What the painting wants to become
March 22, 2026
For most of my life, I knew exactly how to get things done: decide what to do, make promises that hold yourself accountable, and then deliver as promised on time. Any step that doesn't lead toward the final delivery is noise or waste.
In fact I didn't think there was any other approach. It had worked for everything: sports, business, education, projects around the house... life.
I was not expecting this mindset to be counter-productive in my new life.
At first I didn't notice. I had become a full-time student and the delivery-oriented thinking served me well. I only realized I needed a new mindset when I started to free up time for more of "my own stuff".
As usual, I had intended to define a goal for each area of practice: a novel about X that carries a message about Y. A collection of songs that convey a feeling of Z, and so on. Then I would communicate the "projects", work hard towards each deliverable, and report on progress over time in the newsletter.
I had plenty of ideas but none felt strong enough to justify a massive effort. Luckily the courses helped set me on the right path.
In one course a professional artist described his process. He just starts painting, puts some color on the canvas, and explores what the painting "wants to become". Sometimes he starts with an intention, but the painting often ends up as something completely different.
At that point I was not yet receptive. I probably dismissed it as some kind of cheating: you can only draw if you can put your intention on paper. If you have no intention, no purpose for the final work, then why draw? (I find his art beautiful and as far as I know he is quite successful.)
But over time more signs were pointing in the same direction. Marguerite Duras writes in her book Writing: "Writing is trying to know beforehand what one would write if one wrote, which one never knows until afterward"
She is basically saying the same thing as the artist. The process is not to define, commit, execute, and deliver on time. It is more along the lines of execute, explore, and (potentially) deliver.
Marguerite elaborates further. "If one had any idea what one was going to write, before doing it, before writing, one would never write. It wouldn't be worth it anymore."
In other words she is telling me that if I need to decide what to do before starting, I wouldn't be able to come up with anything worth starting.
When I stop defining the outcome in advance, things definitely get produced. Not always what I expected, but real nonetheless.
In his book On Writing Stephen King describes his approach. He places an interesting character in a certain environment and observes what happens. It's the same logic as the artist who discovers what his painting wants to become.
When adopting this mindset I've had to reconsider what used to be sound habits. A small example is a to-do list and schedule for the day. Now they hamper creativity and disrupt my flow.
I dropped both and came up with an alternative method. I let each marble in a glass represent about fifteen minutes of intentional, focused, high-quality time in any of my practice areas. (Things like admin, emails or impulse-driven activities don't count)
During breaks I make a rough time-estimate and move marbles from one glass to the other. When I run out of marbles, I know I can call it a day with a clear conscience if I wanted to. It's like the opposite of a to-do list: a done-list without specified items.
The to-do list is just one detail of many. Let's get back to the bigger picture.
Learning and increasing my ability is my overall goal. It's like an endless staircase, there is always a next level. I experience progress and can even measure it, but I keep raising the bar. I celebrate progress but there is no final finish line to cross. Timelines and deadlines have less meaning in a perpetual process.
I'm focusing on process rather than the outcome. Outcomes do come regularly and some are keepers: a short story, a song, a drawing. But, the deliverables are byproducts of the learning process. They are never carefully considered or intended to be the result that defines me. The deliverable is no longer the main point.
Haruki Murakami addresses this in Novelist as a Vocation when he talks about his first successful book (Hear the Wind Sing):
"I had no thought at all that ordinary readers would ever see it, and all I thought about as I wrote it was that writing made me feel good. Taking some images I had inside me, choosing words that satisfied me, putting those words together into sentences."
For Haruki Murakami the process was the point. The book came about as a byproduct of him enjoying writing. He was not even thinking about readers.
I used to think everything started with deciding what to do and why. It turns out that, at least for me, creative work starts with making something. When I keep doing that, something real emerges.
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