Business and creativity can become like a giant bowl of spaghetti. A tangled mess of awesome but impossible to tame. All of the ingredients for delicious are in there but every day is fraught with problems because no processes are in place.
Instead of peaceful pathways leading to predictable results, there’s a constant run round the same mountains, increasingly eating your time and hampering your creative flow.
But creative natured entrepreneurs often prefer the chase. They love the starts, not the stays. The making, not the maintaining.
But a business is not built on excitement. However much the sales pages sell you on passion, passion is not enough to build your business on. There has to be structure, however simple, and process, however rudimentary.
Once the pathways are in place, the streams can run freely, and results can be expected today, tomorrow and for as long as the machinery of production is in place.
This may be a time frame you fit your creative work into.
It may be maintained and monitored operations that you have carved and committed to paper. Documented do-this-then-do-that systems of creation and maintenance.
All of this takes work, especially head work.
Most of the time we default easily into the comfortable inefficiencies of “what-I’ve-always-done”.
The problem here is that “what-you’ve-always-done” is not necessarily “what-someone-else-can-do-for-you”.
Scalability and freedom are curtailed when no system exists.
The effort and time put into granulating and documenting your process maps will deliver thousands of times the value that you doing everything forever could ever bring.
You may be good at what you do, but better is possible. Better means your business working for you, not you working for your business.
This is true in work and in life.
Habits form character. Disciples lead to delight.
We do not pay the price, we get to pay the price.
The price for health and fitness.
The price for a healthy marriage.
The price for a prospering business.
All this takes time and energy feeding into the systems to make them work well.
The second law of thermodynamics teaches us a worthy lesson. Left to itself any system will increasingly falter and break down. This is the big sticking point for the lie that people call evolution.
It’s the same for you in your life and business. Things don’t evolve without energy and design being injected. However, an efficient system will burn less energy needlessly, and the maintenance of what works becomes less burdensome.
That friend is why habits and processes lead to peace.
Your brain is freed to think about other things instead of rounding the same decisions day after day.
Make the decision once, document the process, and do or have someone else do it for you as often as is necessary.
Creativity is not always about originality, it is about perfecting processes that serve your end result.
It takes creative energy to:
- Recognise what you are doing.
- Crystallise your ‘doing’ into a process someone else can do for you (even if you choose to continue doing it yourself.)
- Set things in place to automate your system in the most faithful and efficient way.
The power of this is that you are then freed to extend your boundaries. Mental and creative bandwidth is freed up to stretch and explore your potential further.
