My Villain Origin Story

It was not my intention to destroy my creativity.

We usually imagine ourselves as the protagonist of our own story. Perhaps we descend to that morally gray archetype at times, but at the end of the day we like to hang our cape next to our cluttered bedside table at night. Our struggles are against outside forces; enemies who attempt to snuff out our creative genius.

How dare they. 

What we never plan for is being the villain. While the resistance we face may often come from external combatants such as a lack of support, financial crisis, the economy [gestures widely], or that one mean thing that one girl said in middle school that still haunts us from time to time, it sometimes comes directly from our own self sabotage. 

Let me be clear: I’m not referring to chronic mental or physical health challenges that might plague us. These are things that may increase the default difficulty setting, however, it is not something I would deem as intrinsically “bad”. Simply something we must work into the equation. 

If you are anything like me, then you can identify moments when what you thought would be best for you turns out to be…not so great. Yet in a quest to hold onto your conviction, a villain arises from within yourself. Suddenly, your preferred method of execution is in direct opposition to your desired outcome.  

The beginning of my villain arc goes a little something like this.

I’m a multipassionate creative, something I have words for now, but didn’t only a handful of years ago. If you don’t know what that is, basically you’re a creative but it looks a lot like a group of Swifties who just got word their Mother is dropping a secret 50-song album at midnight. Overwhelming passion with slightly unhinged expectations. (No hate Swifties, I promise!)

For my enneagram lovers out there, I’m a solid 4 with a 5 wing. I prefer being multidisciplinary and niching down makes my skin crawl. To be defined is to be caged. Where others see chaos, I see endless possibilities and connections. I usually thrive in change and I tend to push against the status quo as often as I can.

BECAUSE I’M UNIQUE DANG IT!

-Me, all the time

However, when it came to my creative process, my ruthless desire to ‘be different’ for the sake of it nearly destroyed my art in the process.  

The Spontaneity Trap

Most of the people in my family thrive within rigid guidelines. That is not to say they are not creative. They just really like their schedules. My mother, who was a great influence on me as a creative, embodies what it means to be an A-Type Personality. 

I tried most of my life to fit within the traditional means of time-management and organization. It never worked well, so after I graduated from college with a BA in Vocal Performance, I decided I was done with all that mumbo jumbo. I was a free bird. Spontaneity only from then on. 

This would be the part in the movie where we get a freeze frame and the narrator, also known as the main character, would let us know via voiceover that this is where everything would start to go downhill. 

My twenties were hard. Whoever said you were supposed to live your best life then was either lying or really rich. I think that decade would have been a struggle no matter what. Now that I’m going to be 35 this year, I’m very thankful that I didn’t “make it big” when I was that young. I needed the toil to shape me. 

However…

My art and creativity suffered during this time – and it probably didn’t have to. 

My goal was freedom. I thought I could achieve this by breaking out of the mold. Being different. Removing restraints. Leaving my life as open as the first page of the brand new notebook you’ll inevitably abandon. 

The result was frustration, missed opportunities, and a whole heck of a lot of burnout. 

The truth is my dedication to total spontaneity nearly ruined me and destroyed my creative process. It’s a hard pill to swallow, especially for multipassionates, hobbyists, avid sidequesters, and cozy creatives, but here it is:

Having no plan, no organization, and no time-management skills is a detriment to your art. 

I know, I know. I really hated that realization. But there’s no need to get any ointment for that burn because here comes the incredibly good news that I learned along the way.

All of those things traditionally associated with “organized people who have their sheesh together”? Plans, goals, color coded-systems, time-management resources, and lists? 

It doesn’t have to look like that – if you don’t want it to. 

When I finally started to see this, I supplemented my spontaneity with structure. Now, structure is my friend and actually makes my spontaneity more impactful. 

The Power of Personalized Organization

There is this incessant need in our culture, specifically American consumerist culture, for everything to be bigger, better, bolder, and booming. The hustle is glorified with algorithms churning and burning content for a millisecond of recognition, riding the fickle waves of currently viral trends. 

Specialization is king. We all know the equation: the elevator pitch that tells people who you are and what you’re going to help them with or what they are following you for. 

Hello, my name is Stephanie and I crochet bikini tops for special needs cats. (Actually, that’s kind of cute someone please do this if it doesn’t already exist.)

Specialization requires a specific type of organization and time-management skills. Most of these are time-tested and battle worn. They are the traditional approaches you most likely grew up using, or trying to use in my case. They are simple, rigid, and formulaic, designed to propel someone forward from point A to point B through an uncomplicated waterfall of action steps. 

However, the time of the Renaissance creator is on the rise as soloprenuers are juggling all the hats as the only person on their team. People need that jack-of-all-trades energy in their companies, departments, and industries. Things have shifted, as they always do, and the era of the multipassionate/multidisciplanary is upon us once more. 

Arguably, it never really went away. It was simply societal shifts made more room for one over the other.

Traditional time-management and organization tools are created by already organized specialists for other already organized specialists. Generally speaking, these tools are task-oriented. If your brain happens to function like this, these tools are phenomenal!

