Golden Email #24: Art & entertainment v2025

kbrecordzz is all about art & entertainment. How can you achieve this combination in practice, when these are two very different things - art being about inspiration and creative freedom, and entertainment about giving an audience a satisfying result?

To be creative you need to be free from pressure and requirements. There's no trick to it. The creativity is always there, you just need to remove pressure, requirements and other distractions for it to appear. Also remove your doubts about how you can't do things or even think about ideas on how to possibly do things because you don't believe in your own ability. They're only true if you believe them.

On the other hand, to make a great product you need to be productive, consistent and efficient. This is needed in order to repeat the creative process regularly and not just randomly (if you remove all pressure but don't add any consistency or habit, creativity will "only" happen from pure inspiration, and how often does that happen?). But too much productivity, efficiency and result orientation kills creativity. So the key is to make creativity and productivity work together, instead of treating them as two different "modes".

To achieve both creativity and productivity at the same time, create a habit of regularly sitting down to be freely creative without any pressure. Like an environment with the atmosphere of freetime, but the regularity of a normal dayjob. Don't pressure yourself to "achieve" any specific result every day. Just decide to show up and make SOMETHING, without caring about the result. Then you can relax, which is exactly what creativity needs. We don't want to go against the mindset of a "true" artist, we just want be in that mindset more regularly and consistently (but not too regularly - find the sweet spot where you get stuff done but still don't get tired or start repeating yourself).

Secondly, you also need the ability to judge your own ideas if you want to make a good product. You can't be freely creative all the way to the end of a project. At some pont you have to make the final call and kill some ideas you liked because they didn't fit in to the project's direction. You have to turn all the ideas that came from your free creative environment into a cohesive whole, so they're not "just" a pile of unrelated stuff (which is what you get when you're freely creative without a plan).

At their cores, being judgemental and creative are two completely different emotions and ways of thinking, and are hard to be in at the same time. So let the judgemental and planning part of yourself take over at certain times, but don't let it take over everything - then you'll turn into a company afraid of experimenting and having fun. Yes, even if you're a single human person you'll start behaving as a company. Because, when you're in a big organization you naturally create systems to handle the larger complexity, but this also naturally happens when your personal project grows somewhat complex. You create some kind of rules on how to handle decisions and problems you've been through before. That's efficient, but it leads to repetition and you can't rely on that only. Sometimes you need to go with your guts, test something new or decidedly NOT do what feels right or is right on paper. Especially if you really care about your project, it's easy to take it too seriously and lose the joy of trying out things.

It's easy for any single individual to create art. And companies have many proven ways to fulfill projects, but not many of them who don't kill the individuals' creative joy. It's also easy for companies to get stuck in old paths. They can be extremely productive but can't change as quickly as an individual person. So an individual person can risk more but can't execute as efficiently, while a company usually does the opposite. And all these thoughts are my way to find the best of both the individual and the system, because I believe that's what you need to create both art & entertainment.

/kbrecordzz, 2025-04-04