Creative Pep Talk #81: It’s Okay Not to Know

Every last one of us got through school, and probably work, by knowing the answers most—if not all—of the time. Is that actually necessary? NOPE. And it can even hinder your creative process. I’ll tell you why in this short episode.

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Transcript

Nancy Norbeck: Welcome to Follow Your Curiosity. Ordinary people, extraordinary creativity. Here’s how to get unstuck. I’m your host, creativity coach, Nancy Norbeck. Let’s go.

As you may know, I’ve been working on a new one on one course and it’s here. Reignite your creative spark is a private coaching program designed to help creative folks build momentum that lasts so they can turn their creative dreams into reality. In six private sessions, you will discover how to engage with your creative dreams with ease and joy, feeling both more confident in yourself and your work and more vibrant than you have in years. Want to learn more? Use the link in the show notes to get in touch. Talk to you soon.

Hey everybody. This is Nancy Norbeck with this week’s creative pep talk. And this week is inspired by the latest Doctor Who episode which has caused an interesting reaction among fans. Some people love it and some people are frustrated because they don’t have all of the loose ends wrapped up. I’m not in that second camp. I’m loving it because it’s a giant mystery and because I’ve been watching this show long enough and have enough time logged watching things written by the guy who’s currently in charge to know that a lot of this is probably going to get wrapped up before the end of the season. And so it’s fascinating to me watching people just wanting to know right now and even saying things like, if it’s not wrapped up in the next episode, I’m going to consider this episode a dud. I don’t really think that’s fair.

But more to the point, for us, I don’t think it’s fair when we do it to ourselves, right? How many times do we get an idea and we might go, I don’t know what this is. I don’t know what it wants to be. And that may be at the beginning stage when the idea first pops into your head, or it may be after you’ve drafted something, you could still be looking at it and going, I have no idea what this thing is. I don’t really know what to do with it. And a lot of the time, if that happens to us, we assume that that means that it didn’t work and it’s bad and we should just throw it away and never think about it again. And what I want to point out today is that it’s okay not to know what it is. It’s okay because sometimes things take time to become clear.

Sometimes you need to sit with something. Sometimes it just needs to take up space in the back of your head long enough for something to pop up that suddenly makes it all make sense. That can happen when you first start something. It can happen when you have a draft. It can happen any point in the process. There are so many pieces of art that have taken years to be realized because somebody just started out with something and they didn’t really know what it was, but they let it get into them, get under their skin, sit in the back of their head and percolate away until suddenly they did.

That may mean that you do something with this project for a while, and then you’ve gotten as far as you can get with it for now, and you go on and you work on something else for a while. It could mean that, you know, you come back to it once a week for a couple months, for a year, for a couple years. You don’t know. Or it could mean that you do what you can with it right now, and then you let it sit until it calls to you, because suddenly something has come together for you somehow and you go back to it. It could be that it was a couple of years, it could be a couple days, it could be anywhere in between.

My point is that it’s okay not to know, and it’s important to be okay with not knowing, because sometimes that’s just how things work. You don’t need to know it all right up front. I mean, Lord knows, when I started my MFA thesis novel, I had absolutely no idea where it was going, and I knew that I had less than two years to finish it. If you don’t think that’s terrifying, I have news for you. But I had faith that it was going to come together if I just followed along. And as the Goddard College MFA informal motto, “Trust the process,” kept telling me to trust the process. And eventually it did come together. So be okay with not knowing.

And you can apply this in other parts of your life, too. It’s not just a creative thing, but be okay with not knowing. Have faith. Trust the process. Let it be what it wants to be. Not everything is going to come to you fully formed. In fact, almost nothing is going to come to you fully formed. Some things are going to take some time. That’s okay. It doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. It doesn’t mean it’s the wrong thing. You’ll know because the part of you will just not feel right if it’s the wrong thing or if you’re doing it wrong, it just means you need to give it a little time, a little trust.

So if you’ve got something like that right now, or if you have in the past, just know that’s okay and go back and look at it when you get curious about it, or when something pops for you, or when it just calls to you and see how it goes. But don’t rush it. Enjoy the mystery of it. Enjoy the wonder. Enjoy the not knowing. Not everything has to have an answer right now, so let me know how that goes for you, as always, because I love to hear from you. And with that, I will see you next time.

If this episode resonated with you, or if you’re feeling a little bit less than confident in your creative process right now, join me at the spark on Substack as we form a community that supports and celebrates each other’s creative courage. It’s free, and it’s also where I’ll be adding programs for subscribers and listeners. The link is in your podcast app, so sign up today. See you there, and see you next week. F

Follow Your Curiosity is produced by me, Nancy Norbeck, with music by Joseph McDade. If you like Follow Your Curiosity, please subscribe, rate and review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And don’t forget to tell your friends, it really helps me reach new listeners.