Augustus Loi’s Reviews > The Accidental Creative: How to Be Brilliant at a Moment's Notice > Status Update

When you do this you fail to realize that (1) all your past work was once unformed and in midprocess, and that (2) you always remember past work more fondly than you actually felt about it at the time.

Even though your current work is still in its infancy and so of course can’t stack up to a fully formed and executed idea, you’re not willing to give yourself that grace period. Instead, you do a quick assessment of whether the work is worthwhile based on nothing more than these artificial expectations. As a result, you don’t give the idea time to develop.

The more opaque the decision-making process, the more likely that misinterpretation and misalignment will follow.

Why? Why are we undertaking this work? What purpose does it serve? Who? Whose approval is required? Who needs to be involved in the work? Who are we reaching? What? What are we really trying to accomplish with this project? (No consultant-speak. Be very concrete.) When? What are the hard (and soft) deadlines for the work? When will it be implemented?

Project strategy boils down to the five W’s: Why? Who? What? When? Where? The creative strategy lies in how we plan to accomplish these objectives. Often, when we’re trying to solve a creative problem, we jump straight to how we’re going to do it, the creative strategy, before we’ve even settled on a concrete set of objectives, a project strategy.

We are constantly forced to choose between striving to improve the quality of our work and driving it to completion. This dynamic manifests itself in three tensions: the time-versus-value tension, the predictable-versus-rhythmic tension, and the product-versus-process tension.

As creatives, we are wired to take new ground. We love the thrill of the chase, pursuing objectives and tackling goals that seem just beyond our reach.

Amos’s struggles to gain creative traction are largely the result of pressures he feels in five key areas of work: Focus, Relationships, Energy, Stimuli, and Hours. Let’s take a look at how Amos is affected by each of these five areas:

A few years ago my company, Accidental Creative, coined a term to describe this workplace dynamic: “create on demand.” You go to work each day tasked with (1) inventing brilliant solutions that (2) meet specific objectives by (3) defined deadlines.