Having made art my entire life, I realize there are three main stages in the process of creativity. I’ve spent my fair share of time in every stage, (sometimes to my own demise), but that’s okay because now I get to share my learnings with you. These stages exist regardless of the medium you work in, and it serves you to know what stage you are in to help further your creative progress.

The 3 Stages of Creativity:

Stage 1 = Creation (Intuition)

• This is your “shitty” work. I put quotations around the word “shitty,” because it just refers to the work being technically rudimentary. The upside, however, is the fact that the work you create here is natural, like children’s drawings. When you’re creating from this stage, you don’t think about whether what you’re doing is good or not. You don’t care who’s watching. You’re just being yourself. Whatever happens, happens. If you don’t know what this feels like just take a few seconds to scribble your signature on a piece of paper. How did you do it? You didn’t think about it. This is a beautiful place to be in. You’re creating from the purest form of you. However, we all want to get better at our craft, so that’s when we enter the next stage.

Stage 2 = Cerebral (Technical)

• Technically proficient work. While this stage is awesome because you start building strong fundamentals, it can also be quite dangerous because if left unchecked, you might end up unknowingly crushing all of your natural intuition for the sake of technical perfection. I have definitely fallen into this never-ending abyss. Ceaselessly obsessing over the tiniest details because I’m oh so worried about what the “real professionals" will say. So let me just keep working endlessly through the night so I can be free from blame. Aka. Perfection. Aka. That shit doesn’t exist. Aka. Sorry, you’ve now entered the, “Wow, you’re good at what you do, but it doesn’t move me” phase. As you can tell, this stage is pretty self-conscious. You usually know you’re done with this stage when looking from a macro perspective, your work is technically good, but it’s lacking of soul. Put another way, you’re capable of making beautiful shiny objects, but it seems to be missing a key ingredient, you. 

Stage 3 = Creation (Intuition) + Cerebral (Technical)

• Technically proficient work that also has soul. This is the hardest stage to enter because essentially what you’re doing is trying to mend together both mind and body, which, if you have spent a good amount of time improving your craft, you may have forgotten this connection exists. This part is hard. Integrating your intuition with technical ability requires that you give up on absolute perfection. You might find that in this stage, a lot of your work may feel a little off. The whites aren’t exactly white. The blacks aren’t exactly black. Straight lines may feel a little crooked. You might find that even though you want to get the grids to match up perfectly, your intuition tells you otherwise. How in the world do you know which one is right? Well, it’s the one that feels right. Here, you are blessed with the technical ability to take what feels right and turn it into a reality. This is a beautiful place to be and it takes forever to get here. 

The 3 stages of creativity seem to work this way.

You go from leading with your gut to leading with your brain, to then merging the two so you have the technical capacity if you need it, but you don’t let it guide your decisions. Instead, you let your intuition lead the way and your learned skillsets become tools that enable you to create what you truly feel inside.

It’s almost a backwards way of working, but it’s necessary. You have to get a little too technical and follow the rules a little too much in order to see for yourself, the mediocre results you will get by doing so. And then, on your own, you have to burn your old thinking, to unlearn, and to re-learn to trust your intuition once again before school, teachers, blogs (yes, including mine), and YouTube videos told you otherwise.

Nobody else can do this for you. You must embark on this journey yourself. It’s very difficult. It can last for years, even decades. I feel like I’m just beginning to learn how to merge the two.

by Jason Lam