Designing A Personal Project to Get Your Creativity Flowing

The Importance of Play

Play is one of the most important ingredients when it comes to creating a personal project for creative flow. As adults, we tend to engage in play less and less frequently. Play tends to be something our society expects of children and sees as having no value beyond pleasure. However, scientists are finding that it serves as a survival mechanism. As Stuart Brown explained in Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul, “Play is a profound biological process. It has evolved over eons...to promote survival. It shapes the brain and makes animals smarter and more adaptable.”

Brown discovered the importance of play in human development by studying people whose childhoods had a distinct lack of play. It turns out that serial killers and psychopaths all had this lack of play in common, and it was this lack that distorted their minds and behaviors. We see this same reaction in animals: if an animal is deprived of play, it becomes aggressive (read Friendship: The Evolution, Biology, and Extraordinary Power of Life’s Fundamental Bond by Lydia Denworth to learn more about how play affects social relationships).

how play boosts creativity

Play increases creativity by decreasing stress that inhibits creative thought. As Brown put it, “Play lies at the core of creativity and creation.” Play acts as a buffer for us as we enter into something new; something outside of our comfort zone. Play is...

• Free of stress

• Fun and joyful

• Exploratory

• Engaging for the mind

• Improvisational

play is crucial to learning

In my recent blog on Overcoming Creative Blocks, I explained how the brain doesn’t like being creative or learning new things because it takes effort and the brain prefers the path of least resistance. However, when we combine play with learning and creativity, we can bypass this resistance because play triggers the release of feel-good brain chemicals like dopamine.

The most creative people engage with play purposefully. As Paul Rand, a prominent American designer of the 20th century puts it in his article Design and the Play Instinct, “A problem with defined limits, with an implied or stated system of rules… is conducive to the instinct of play.” Rand recognized that pure play without boundaries will result in empty exploration. However, when we define imagination with rules and limitations, we create a problem to be solved. We invent a creative game to play. We create a need for curiosity, improvisation, and innovative thinking. This combination allows creatives to walk the line between freedom and discipline. 

how to create your personal project for creative flow

Now that we have an understanding of why play matters, we can get into practical tips for using play to get creativity flowing. Here are some key steps to take and things to consider:

1. DEFINE YOUR INTENTION

Here are some questions and prompts to get you thinking about and defining your project. Use these as brainstorm prompts or journal your answers:

• What brings me joy? This is probably the most important question when designing a personal project, and one you should constantly be coming back to. Joy is the thing that will keep you engaged.

• What’s something new I’m interested in exploring/learning?

• What is the goal of this project? The primary goal should be fun and joy, but it is always smart to have some sort of end result or goal that you are striving for. I’ve had goals like eating healthy and delicious meals, improving my hand lettering, or making gifts for friends.

• What materials do I want to use? 

• What is stopping me from accessing my creativity? What obstacles might I run into along the way?

2. COMBINE YOUR INTERESTS

Another great way to inspire creativity in this personal project is by combining a couple of different interests. I combined cooking and hand lettering by creating my recipe cards. As I went through defining my intentions, I found that cooking brought me great joy. It was an easy activity to motivate myself to do, and I was so proud of the end results that I wanted to share them. Additionally, I had begun teaching myself hand lettering, and it was something that I wanted to get better at. So the idea came to me to combine these two practices, one in which I felt very confident and one that was new and challenging. This took the pressure off of the more challenging interest (hand lettering) because it was combined with something that came more naturally.

3. SET LIMITATIONS

Setting limits for your project is important because creativity needs boundaries to push against or build off of. If possibilities are endless, it makes it more difficult and overwhelming to come up with the initial idea. Having rules and limitations along the way gives the sense of structure that we need. For example, if you are prompted to tell a story, figuring out where to start is a lot more difficult than if you are prompted to tell a story about an adventure with an animal lead character where something magical happens. Now your brain has a jumping off point. Creating guides for yourself—albeit loose and open to interpretation—will increase your ability to engage creatively. 

A couple of years ago, I was struggling with feeling very blocked and unmotivated to create, so I decided to create an exercise that would help me to lower the stakes and just play with my creativity. What resulted is my collage doodle series. I chose a medium that brought me joy and I set some rules and limitations for myself, because I needed a specific container to feel safe enough to play. I set a time limit of about an hour for each piece to create those boundaries around this project.

4. LET GO OF JUDGMENT

Letting go of judgment is important especially if you’re learning something new. Judgement of my skill and the need to make something “good” are the two obstacles that tend to get in my way most often. As I explained in Overcoming Creative Blocks, the more you produce, the more creativity you will have. So it’s important to learn to create without reservation. If it’s not the result that you wanted, that’s fine, the next one will be better. Keep at it and you will get better. 

When I first began reinvesting myself in my creative practice post-college, making things actually brought up so much fear and anxiety. It was difficult to get myself to sit down and draw (something that in the past had brought me security and joy) because of how much fear I was living in. I desperately needed a creative outlet, yet drawing was not bringing me the joy I needed, so I supplemented my creative practice with cooking. Cooking became a powerful outlet for me to be making, but without the pressure of making a masterpiece.

5. PRACTICE CONSISTENTLY

Just as with any other practice, if you want to see results—if you want to witness change—you must return again and again. I definitely didn’t love or feel incredibly inspired by my collage doodle series until I made several iterations. It wasn’t until immersing myself more into the practice that I began to understand and see where this exploration was taking me. 

6. IF YOU DON’T LOVE IT, SHIFT IT

If it’s not bringing you joy, then it’s not doing its job. Before you decide you’re over it and it’s not working, reevaluate how the process is and is not working for you. Where are the pain points? What’s continuing to get in your way of enjoying this process? Nothing has to be set in stone. This time and effort is for you, so make it work for you.