8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

Tag: blocks and resistance

  • Derailed

    To say it is easy for a creative person to get derailed in the span of any given day is almost not worth saying, it is so obvious. Stephen Pressfield in his wonderful little book The War of Art, a must read for any creative soul, calls this a kind of resistance.

    Resistance is the force, says Pressfield, that keeps us from doing our work as creative people.

    Today, I found my day full of resistance, derailed and amok.

    I will spare the details of the chaos in this post, but needless to say that I ran up against a lot of external resistance in the hours when I would usually be creating something worthy of the concept.

    And yet, here I am and I have opened my laptop late into the evening to fight the resistance that swelled up over this day and to finish off the waning minutes having done at least a little of something.

    It is easy to get derailed, but it is important to find one’s way back to the tracks sooner than later. Resistance is tricky like that, always tempting you to take the easy route, go to bed having accomplished nothing, when all it takes is to resist right back.

  • Dabbling

    The risk when taking on any new project is that it might all too quickly become another notch on one’s chalkboard of failed projects. The risk of dabbling is ultimately boredom and moving on to something else new.

    But how does one stop dabbling and start honing and refining—especially if one is inclined to be more of a dabbler than a deep diver.

    I admit, I am a bit of a shiny object guy when it comes to my hobbies. I see something new and interesting and I d dive deeply into it for a while—that is, usually, until I’ve learned enough about said shiny object that learning about it becomes less interesting than it was at the beginning. And then often, said shiny object goes on the shelf, forgotten. Dabbling done.

    To fight through and beyond the honeymoon period for any new project my tactic has generally been to use goals or public accountability or external commitments. It’s neither complex nor especially obscure. Signing up for a language class or telling everyone your running goal race or planning a trip to sketch in another country are examples of great counter-dabbling tools.

    These sorts of external motivators create a kind of reward system to overcome the raw dopamine drop when the innate rewards of dabbling fade. 

  • Creating on Routine

    Last October I decided I was going to sketch every single day of the month.

    I broke out a fresh sketch book, I gave myself a few basic constraints, and I drew one sketch for each day in October.

    Can you guess how many of those sketches were amazing?

    Basically none.

    Sure, there were a few solid works and I even shared a half dozen of them. But if I was seeking perfectionism—or worse, waiting for it to even get started on my artist journey—I would have drawn one thing on October first …and then very likely given up.

    Instead, I embraced it as an incremental effort of modest improvement.  The goal wasn’t to create thirty-one great sketches, no, the goal was to sketch thirty-one times.

    The goal wasn’t fame or a viral drawing or something I could sell. The goal was creating on a routine.

    It’s easy to aim too high. It’s easy to think that anything and everything we create should be a final, salable product to hold up to the whole world for judgement.

    It’s actually pretty tough to recognize that almost everything we make should start off as something just for our own selves and maybe never become more than that.

    January 12, 2026 – Audio Version