When was the last time you sat around a campfire and looked up at the stars?

For me, it was a few weeks ago when some friends invited Kelly and me over to their place for dinner and a backyard fire.

At the time, we’d recently arrived back in Canada after being stuck in Europe throughout COVID and were freshly removed from our mandatory two-week quarantine. Suffice it to say the freedom of getting outside of the house was still very much a novelty, perhaps even a luxury.

But as I sat by the fire, leaned back, and looked up at the expanse of space above, I experienced something more profound. A powerful reminder of one of the essential ingredients of doing meaningful creative work.

Staring up at the stars always has a way of making you realize how small you really are. But as I looked up that night, I realized how unnecessarily small I’d allowed my world to become over the previous weeks.

Sure, the quarantine accounted for some of the shrinking of my world.

But there was more to it than that.

I was in the middle of a big project. And as the project ramped up in the weeks preceding the quarantine, I’d stopped going for my daily walks, stopped writing every day, and stopped reading fiction, stopped engaging with my community on Twitter.

It was an exciting project that I enjoyed working on. But as I shut off the outside world to focus solely on my work, my world shrunk down until the only thing it contained was the project itself.

Pushing Back on a Constantly Shrinking World

Over the past year, most of us have had our worlds shrink in one way or another.

Yours may have shrunk to the size of your neighbourhood, home, office, bedroom, or computer. But while global pandemics are certainly one reason for world shrinkage, they’re not the only one.

In fact, the natural state of our worlds is to shrink in on themselves.

The weight of our routines, schedules, and obligations exerts a sort of gravity on our lives and worlds, constantly pulling them in on themselves.

Without intentional effort to push back on this gravity, our lives soon shrink down to the size of our office, our local coffee shop, the route we take every day to and from work, and the same 5 restaurants we always go to… or more likely order in from.

Part of the problem is this shrinkage is subtle.

We don’t realize the shrinking is happening until we have an expansive experience like the one I had around the fire that opens us up to what we’ve been missing out on. It’s not all negative either. As our worlds shrink, they become more predictable, giving us a sense of order, safety, and control.

But that sense of security comes at a price.

Because as our worlds shrink, they become increasingly inhospitable to creative projects and original ideas.

How a Small World Hurts Us Creatively

Great creative work doesn’t exist in a vacuum.

It requires an awareness of–and interaction with–the world in which it exists, and is born of a broad and diverse set of influences. As our world becomes smaller, our awareness, perspective, and influences shrink down and our work suffers.

New ideas are the first to go.

Coming up with a steady stream of new ideas requires regular interaction with a broad set of influences. The larger your world, the more unique and interesting your inputs are likely to be and as a result, the more unique and interesting the ideas that emerge from their collisions and permutations.

The smaller our world, the more limited our set of influences, and the more likely we are to have generic, uninteresting, unoriginal ideas.

We also lose perspective on our projects.

As the boundaries of our worlds shrink, their contents take up more relative space within them, and with it, more significance… at least to us. We forget that while our work might now make up our entire world, it occupies only a tiny fraction (if any) of anyone else’s.

This is a dangerous place to operate from as a creator…

For one that makes it hard to make and market anything effectively.

Creating and marketing successful creative work requires a constant process of interaction and iteration. When our world shrinks down, our intended audience often gets shut out and we end up creating blindly. With no feedback to keep us moving in the right direction and our work suffers.

Secondly, we tend to overemphasize the importance of our work itself, leading to perfectionism and unnecessary pressure on ourselves and the project to perform.

Without perspective it feels like this project might be our one and only shot and that if we blow it, we’re doomed to failure.

Needless to say, this isn’t a productive mindset from which to do our best creative work, which most often comes from a place of ease and flow.

Make Space for Expansive Experiences

As creators seeking to do meaningful work, this means that one of the most essential activities of our creative process needs to be a constant pushing back on the boundaries of our worlds.

If small worlds lead to small, generic, mediocre work, then it only makes sense that we should seek to make our worlds as big as possible while still shipping regular work.

The way we push back on the boundaries of our world is through expansive experiences.

These might be experiences that make you feel small and realize your place in the universe. This might include sitting around a campfire, staring up at the stars, traveling abroad, or looking out over a landscape from a mountain top.

But we can also have expansive experiences closer to home.

Reading fiction might be one of the most expansive experiences available to us. As George R.R. Martin quipped, “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies . . . The man who never reads lives only one.”

Fiction allows us to experience different viewpoints and perspectives which in turn develop our sense of empathy, which is critical to successful creative work and marketing.

Non-fiction too can be expansive.

Expansive non-fiction is not likely to be found in reading the same business and marketing books that everyone else is gobbling up, but by identifying your curiosities and following them. I’m rarely more creatively inspired than when I’m reading non-fiction books about the natural world, for example.

Outside of books, we can work to intentionally add more variety and novelty to our day-to-day lives.

We can start by unplugging from our phones and paying attention to the world around us.

We can walk more, taking a slightly different route each time. We can shop at different grocery stores, eat at different restaurants, and explore our cities and surrounding areas.

By tapping into our curiosity we can build a habit of seeking out the novel, the unique and the foreign, and in doing so, grow into a constant state of expansion, rather than reduction.

Pushing back on the boundaries of your world isn’t always easy.

Expansive experiences are by their nature more difficult or uncomfortable than their alternatives.

They make us feel small. And make us realize how little we know about the world, about others, and about ourselves. And yet, it’s this very not knowing that further fuels our curiosity, and with it our creativity.

All great creative work is an exploration after all.

But before you can embark on an exploration, you must first find a slice of unknown, uncharted territory to explore.

It exists. But it’s up to you to expand the boundaries of your world to encompass it.

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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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