It's freeing to throw it all away

Have you ever been working on something that you start to tire of? Perhaps you’ve begun to really hate a photograph that you’ve spent hours, days or weeks editing? Or a location you went to and found out it wasn’t working for you? Try as you might, you can’t quite get the composition to work.

The solution, is to abandon the work. Throw the pursuit of it away.

I’ve found that when something isn’t working, it’s usually due to:

a) being tired, and therefore unable to be receptive to it.

b) it isn’t a very good idea.

Often it is b), more than a). And learning to recognise that the idea you’re frustrated with, isn’t going anywhere is a skill that we all have to work on. Knowing when to hit the eject button, or discard an idea, particularly when you have invested so much time in it, is hard.

But when I do abandon something, I often find that it is liberating. I becoming ‘unstuck’.

Spending too much time with the wrong company means you aren’t spending time with the right company. Similarly, spending time in the wrong job means you aren’t spending time in the right job. Same for photography and for creativity in general. If it’s not working: leave it.

Because when you do, you open yourself up to the opportunity to find something that does work. I know this because there have been many times when I have realised that the idea I’m working on has no future. Even if I’m unsure of whether it has no future or not, by simply walking away from it, I have often found that this gives me the chance to find something that does work.

The composition I felt wasn’t working, If I stayed put and persevered with it: I wasted time on something that was going nowhere. By walking away, I have often been very pleasantly surprised to find something wonderful to photograph only a few feet away.

So if there is one bit of advice from this short post today, it is this: keep moving. If you get stuck, take that as a hint that something isn’t working. By moving onto something else, you give yourself the best opportunity to become unstuck.

Creativity is all about keeping things fluid. To do that, you need to become less precious about what you do. That means being willing to radically change it. Abandonment of the work can either mean ‘throwing it all away’, or simply ‘redoing a lot of what you’ve already done’. Nothing is permanent, and accepting that impermanence is part of our work can be extremely freeing and liberating.