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50. Stop me before I optimize again!
Why optimization and creativity just don’t mix
“Remember: interesting, inspiring, and informative are all at odds with optimized.”
~ , author of the StratScraps substack
What is the opposite of creativity?
In our quest to be more creative, it might help to know what we’re up against, who the “villain” is in our story. According to Webster’s Dictionary—which is, appropriately enough, the most stereotypical, least creative way to begin an essay—the opposite of creativity is unimaginitiveness, which is itself an appropriately insipid word, an onomatopoeia of blandness. I don’t disagree with Webster, but I’d argue that the real villain is something a bit bigger. What if we looked beyond the textbook definitions into the Bonfire definitions we’ve spoken about across almost a year’s worth of newsletters? Creativity is the intersection of disparate ideas, where novelty meets a dream. Creativity requires time, devotion, attention, and levity. Sure, creativity’s antithesis may be a lack of imagination, but once we scratch a little deeper there are hints of something bigger: If we don’t have the permission to be intentionally expansive, we can’t expect to live our most creative lives.
We creatives like to noodle, not templatize.
We wander, we don’t race.
We throw spaghetti, not playbooks.
We’re about blue sky, not bottom lines.
We are “what if,” not “what for.”
We let things take their time, don’t force things into boxes.
Many things run counter to these concepts of creativity, not the least of which is the affix salad of unimaginitiveness. Collectively, they point to a grander and, in today’s day and age, more pervasive villain: Creativity’s biggest boss battle might actually be against optimization.
Optimization, defined (and vilified)
What do we mean by optimization? Well, according to Webster’s Dictionary, to optimize is to take an existing thing and strip out all the unnecessary bits for the purpose of efficiency. Immediately, I see two problems:
Stripping out the unnecessary bits. Creativity finds the unnecessary bits quite useful actually!
For the purpose of efficiency. On the list of goals for our creative output, “efficiency” does not make page one.
Optimization goes way back to cavepeople times and is, in a sense, baked into our DNA of survival of the fittest / most optimized. Thankfully we’re beyond the days of optimizing our lives to survive from predators. Nowadays when we talk about optimization, we tend to approach it through a capitalist lens: maximize gains, minimize losses. The tension between creativity and optimization exists because stripping out the unnecessary bits of our process is a highly subjective exercise; what matters to little old creative me is likely to be different than what matters to the capitalists who run the world. I might want to strip out my email notifications for an afternoon of focus time; they might want to strip out all brand spend forever. My needs are different than Shannon’s, her needs are different than yours, yours are different than your friend’s, and yet capitalism would like us all to have the same need in order to be more efficient.
The goals of creativity and optimization are different, too. Optimization is all about max/minning our way to efficiency. The goal of the creative process is almost goal agnostic: Success means you created something, and also no worries if you didn’t, because the act of regularly returning to your creative practice is enough.
So we find ourselves at a crossroads. Creative people, living in a world of optimization. Is there a way out?
How to exist, creatively, in a world of optimization
1 - Not all optimization is bad
Like most things in life, optimization is a spectrum. It’s just that a lot of time and attention get paid to the grind, grind, grind extreme end of that spectrum.
If we can avoid the grind, we can reclaim some of the good parts of optimization and actually use them to our creative advantage. If optimization is all about cutting back to meet a goal, then the trick is to be mindful of what we cut and vigilant about our goals.
Here are three perspectives for an optimized creative life:
Editing is optimization. And a lot of good, creative output goes through an editing process before it reaches the world. The goal with editing, of course, is not to create the most efficient essay or artwork or play. The goal is to edit so that the heart of your creative work is more evident. To borrow some optimization vocab: maximum truth, minimum distraction.
Filtering is optimization. By subscribing to this newsletter and reading it occasionally, you are participating in a form of optimization. You are flitering your world and curating the intake that matters most to you.
Output is optimization. To believe the following visual is to believe that how we share our work with the world is inherently stripped down. No one can understand it all. We can’t even put all our thoughts into words! Therefore, to get to a place where we’re able to do creative work, we will have to do a fair amount of pruning and streamlining every step of the way.
2 - Meet your needs first (emphasis on you, emphasis on needs)
One of the trickiest bits with optimization is feeling beholden to the optimization outcomes of others. When I think back to the times I felt the least creative at work, it was because I was running on the treadmill of Get Stuff Done in order to feed the Stuff machine, which—get this—simply made more Stuff.
We can trace a lot of the world’s problems back to unregulated capitalism, and I can trace a lot of my creative droughts back to my unconscious attachment to capitalistic themes. “I could be more creative if I just had another Moleskine notebook.” “I would have been more creative today except that I had to check my email every hour.” Not to mention the guilt of “I should be more productive when I’m doing my creative thing.”
Instead, to survive in a world of optimized productivity, I need simply to know what I need.
Me, me, me.
Need, not want.
For instance, I need 90 minutes of uninterrupted time to come up with a Substack topic to write about, and I need to go down dead ends and have terrible ideas and to end the 90 minutes maybe having written nothing and yet I’ve met the goal of having started. (Based on a true story.)
Once we are clear about our needs, we can optimize our day-to-day in order to get our own needs met. Virtuous optimization in the spirit of creativity!
3 - Lean into your limits, judgment-free
“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”
~ Sylvia Plath
Apologies if this sounds a bit too nihilistic, but there’s really no way to exist in the world except to optimize. There is simply not enough time to fill ourselves up creatively with all the great filler that exists in the world. Sylvia Plath felt this way and did not even have TikTok!
Therefore, we can treat optimization as an antidote to feeling overwhelmed by our feeds. My choosing to put a time limit on social media is a way to optimize my day so that I have time for other creative pursuits. My creating a reading list of interesting books is a means of optimizing my reading time so I’m not consumed (or paralyzed) by choice.
Over to you
What has been your experience with optimization versus creativity? When do you choose to optimize? Have you ever taken optimization too far? It’d be great to hear from you!
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