Measuring The Success of Our Creativity

The three steps to understanding your creative success.

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How do we know if our Creative output is good? It is a tough question and a tough judgement call to make because creative value is not necessarily measured numerically. Deciding that one painting or book is better than another comes with a host of challenges and personal bias. We look at reviews or sales to make assessments based on what other people say and this is important.

But for creatives there is a different type of validation or response that we need -especially after we have worked hard on our creation which invariably contains much of us. There are stories of rock artists being persuaded to release a song they didn’t think was good enough only for it to become their biggest hit. These artists then spend the rest of their lives learning to live with the song which, by any empirical measure, is successful. David Bowie was unhappy with his 1984 smash hit album Let’s Dance despite it being his biggest ever commercial success and selling over 10million physical copies. He refers to the time making the album as his “Phil Collins years” (ouch!)

Even when we are commercially successful, creatives still hear that voice in our head questioning whether our work was valuable, meaningful and, frankly, any good. Some of this is imposter syndrome and some of this is because of personality type - if we were ever completely satisfied then we would probably stop creating! Personally, I don’t think that I have ever been 100% satisfied with anything I have created. What I have learnt though is to accept that what I have done might be the best I am capable of in any given moment.

Recently I have recorded a series of podcast interviews with creatives for my Confidently Creative Podcast. We talk about their work and when they knew that they were creative which is often marked out as realising that they are ‘different’ or as writer Joni De Winter said “I realised that other 6 year olds don’t write musical mash ups of Les Miserables and The Wiz for the rest of their class to perform!”

All the creatives I spoke with went on to identify a point when they knew that their work was successful. The strange thing is that nobody used commercial success to measure how good their work was. There was something else going on and, much like Bowie selling 10 million copies of Let’s Dance, this group of writers, artists and songwriters all discovered three very similar ways to measure their creative success.

STEP ONE - I Liked What I Had Done

This may sound obvious but there are many occasions in which creatives may produce work that they don’t like. The most obvious is when we are working to client briefs based on brand values, budgets or other factors. I have created hundreds of shows, events and programmes that had to serve particular requirements and, while they enabled me to make a living and were successful on their own terms, it would be dishonest if I said that I was creatively happy with all of them. So while I was happy that clients and audiences enjoyed what I created (and that I got paid - which is important) I cannot say that I was always creatively satisfied or content with every piece of work.

There is a caveat to this. Creative dissatisfaction is not the same as thinking that what you did needed more work. I am studying creative writing and recently submitted an assignment. It got pulled to pieces for many technical reasons, but I am still happy with the story - with the essential creative idea. My duty now is to improve my technique to properly honour the story or creative idea.

STEP TWO - Somebody Else Liked What I Had Done

For one of my podcast episodes I spoke with musical theatre writers Susan Grant and Joni De Winter. Both women are working mums who also perform as a function duo singing at weddings, birthdays etc. They almost didn’t perform their first show because they were so worried and stressed about how it would be received. However, they had got past Step One so they took a deep breath and presented the show at a local fringe theatre festival. Audiences loved it and they realised that they had something that had value. They both continued to work full time and to bring up their kids and to commit to improving their show. As they performed Hugh the Musical more widely they were able to hone and improve it before finally being able to recognise themselves as musical theatre writers.