Imagine for a moment a smooth glassy sphere (personally, I’m visualizing the palantir from Lord of the Rings, but that’s just me).

The sphere is perfect. Not a scratch or smudge or mote of dust marring its surface, it’s a beautiful sight to behold.

In theory, the orb has some purpose, but you’ve almost forgotten entirely what it is. And while you don’t really put it to use, you spend a good deal of time gazing at it from across the room, fussing over it, polishing it, maintaining its perfect veneer, sharing

This orb is how a lot of us as creators treat our creative practices.

How a “Waggle” Can Help You Create More Consistent Work

As we develop as creators, we tend to develop a series of rituals, habits and superstitions designed (at least in theory) to get us into the zone and allow us to create our best work.

This practice might consist of a specific location at which we always sit down to do the work, a sacred hour when we feel inspiration is most likely to strike, a steaming cup of coffee close at hand, prepared in a specific ritualistic way, or a particular playlist that seems to channel the muse. If we’re particularly zealous, we may even offer up a prayer to the creative gods or make a sacrificial burnt offering.

Jay Acunzo refers to this type of pre-work ritual as your waggle, a phrase borrowed from the unique pre-swing ritual many golfers perform before every shot.

And regardless of how superstitious it may seem, waggles work.

In creating, as in golf, they’re a way to queue muscle memory in order to deliver a consistent outcome. And a consistent outcome is what separates pro creators from amateurs. Most people can stumble their way into making something good once. But making a career as a creator requires creating good work with practiced consistently.

But while our chosen waggles can be helpful if not outright necessary for creating consistent work, they present a problem. Particularly when they become polished to a smooth, glassy perfection.

The Downside of a Defined Waggle

As the last year has shown us, we have less control over our lives and routines than we might think.

Travel, family or friends visiting from out of town, kids activities, events, global pandemics, and more all have the ability to throw sand in the gears of our finely tuned creative machine. These situations are inevitable and unavoidable, and when our ability to do our creative work is dependent on being able to perform our waggle in the same way every time, we have a problem.

The more finely polished our waggle, the easier it is to hide behind.

When we’re unable to satisfy all of the many rituals, circumstances, and environmental requirements we’ve defined as being essential for our creative process, we’re likely to simply skip creating all together and hope for better conditions tomorrow. Repeat this process even a handful of times and before long our buffed-to-perfection creative practice becomes something to simply observe and admire from a distance rather than put to use.

If we’re in this for the long haul, we need a way to be able to maintain our creative productivity regardless of what the external world throws at us.

The best way I know to do this is to introduce some sandpaper to our practice and roughing it up, an idea borrowed from the world of meditation.

Roughing Up Your Creative Practice

A few years ago, I worked on an audio editing project for The Daily Meditation Podcast.

The project consisted of proofing the back catalogue of over a thousand episodes to be uploaded to the new paid app that Mary, the host was creating. By the end of the project, I had received an intensive crash course in meditation, mindfulness, chakras, and the benefits of various herbal teas (one of the unique quirks of the show).

While I’ve since forgotten almost everything I learned, there’s one idea that has stuck with me.

Contrary to what many people think, the real value of meditation and mindfulness is not in the time spent sitting cross-legged breathing deeply, with a blank mind.

Instead, it’s in applying the same mindfulness practices to the rest of your life especially in challenging or stressful situations. If you’re only able to practice mindfulness in a perfectly controlled environment, then, the practice isn’t much good to you.

To combat this reliance on perfect conditions, Mary frequently counselled listeners to take their meditation practice and rough it up around the edges.

Essentially, this meant challenging the notion that any of the various individual elements of the practice were necessary to meditate effectively.

Always meditate sitting straight-backed with your eyes closed? Once a week, try a walking meditation instead.

Always meditate at 7 am every morning? Try meditating in the evening.

Always meditate on your bedroom floor? Try the living room. Or the basement. Or somewhere intentionally difficult to focus, a mall food court perhaps.

Perhaps the most readily available, yet underrated method of roughing up the practice, shared Mary, was to simply push through unplanned distractions and annoyances outside of your control. Reframed this way, a neighbour mowing their lawn outside your window or kids running around the house cease to be maddening distractions and impediments to your meditation, but opportunities to persist and rough up your practice.

While an individual meditation might not be as effective as when the conditions are perfect, the practice as a whole grows more resilient.

The resiliency that comes with Rough-Edged Practice should be one of our primary goals as creators as well.

How To Create A Rough-Edged Creative Practice

As with meditation, roughing up our creative practice is essentially about putting ourselves in less than ideal environments and circumstances and training ourselves to create anyway.

Much like Marathon Projects increase our belief in our capabilities at a macro level, roughing up our creative practice increases our belief in our ability to create at the daily micro level, regardless of the external events outside of our control.

Opportunities to rough up your practice aren’t hard to find.

If you normally write every morning at 8 am at your kitchen table, try writing at 3 pm in a coffee shop. Switch up your drink, your process, or your playlist. Better yet, leave your headphones at home and ditch the playlist altogether. Find ways to intentionally introduce discomfort and friction into your process and rough up its perfect shiny exterior.

Keep in mind that the point isn’t to switch up your process every single time you sit down to create. A solid, consistent process is your foundation for reliably creating solid work, after all.

Instead, aim to switch things up once every couple of weeks.

Spend the rest of the time making use of the process that you know gets you results. Besides, even under ideal circumstances, opportunities to rough up your practice are unavoidable. When the inevitable annoyances, distractions, and frustrations arise, recognize the opportunity to further rough up (and thus strengthen) your practice and commit to pushing through.

When roughing up your practice, remember that the point isn’t to create your very best work every time you sit down.

The point is to slowly raise the overall average of your body of work over time. Building up your ability (and belief in your ability) to create solid work regardless of the conditions is a key component of raising that level.

You can start raising that level immediately.

Commit to introducing some grit into your process this week. Either by intentionally changing up your waggle, or by keeping an eye out for resistance and pushing through when you feel it urging you to wait for more ideal conditions to appear.

Take that perfect, shiny, delicate glass sphere that is your process and turn it into something that more closely resembles a dull, well-used bowling ball.

It might not be much to look at, you certainly won’t display it on a pedestal in your living room, but it’s capable of knocking down anything that comes across its path.

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This article originally appeared in my weekly Creative Wayfinding Newsletter. Each issue is the product of a week of work, and contains something not available for sale.

A fresh perspective, a shot of encouragement when you need it most, and maybe even some genuine wisdom from time to time.

Each week, we explore a different facet of the question “How do we navigate the wilds of creating work that matters?”

It’s something I’m proud to create and I’d be honoured to share it with you.

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