Don't Be Precious

When it comes to getting creative work done, no one dishes out the tough love like Steven Pressfield, author of Do the Work and The War of Art.

Today, Steven released a video explaining his Foolscap Method of capture an entire storytelling project on one sheet of paper. My favorite part of the method, is a principle I’ve written about before, “Don’t be precious.”

Creative work is messy. Most of us are tempted to clean it up. We buy complex apps to organize and track projects that could have been simply written on paper in seconds. We buy cameras with ever-increasing lists of features, when we only need a few to capture a story.

We could learn a lot by grabbing a workhorse camera, a cheap pad of paper and a pen we don’t care about losing, and crafting a story. Everything else we add to that process is just a way to avoid the work that matters, because we’re scared of criticism, self-examination and honesty.

Don’t be precious. You already have the tools. Get to work.