Creativity is about dealing with frustration

When I get a promising idea it's often all fun and excitement, even getting started might be a breeze. It’s all potential!

But there always comes a point when it feels like a tangle of frustrations. Problems without clear answers, new skills to learn, uncertainty and tasks that distract from the important parts.

Facing this tangly barrier is when real creativity begins. Up until the frustration hits all I’ve done is go through the loops, doing what is obvious and easy. Now I’ve reached the point where I need to face the facts - the roadblocks between the lofty dream and the real, finished manifestation of the idea.

Every project, idea and medium has frustrations built into them that can’t be skipped.

• Story telling: figuring out what the message is and stringing together a bunch of events in an organic escalating manner that convey that message.
• Game design: finding a hook to build a game around, figuring out a gameloop to make it fun to repeat the hook and overcoming all the technical challenges.
• Composing (music): finding repetitive patterns that aren’t annoying while finding and conveying the right emotions.
• Coming up with ideas: to think of something that you think is worth doing and that you are excited about and that overlaps with your skillset and experience.

If you see some kind of finished piece of art. A movie for instance, and it’s just not very good. Then it’s probably because for some reason the creator(s) of it didn’t deal with some of these frustrations. Let’s say the issue of this movie is the story. There could be a variety of reasons why; maybe they didn’t think of the good answers, so they relied on tropes, perhaps the message was fuzzy because they didn’t have a deep enough understanding of it, perhaps their world view was too limited for the topic. Or they simply didn’t have enough time (time helps a lot in dealing with frustration).

Soul searching and expanding your world view? We are talking frustrating stuff here! When I was a teen I met people that really challenged my beliefs and values, it’s not easy to willingly put yourself in situations like that (I stumbled into it there). That’s why I keep repeating ‘creativity is an adventure in the mind,’ real adventures should be at least a bit uncomfortable.

Story telling might sound dramatic as an example. But take any craft, drawing for instance, you don’t exactly need to search your soul to draw something decent, but you could find yourself unable to pull off an image the way you want and then face the frustration of self-doubt. Frustration hides everywhere in the process.

I’m not saying anything you don’t already know here, you have definitely felt it (and that’s a good thing). I’m just framing it in a different way or putting words to it.

My hope is next time you sit down to work on an idea and you feel frustrated, you should know that it is the most important part of the process. The way you tackle that frustrating thing is what determines how good the outcome will be or how much you will grow from it.

It’s too hard to not mention AI at all when talking about this. One of the main reasons people feel like they need AI is because they think they can remove the frustration from the creative process. But if you do, you will get robbed of the satisfaction of being an artist/creative.

The satisfaction of solving a problem is proportional to the frustration. And without frustration there is no growth.

Creating stuff is about facing frustration and doing something about it.

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published 2026-03-04