it right away because the movie we didn't have enough money to make the movie look good in color if any DP would have come to me when I was working on this project and say okay so what are the magentas that you want or what is the penone for that scene I was like go yourself you know I'm focusing on something that's way more more interesting than that and that was a subject so that's what uh black and white does and it's cheaper okay the final limitation that I wanted to look at is just a basic one of limiting the time that I spend on the project now obviously there's a lot you can do in terms of playing with that limitation around time and how we work at this early development stage in the project I didn't want to be too strict with time limitations myself but instead I just wanted to consciously try to build a bit of loose time around a few other activities and try to pick up the guitar every now and then instead of looking at my phone I'd like to have the songs playable by next spring so after Christmas I might start to bring in a bit more Focus around some certain time constraints in terms of hitting those goals I'm going to link a podcast in the free newsletter from this week that looked at some useful ideas I think around constraining our creative process to certain small chunks of time in the day in order to get us moving forward with more focus and energy and yeah as I said above please do feel free to follow the link to the newsletter if you want to see this plan written out or copy and paste the prompts for yourself okay I'm going to leave that there now but before I go I wanted to put that sentiment in here again that as artists the idea of procrastination can come along with a lot of guilt sometimes and just to mention here that we don't have to accept those ideas around our lazy or unmotivation in the age that we're living in it's really easy to feel inspired in one moment and then kind of overwhelmed and hopeless in the next so yeah when you feel yourself in that moment remember you do always have the power to limit possibilities and bring those projects in front of you more easily into hand in a way that makes you feel empowered again so with all that said an invite is always to let me know if anything that I've said has resonated with your own thoughts or different approaches that you might use use yourself when you hit that wall of procrastination I'm going to link some more relevant videos as we play out here thanks to the growing community of patreons who supporting this and yeah good luck with whatever you're working with at the moment and see you next [Music] time

Channel: Creative Minds

Views: 28,098

Keywords: André 3000, Little Simz, Procrastination, Procrastinating, overthinking, overwhelm, stuck, creative minds, writers block, how to stop procrastinating, cure for writers block, cure for procrastination, creativity, production, making music, virgil abloh, inside the box thinking, creative problem solving, creative thinking, cure for overthinking, I feel stuck, How to make music, How to write, creative tips

Id: MvHe5Rh8oGQ

Length: 11min 24sec (684 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 26 2023