If you’re like me….

These tools are soul crushing.

But everything changed when I started personalizing my own organization. I took the tools available to me and crafted something retrofitted to my needs as a multipassionate creative. A flexible framework that would allow me to stay organized but make room for necessary pivots or shifts in my goals due to capacity changes.

I’ll be spending the first season of my podcast, Sidequest of the Week, on this system I named The Idea Crafting Wheel. It’s all about idea management rather than red lining it indefinitely and creating at break-neck speeds. Your ideas matter. And they should be valued, written down, and explored. Once I learned this lesson, my creative process truly came alive.

The Role of Time Management in My Artistic Revival

It’s not always about reinventing the wheel. My personal Renaissance was much more about taking tools that already existed and reshaping them around my needs. It seems simple. You may be thinking…I mean, yeah Kayla. That’s pretty obvious.

It’s obvious (as it was to me) but if it were so obvious, why are there so many creatives out there paralyzed by overwhelm, comparison, self-doubt, and systems that were designed with someone else in mind?

I knew that I could just “do my own thing”. However, I kept looking to the masses for a formula. A set of guidelines. When that didn’t work, I abandoned all of it only to find out what I craved was structure.

You see – I didn’t actually want a formula. I wanted a secure foundation I could build something of my own on. When I looked around me, all the foundations I saw already had the framing of the house secured. And none of the layouts quite suited me.

So I stripped it all back to the foundational principles that make these approaches work.

When I started overhauling my organizational approach, I realized that there was another area that needed my desperate attention.

Time.

The way I managed my time was not great. Yet again, I felt caged in by rigid schedules. Setting up my day in hour increments never seemed to work. By noon, I was way off schedule and full of shame because I’d already failed at keeping my commitment to myself. But when I had and open-ended calendar, my time seemed to just…slip away. I’d feel the same amount of shame because I accomplished nothing even though I had a full day.

I left my job as a bank teller back in 2017 to pursue full time photography. That was my current obsession at the time and I was convinced I would break into the business like everyone else was doing. I was already shooting weddings among other things.

I spent nearly a year with my days completely open-ended. Nobody had any hold on my time. Nobody, including myself. Needless to say, that business venture died within 8 months, adding the growing pile of others things I tried and turned out I didn’t like as a full-time gig.

I’m not ashamed of that time. It taught me a lot. And I don’t think I did everything wrong. I just figured out that being a full-time photographer was most definitely not for me. I tell you this story to contrast to where I am today.

I work a remote job 30-40/hours a week. My hours are basically 9-5. I wake up at 3:30AM every morning so that I can be at the gym at 4:00AM. I have two major blocks of time to create: 6:30AM-8:00AM and 5:30-7:00PM. Those aren’t strict either, because I have other commitments that sometimes push into those segments. I do protect my time, however, I have MUCH less of it to create than I did as a full-time artist.

I have created more consistently over the past two years than I have most of my life.

It’s easy to want to beat myself up about it now that I know the things that I know. If I had the tools, mindsets, and flexible frameworks that I do now, I wonder if I would have been further along. But I can’t go there and neither can you.

My point is that having my time significantly more restrained forced me to hone my time-management skills. By creating boundaries around my time, I actually have more time and space to embrace spontaneity when it is beneficial to my creative process.

Tools and Tips for Structured Creativity

As I stated before, I’ll be spending my entire first season on the podcast talking about implementing a flexible framework (that is totally able to be retrofitted to you!) that helps you move your ideas from thought into action.

However, I’m well aware that sometimes you need a quick win. With that in mind, this is my go-to list of resources I reference! This list will continue to grow, however, this is where I would start if you’re looking for something to help ease the overwhelm right now!

Books:

• Atomic Habits by James Clear
• The Creative Act by Rick Rubin
• The War of Art by Steven Pressfield
• Creative Quest by Questlove
• Daring Greatly by Brené Brown
• On Writing by Steven King
• Ruthless Elimination of Hurry by John Mark Comer
• How to be Everything by Emilie Wapnick
• Refuse to Choose! by Barbara A Sher
• Overwhelmed by Brigid Schulte

People I Follow:

• George Kao
• Annie Petsche
• @shinewithnatasha
• @inspiredtowrite
• James Clear
• Ergo Josh

Embracing Structure for Creative Success

I guess if you got this far you now know just how verbose I am. Lol. Sorry…not sorry.

I hated anything that put to rigid of perameters around me. By abaondoning them altogether, I became my own worse enemy. Once I gave myself permission to use the tools I already had, but make them work for the way I view the world, everythign changed.

If any of this has resonated, then a formula most likely won’t work well for you. That 90-plan that coach has might not work well for your artistic goals. Niching down to a super specific elevator speech might be too limiting for you – at least right now.

You might already know this.

What you need is structure, not plug-and-play automations. I’ll leave you with this quote:

“Even magical, fantasy, and sci-fi worlds have systems and limits. So why don’t you?”

Me, to myself