We’ve talked about healthy ways of receiving feedback. Now let’s talk about healthy ways of giving it. In almost every way, giving good feedback is harder than accepting it. It is a discipline. And it takes a long time to master. Any novice can teach himself to listen to wisdom. It’s a thousand times harder to speak it.
Despite being necessarily collaborative, filmmaking can be lonely. And that loneliness can start to affect you — not just personally, but creatively as well. It’s hard to do good work when you don’t have people behind you.
Creativity and loneliness seem to go hand in hand. Some even believe loneliness is essential to creativity — not only as a by-product, but also a catalyst. A study from Johns Hopkins University found that people who were socially rejected early in their life tend to be the most creative. Rejection becomes their “fuel.” This explains why creative people are usually pretty weird. They are literally “out there.” On the fringe. Refusing to conform. Which can (a) make their work meaningful, and (b) make their work impossible.
According to a recent study by the Behavioral Science Research Institute, 70% of us will doubt ourselves at some point in our career. The other 30%, of course, will be lying to ourselves. Self-doubt is a curse of the human condition — it comes with being a person. But it is especially rampant among creative people. Maybe that’s because creative success is so nebulous. Maybe it’s because so many insecure people are, for whatever reason, drawn to making art. But we think psychologist Christian Jarrett might be on to something when he suggests: “In our world there is a pervasive myth that there is a minority of super achievers who are born with a magical gift, while the rest of us mortals struggle by with our ordinary talents.” We interpret our effort as lack of talent. We see our successes as flukes.
