On Creativity

They say Creative Discipline is a muscle. Who is they, you might ask? The creatives. That’s all you need to know. Alright, fine. You need something concrete from someone in particular, I get it. A source! Here’s Fred Again discussing it:

But yeah I think he’s right. When you don’t flex it, test it, push it, build it… it withers. Just like these biceps, when they haven’t seen the inside of a gym for the past month because I’ve used The Travel Excuse to fall out of a workout routine (also, tequila), the creativity muscles become wimpy when underutilized.

Talking about hands of poker that I played is easy. Every hand is a story. Flop/turn/river—the classic 3-part narrative, with a preflop preamble! A poker session is a collection of stories that becomes its own story. A poker vlog channel is a collection of session stories. It’s one reason why the format makes so much sense—story time, easily formulated. And we’ve enjoyed stories since caveman days.

I mean, the nuts and bolts of content creation is not easy. When paired with trying to be a good, competitive poker player, it is very fucking tough, and anyone who maintains a YouTube channel should be proud of the grind. And what about being creative on top of all of that?

The first two years of my vlogs were chock full of creative ideas that I had piled up inside of me and I was excited to produce in digital but tangible form. Whether I did or didn’t have an overarching idea for an episode, the creative muscle was absolutely jacked. Produce, post, brief rest and then go again. There were locations to shoot, favorite bars to tell you about, and angles from suction-cup-mounted GoPro or eagle-eyed drone heights!

I shot this tram sequence on a complete whim, using one person (me), one camera, one train car, one 1-minute stop, one try… and it all came to me in the moment just before shooting, with nothing planned out or envisioned ahead of time. It’s one of my all time favorite moments in the entire project because of how it came out and how well it captures the creativity juice on tap:

At some point you gotta take a break. And at some point ideas run thinner than when they were stockpiled. If those points happen to occur simultaneously, it can be tough to get back to peak form. Rely more on the poker hands to tell the story, especially if you want to move up in stakes. Because this game is hard, is it not? Yes, yes it is. Solvers, sims, and training-site-video-intake require brain power. It’s tough to do it all. AND still be creative. Props to anyone who even attempts, much less thrives. 

It’s ok, I think. I played poker for 8 years in Las Vegas before I picked up a camera and started talking into it. If I take some time to just do hands for a while, it’s ok. The poker muscle is one that I never fully flexed even as a full time grinder. Reasons for that would be another blog entry. But it’s ok to focus on that muscle for a little while, I think.

But I kinda want to be creative again. Just look at how much fun the creatives get to have: