Be a Doer, Not a Viewer

This article was originally published recently in the Makers of Sport Podcast newsletter which can be found here. It has been modified some for a public and broader audience’s comprehension.

If you are taking part on social media today, you have most likely heard of D.J. Khaled, a D.J., producer and artist that had many hits in the 2000s and has recently had a grand re-awakening amongst millennial and younger generations due to his Snapchat adventures. If you are unfamiliar, read this article, then come back.

Anyhow, a mainstay on D.J. Khaled’s Snapchat is his chef, Chef Dee. Chef Dee is always cooking up something amazing. I tend to salivate each time D.J. Khaled gives us a view into the realm of his personal chef’s edible masterpieces.

In addition to D.J. Khaled’s Snapchat, I’m a sucker for the Food Network or pretty much any cooking show, restaurant show, etc. I’ll sit around eating cereal or some other completely boring meal while people make amazing things on television or Guy Fieri stuffs his face with culinary treasures of different cities. Sometimes, these shows are even teaching me how they create their food. The problem is, I never try to recreate what they make. I never do, I just watch. So I never truly learn.

I am a huge advocate of learning by doing and experimentation. We can only consume so much before we overload and begin to forget what we take in. You can watch YouTube videos, read cookbooks and ask questions about cooking a steak, but you’ll never learn how to cook a steak…until you cook a steak. Hence, active participation = learning.

There is a great metaphor in the cooking scenarios above when it comes to creativity. How many hours do we spend on YouTube, Vimeo or Lynda.com watching amazing creative work happen? We even spend hours on Behance.net or Dribbble salivating over polished work made (oftentimes without true purpose or functionality) to please the eyes of the aesthetically gifted.

It’s very enjoyable to those of us that admire the beautiful things of life to gawk at the work others are making. Sometimes, we even get jealous, which may lead to anxiety or cause us to question ourselves.

“The most important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying.”

Perhaps we chalk the time spent on sites like Dribbble up to “inspiration”. The problem is, we can look as much as possible, but if we never make, we never get any better or any steps closer to creating the quality of work we admire.

In the book, The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield (also author of The Legend of Bagger Vance), the author states “The most important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying.”

It’s easy to get caught up watching some amazing digital artist create their work in Photoshop on a sped-up YouTube video, or to consume tutorials on Lynda.com, or watch interviews or talks with creatives at the top of their game; but, if we continue to consume and never actually sit down to make work, all of that consumption is for naught and we are really just wasting time. Just as our physical muscles will atrophy when they are not being used, so too will our creative muscles in our brains.

Perhaps we continue to consume others’ work because we are afraid of starting. Starting things can sometimes be tough. Sometimes, not knowing how a project is going to end or turn out can be scary. But we must take time to make in order to forge our paths ahead in our creative journeys.

Each of us is on our own journey. Those people on those cooking shows are on their own journey. In this world of the social internet and “real housewives”, we have become too voyeuristic — experiencing our lives vicariously through others instead of making our own lives or creating our own work.

Renown business author Seth Godin states in his book Linchpin: “Don’t wait for the right answer and the golden path to present themselves.

This is precisely why you’re stuck. Starting without seeing the end is difficult, so we often wait until we see the end, scanning relentlessly for the right way, the best way and the perfect way.

The way to get unstuck is to start down the wrong path, right now.

Step by step, page by page, interaction by interaction. As you start moving, you can’t help but improve, can’t help but incrementally find yourself getting back toward your north star.

You might not end up with perfect, but it’s significantly more valuable than being stuck.

Don’t just start. Continue. Ship. Repeat.”

I encourage you to get off of Dribbble, turn off Twitter and close out of YouTube temporarily. Make something this week.

Makers of Sport is a podcast about the intersection of creativity and sports. The show includes interviews with designers, art directors, writers, animators, sneakerologists, marketers, technologists and entrepreneurs working in the sports vertical. To listen to the podcast, subscribe on iTunes or play on Soundcloud. Subsequently, the Makers of Sport Community is available to join for a small monthly fee and includes additional educational content, private Q&As, extra soundbites, private podcasts and more.

Be a Doer, Not a Viewer was originally published in Starters on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.