Acuity

In recent years, a brush, paint, canvas meme format has gained popularity and made its way into nearly every subreddit and Facebook group. The format features three rows, each with a line of text and a photo. The first line says, “This is my brush:”, and is next to a metaphorical brush of sorts (a keyboard, a car, or an Instagram post). The second line continues, “This is my paint:”, and sits next to an image of a metaphorical medium (some poetry, a bottle of beer, or a picture of a schizophrenic brain). The final line completes the meme, saying, “This is my canvas:”, next to a picture of the location where the brush and paint are employed (a journal, a busy road, or a chaotic comment section on Instagram).

When used well, the meme format portrays the comedic idea that the author of the meme is a masterful artist when using their metaphorical brush and paint in the corresponding avenue.

I find that there is also some deep wisdom in the format. It’s a reminder that most things in life worth pursuing are forms of art, requiring the best tools, inspiration, and effort.

The following is my best attempt at highlighting how one can utilize creative infrastructure, a concept I’ll go into more detail on later, to yield the greatest returns in whatever art form they pursue. The core concept I’ll aim to demonstrate is that creative infrastructure has a multiplicative effect on creative efforts, and therefore, is the most important aspect to getting what you want. I’ll also add a disclaimer that, while these concepts apply to most everything, I am writing this primarily from a financial and business perspective.

What is Your Art?

As many thought leaders have pointed out, it is always best to begin with the end in mind. Your art is your end goal; the thing that you aspire to achieve. Your art may be a successful social media account with millions of followers, or it may be a bank account with sufficient funds to enable you to explore the world. Knowing what type of art you want to create is paramount, and strongly outweighs hard work. In the words of Naval Ravikant, “If you don’t know yet what you should work on, the most important thing is to figure it out. You should not grind at a lot of hard work until you figure out what you should be working on.” The quote is self-explanatory, but is a good reminder that eighty-hour work weeks using the wrong brush, paint, or canvas will never yield the art you desire.

If you don’t yet know what your art is, I would recommend an exercise whose origin I believe to be the sales guru Brian Tracy. The exercise is to get out a pen and paper and to write 100 goals. As you write, the first five to ten will likely come to you quickly. If you’re like me, you’ll feel completely out of ideas by goal eleven or twelve. This is an important part of the exercise; let your brain sit for a moment and start to consider other things you’d like. However long it takes, write down all one hundred. You’ll likely learn a lot about yourself and about the things you really desire. For example, you may find that deep down you have always wanted to hit a home run, start a quilting company, or sell a Microsoft Excel course online.

Many of these 100 goals will likely fall by the wayside, or pale in significance to a few that really stand out to you. Remember, you can have anything, but you cannot have everything. Once you have landed on your desired art, you’re ready to begin thinking about your brush, your paint, and your canvas.

What are Your Tools?

With your end in mind, you now must learn what tools you need. The best way to do this is to begin to analyze the top 1% of artists in your sphere. Where do the financially secure business people go to work? What do the top 1% of Udemy teachers use to record their lessons? What do the top 1% of quilters use to get ideas for patterns? What do the top 1% of software engineers use to write code most efficiently?

This may seem like it requires financial capital, but it many cases it does not. Your brush, paint, and canvas are not limited to tangible equipment; rather, they extend to your career path, the company you work at, the type of labor you do, and the systems you put in place. For example, if your goal, or your desired art, is financial freedom, but you are working an hourly job cleaning a commercial office building, you have selected the wrong tools. This is as if you were hoping to sculpt the famous marble David but you were using water and sand. Choosing the right career, the right people, and the right tools is equivalent to selecting the correct trail to hike through after you have identified your destination.

What Infrastructure Will Best Multiply Your Limited Creativity?

Even with the best brush, the best paint, and the best canvas, your creative efforts may not return anything close to the art you have in mind. This is where the concept of creative infrastructure comes into play.

Creative infrastructure is the multiplier on your creativity. It is the exponent above your effort variable. For every one unit of creativity expended, how much value can you create? If you have the proper creative infrastructure in place, small amounts of creative energy can yield massive results. Creative infrastructure comes in the form of hard skills, PP&E, knowledge, and capital. You gain creative infrastructure when you practice a skill, or when you study the experts. You gain creative infrastructure when you optimize your work environment, or when you set up automations to do menial work for you. Put simply, creative infrastructure is the ability to wield the tools.

To demonstrate the importance of creative infrastructure, imagine a young mathematician with a burning interest in finance. Perhaps a piece of her infrastructure is spreadsheet competence: the ability to convey equations, ratios, and functions in an accessible format. Spreadsheets, however boring, enable enormous business operations around the world, and can yield infinite value after their creation. Regardless of her ambition, her mathematical prowess, or her expensive computer setup, if she cannot adequately channel her metaphorical paint into an accessible format such as spreadsheets, the returns on her creative efforts would be terribly stifled.

The power of creative infrastructure cannot be overstated. To all artists, I can confidently say that a more advanced creative infrastructure in your field will be what puts you ahead of your competitors. This might mean getting back on YouTube to finally understand the intricacies of Ableton, it might mean revisiting the books on fundamentals of user experience and design, and it might mean seeking the wisdom of artists who are currently creating the art you want to create.

As our time is limited on this planet, so too, is our ability to express our creativity. Life is too short to spend your time unintentionally creating the wrong art. It is too short to arrive at old age just to discover you had been using the wrong paint, the wrong brush, or were using the wrong canvas. But it is not too short to develop creative infrastructure. Be disciplined in building your creative infrastructure, and you will find that your efficiency in getting what you want out of life will dramatically increase.