WHY 8?
Eight minutes is an oddly short and specific time to devote to your creative practice.
A few famous creators have left clues to tiny little details that help them keep moving forward on the work that they have become known for... creative work that has touched millions of lives. Which is impressive. If they have a quirk, a trick, a tiny tactic, who am I to say it’s goofy until Ive tried it out. So I did.
I became obsessed with how successful creators structure their practice and borrowed the bits that worked for me. This process has the whisper of a few of those quirks of others baked in... here’s just a few:
1. Five minutes felt too short to make anything meaningful. It seemed trivial to me. I could ignore something trivial and just skip it. Fifteen minutes, I dunno, seemed a little too big. Like I’d just get going on something good and then have to stop... I didn’t want it to get to be too major. Ten minutes? Yeah, maybe... but eight rhymes! Its between 5 and 10... its an uncommon amount of time so it somehow felt hefty in my mind. Perfect. Eight. And there’s a whole bunch of amazing symbolism in the number eight around creativity. I love it when a thing is more than just a thing.
I wanted to pick a time that I could repeat every day, no matter how busy I am. Something that felt small enough to do and yet over time could actually add up to something meaningful. Have you ever gotten phone call and looked at your phone and declined the call because you knew that a conversation with that person would go on for a while. Sometimes we don’t have the time, the mental space or the energy for things that go on for a while... and that makes us not do it at all. So I chose to make consistency and small wins my focus. Nothing so long that I would say - I can’t do it today I don’t have the time, mental space, or the energy.
2. I’ve enjoyed the comedy of Jerry Seinfeld for years. And the more I hear about his creative process, the more I really appreciate the way his mind works. I hear him say in a podcast that he was sharing his process with his daughter... and he told her to set a time for when she could stop writing. That your mind can’t focus indefinitely, but you can focus for a finite amount of time. Do your brain a favor and let it know when the bell rings.
And chronobiology backs up this idea. It’s the study of time as it relates to living things/ i.e. our bodies. We all have rhythms. Time as we think about it is linear, a straight line from the past straight through us on to the future... but our bodies actually experience it in cycles and repetition. We need the flow in and out of activities... like breathing.
3. Hemingway famously left something unfinished on his desk at night so that he would know exactly where to start tomorrow. He left a rough edge to graft the next days work onto, instead of trying to tie up loose ends and leaving himself to start over tomorrow.
It’s ok to leave your practice with something unfinished. Its ok to stop while you still want more. It will draw you back to it tomorrow and the next day. It leaves room for the work to breathe. It percolates. It rises like bread dough. It matures.
I’ve seen some people have anxiety about trying to ‘finish’ in 8 minutes. Finish? Why? Why do you need to finish? Its literally just a container of time to hold your practice. There’s nothing to finish, there’s nothing you need to accomplish. It’s the process of returning to this space to this time to make... again and again. Thats the important part. Capture what you can. Let the rest live within you.
Allow the feeling of anxiety to ease as you show yourself that its ok, you’ll be back tomorrow.
Thanks for joining me for another episode of Create in 8!
Laura Olsen
Why 8?