Some people who want to be considered creative spend a lot of time focussed on making every single aspect of their life reflects their creativity. It’s not enough that they are a brilliant painter, they also have to wear crazy outfits and drive around in a car with jewels and feathers hot glued to the outside. Here’s a thought, have you ever tried being completely uncreative in the parts of your life that don’t directly impact your work?

Lots of artists talk about the importance of routine and discipline for their work, but there is also power in making a choice once and sticking with it.

I was reminded of this when I read an article about Devo asking to meet David Lynch. Lynch agreed, but the meeting had to be at Bob’s Big Boy. You see, Lynch ate lunch there every day. This is how Lynch describes it:

I like things to be orderly. For seven years I ate at Bob’s Big Boy. I would go at 2:30, after the lunch rush. I ate a chocolate shake and four, five, six, seven cups of coffee–with lots of sugar. And there’s lots of sugar in that chocolate shake. It’s a thick shake. In a silver goblet. I would get a rush from all this sugar, and I would get so many ideas! I would write them on these napkins. It was like I had a desk with paper. All I had to do was remember to bring my pen, but a waitress would give me one if I remembered to return it at the end of my stay. I got a lot of ideas at Bob’s.

Charles Schulz, creator of the Peanuts comic strip had the same breakfast, english muffin with grape jelly, and lunch, tuna salad, every day at a diner he built for himself.

Einstein famously didn’t like to think about his clothes and wore the same outfit every day. He said, “I like neither new clothes nor new kinds of food.”

Obviously this doesn’t work for everyone, most people find their creative lives enriched by new experiences. However, spend a few minutes looking at your own life. Is there a decision you dread? A process that takes up too much of your life? Try simplifying it.

Eat the same lunch every day, get your hair cut on the same day every month or stop worrying about the color of your socks. Whatever weighs on you, take control of it!

You just might find that spending less time on the trivial gives your more time for the amazing!

(Read more about David Lynch’s creative life in Catching the Big Fish his book on meditation and creativity. It’s on sale for $5.99 on Amazon and it’s a bargain.)

Copyblogger posted a quote from John Caples, one of the great ad men in history. He wrote, in 1932:

Don’t make ads simple because you think people are low in intelligence. Some are smart and some are not smart. The point is that people are thinking about other things when they see your ad. Your ad does not get their full attention or intelligence. Your ad gets only a fraction of their intelligence . . . . People won’t study your ad carefully. They can’t be bothered. And so you have to make your ads simple.

While this quote is intended to aid commerce, I think it has uses for art as well. I’m not saying all art should be simple, but I think this quote makes a good case for at least an appearance or layer of simplicity that will allow someone to get something from it without their full attention.

If you are creating something that you want to be read or viewed by a large number of people, especially if it’s intended for the web, it needs to be graspable without someone’s full attention. The competition is fierce and you’re lucky if someone is paying even 25% attention when they look at something you’ve created. The complexity can be there, under the surface, to reward the people who decide to look deeper, but they must have a reason to look.

There are lots of places this doesn’t apply, but I thought it was an interesting idea. Don’t dumb it down, just simplify.