Perseverance is essential
I guess everyone that´s doing some creative work is about to give up every once in a while, and when this happens it can be though to perceive.
A lot of the work is about the famous "blood, sweat and tears" -thing, I guess.
It´s about perceiving when you want to quit and just leave it all behind. It´s about staring at the artwork and let it stare back at you until you win the "angry-face-contest" and solve the problem.
I was happy to find a blog discussing the subject
http://theartabyss.blogspot.se/2013/06/how-perseverance-helps-creativity.html
"What Van Gogh and Monet have in common in this instance is that they painted prolifically to get things right. They painted everything around them over and over and over – and over again – until they couldn’t even look at hay stacks anymore. They persevered to get the lighting and the brush strokes and the color just so. Their creativity, the mastery of their craft, was fueled by persistently pushing forward and experimenting. They kept on working and trying new things when others would have stopped.
Author JK Rowling was famously rejected by 12 publishers before Bloomsbury accepted the Harry Potter manuscript, but she kept on pushing. Pierre-Auguste Renoir suffered from severe rheumatoid arthritis, but he kept painting anyway and became one of the most prolific Impressionist painters of his era. Thomas Edison (who reminded us that "Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration”) was one of the most prolific inventors in history; his creative innovations in electricity led to the technological advances that allow you to read this blog.
In Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, he expands on this theory and gives example after example of individuals who became masters of their craft after putting in roughly 10,000 hours working on their specialty (check out this really cool detailed infographic about the 10,000 hour theory here). HOWEVER – big caveat coming up here, people – this does not take into account mindless repetition. If you play “Chopsticks” on the piano for 10,000 hours, you still won’t be Beethoven. So what does this take into account?
Perseverance in your craft means:
Practicing areas of your craft that are (currently) outside your comfort zone
Checking yourself (where am I at with this skill? How can I expand my knowledge of this aspect?)
Always devouring ideas related to your field (like reading art-related blogs!)
Working to create and innovate even when you want to be doing something else
Not being afraid to fail – every failure is a stepping stone toward mastery
Perseverance can open up new avenues for your creativity. Sometimes when you push through, you find something you never expected. How are you taking action to create in your life? What have you created when you kept pushing? What else does perseverance do to support creativity that I didn’t mention?
