IIDA Perspective - Summer 2019 - 34

Go Ahead, Step Back
While it's often natural to push
yourself to be more creative and
produce more high-quality work,
that drive for productivity and
success is often at the root of
burnout. This is especially true
for productive creatives-the
broad category used to describe
all those "compensated to be
creative within an economically
productive way," says Rahaf
Harfoush, a Paris-based digital

34

perspective

iida.org/perspective

"

There is art to
what we do,
but it's not
uninhibited
artistic
expression. It's
creative
problem-solving
on someone
else's behalf."

Photo by: (previous page) Henrik Sorensen/Getty Images

N

anthropologist and author of Hustle & Float, which
explores the epidemic of work burnout.
"The current conditions are just not optimized for
creative professionals," says Harfoush. "People think that
their creativity is something they can force-just push
through-though sociology, neurology, and psychology all
tell us that's not true," she says. "We are not machines. We
have ups and downs, and yet modern work culture expects
us to be at a constant hustle all the time."
Harfoush knows this firsthand. She used to push herself
through sleepless nights and marathon work sessions until
the point of total exhaustion. Harfoush felt brainwashed
by a system poorly designed to foster her creative abilities.
"The mental voice in your head is saying 'if I take a break,
I'm never going to be good enough,' or 'if I take a break,
my colleagues will judge me as not working hard enough.'"
But her research found that the most exciting and creative
designers, leaders, and entrepreneurs were not the most
overworked or the most single-minded. They had built
their own strategies to keep their creative minds healthy.
"Over time it can be hard to find the balance between
renewing our creativity while pursuing income,"
Sejean says. "One of the ways I found was
to set small challenges. Daily creative
challenges-creating something every
day for a set number of days-were a
big part of my healing. I did a lot of
100-day challenges. I started drawing
on a Post-it every day and sharing it
on social media, not trying to gain
followers or anything like that, just
for the sake of it."
R. Michael Hendrix, a partner and
executive design director at IDEO in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, also turns
to creative challenges as a way to focus
on creativity that isn't tied to work.
For instance, for 20 minutes every
morning for a year, he made visual
collages out of his junk mail. "It helped
broadly with everything I was doing at
the time," he says.
Sometimes these exercises can lead
to unexpected places-even seeds
for other projects. Sejean's Post-it
challenge, for example, led her to create
interactive animations. And another 30day challenge she did eventually became
a graphic novel she was able to publish.
"It was just an incremental step
that allowed me to be creative while
-R. Michael Hendrix

Nathalie Sejean is a recovered creative burnout.
Just a few years ago, the French filmmaker was living in
Los Angeles and working on a variety of projects, including
a new screenplay. Every day she would write, and every night
she would have more and more pages filled with words. Yet
the work felt torturous. Sejean felt disconnected from the
project. The writing, she says, lacked any sort of spark, risk,
or, ultimately, creativity. Sejean was simply going through
the motions. And it wasn't just for this project-it was for
every project on her plate at the time.
"I realized at some point that I didn't know anymore
what I wanted to do, what I wanted to say, or if I even had
anything to say," she says.
It was a clear case of creative burnout: a breakdown of
artistic, imaginative, or inventive abilities due to stress or
overwork that leads to a state of exhaustion, a reduced sense
of accomplishment, and even a loss of self-worth. For those
in any creative field-from filmmaking and fine arts to
writing and interior design-creative burnout is a potential
hazard of the job that can be difficult to face.
"When it comes to creativity, it's a bit weird to admit
that you are not feeling creative when creativity
is something that is so strongly a part of
your identity and also how you're making
money most of the time," Sejean says.
But it can be overcome.
"If you think of creativity as a
muscle that everybody has inside
themselves, then you realize that if
you never use this muscle, or if you
overuse this muscle, or if you don't
have the right diet, it can get injured,"
Sejean says. "But, if you think about
it as an injury, then you know you
can get better, you can heal, and
you can even sometimes come out
stronger than you were before."
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