You’re allowed to make something bad

There is a strange pressure that comes with being creative. We are supposed to make something beautiful. Something useful. Something worth keeping.

If we are sharing it online, it would look good in a photograph. If we are selling it, it needs to be good enough for someone else to spend their money on it. Even when we are making something purely for ourselves, there can be a little voice asking:

“But what are you going to do with it?”

Perhaps we need to get better at making things that are simply… bad.

Not deliberately bad, necessarily. Just without worrying whether they are any good at all. 

Pick up a paintbrush and use the colours that don’t work together. Draw something with wonky lines. Start a piece of crochet and realise you’ve counted the stitches wrong. Make a felted animal with one ear slightly bigger than the other. Tear a piece of paper and stick it somewhere that doesn’t quite look right. 

And then leave it. 

You don’t have to fix it, you don’t have to photograph it. You don’t have to turn it into a product, and you don’t even have to finish it 

There is something incredibly freeing about creating without the expectation of a finished result.

We learn through the things that don’t work

Somewhere along the way, mistakes became something to avoid. We are encouraged to get things right. To follow instructions. To produce something that resembles the picture on the front of the kit. But when we are making, the mistakes can actually be information. 

The colour combination we thought would be awful might turn out to be surprisingly interesting. The shape we accidentally created might give us an idea for something else. The technique that didn’t work might show us another way of doing it. 

We can’t discover any of those things if we are too frightened of getting it wrong. Think about the first time you tried something creative. You probably weren’t very good at it. You might have struggled with the materials or made something that looked nothing like you imagined. 

But you are learning. 

And learning requires us all to be beginners. It requires us to get things wrong. 

Perhaps we’ve simply forgotten how to be beginners because adulthood gives us so few opportunities to do something badly without consequences.

Children don’t worry about whether their art is good

Watch a child with a piece of cardboard, some glue and a handful of scraps. They rarely stop to consider whether their creation is commercially viable. They don’t wonder whether anyone will like it on instagram.  They don’t ask whether they should make another one in a different colour so they can create a collection.

They just make it. They experiment. They follow an idea, and they change their minds. 

They might spend twenty minutes creating something then abandon it completely when they discover a stick outside. There is no pressure for the finished thing to justify the time they spent making it.

Perhaps there is something we can learn from that.

Creativity doesn’t always have to be productive 

I think this is something we forget as adults. We are so used to measuring our time by what we have achieved that even our hobbies can become little productivity projects. 

How many things did I make?

Could I sell this?

Could I put it on Instagram?

Should I make another one?

Would anyone buy one?

Could I turn this into a side hustle?

Before long, something that was supposed to be relaxing has become another job. 

Of course, there is nothing wrong with making things to sell. I make things to sell myself, and there is enormous satisfaction in creating something with my hands and knowing that somebody else will enjoy it, 

But there also needs to be room for making things that don’t need a purpose. 

Sometimes creativity is valuable simply because it gives out minds somewhere to wander. Making something imperfect gives us permission to be curious rather than successful. And curiosity is often where the interesting ideas begin.

What if we stopped worrying about the finished product?

Imagine sitting down with some materials and deciding that you are not going to make anything in particular. 

No project or plan. No Pinterest board or tutorial. 

Just a pile of things and twenty minutes. You might draw or cut up some paper. You might arrange buttons into strange little patterns, You might experiment with wool. It may end up looking ridiculous and that is the point. 

There is no expectation hanging over you. You are simply playing with an idea. It might come to something, or it might not. 

Either way you have spent twenty minutes doing something that wasn’t about productivity, achievement or producing something worthy of sharing. You’ve simply allowed yourself to be curious. 

And in a world where so much of our time is already filled with information, notifications and things demanding our attention, that feels quite valuable.