What are you mistaking productivity for?

Enough getting inspiration, go make something

Toffler predicted that the acceleration of technology would leave people suffering from shattering stress and disorientation aka, future shock.

A central tenant of his philosophy was the concept of information overload, a term he popularized to define the moment when the amount of input to a system exceeded its processing capacity and resulted in a reduction of decision quality.

Understatement of the millennium.

Fast forward to the digital generation, and mankind has now produced more information in the past decade than in it has in the previous five thousand years.

Future shock, indeed.

My question is, how does this impact the creative process? Because the job of the artist, is to find inspiration in life’s daily occurrences that most people take for granted, and burn it as fuel to make the world better.

That’s why there are hundreds of applications, platforms and communities designed for note taking, organizing, clipping, managing, curating and archiving the world around us.

Because we’re not only suffering from information overload, but inspiration overload as well.

But here’s the problem. Inspiration is a critical part of the creative process, but it’s not the only part. If we spend all of our time collecting ideas to help us research how to enter the right mindset so we can prepare to sit down and hold a space to motivate ourselves to create a plan so we can brainstorm about how to visualize the possibility of eventually getting started on doing the work, we haven’t done anything.

We’ve confused getting inspired with making progress.

That’s not productivity, that’s pornography.

The thirst for research, the obsession with consuming, the addiction of inhaling, the opiate of organizing, these activities, while seemingly productive, are actually expressions of procrastination and perfectionism.

Because they don’t do anything to move the story forward. They only paralyze the characters.

I once wrote a book about how ideas are free, but only execution is priceless.

If you’re feeling too overloaded to read it, allow me to summarize all four hundred pages in one sentence.

You don’t need an idea, you need an I did.

LET ME ASK YA THIS…
What are you mistaking productivity for?

* * * *

Scott Ginsberg
That Guy with the Nametag
Author. Speaker. Strategist. Inventor. Filmmaker. Publisher. Songwriter.
scott@hellomynameisscott.com
www.nametagscott.com

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What are you confusing productivity with?