One of the reasons creatives withhold their work, is because of fear of failure. As stated previously, art withheld is a gift un-given, a waste of your time, and a lost opportunity, but so many people will look at their work and convince themselves that their work is unworthy. They think they’ve failed.
Creatives need to learn to fail like our creative brethren, the scientists. Oh there are few people more creative than scientists, and there are no people more susceptible to failure than scientists. The thing is, scientists know how to fail. Here’s what happens. One day a scientist comes up with an idea. An idea is nothing more than a creative solution to a problem, something every creative/artist also does every day. Once the scientist has an idea, he or she begins to do experiments to test whether or not their idea will work. That experiment has really only two options. It will either succeed or fail. If it succeeds, the problem is solved. This is similar to the work we do that works the first time. If on the other hand the piece doesn’t work out, we creatives will generally consider it a failure and walk away. Scientists don’t do that and neither should we.
You see, if the experiment fails, the scientist notes what was done, and the results, why it failed etc. From there the creative process continues. The scientist learns what he can from his failure and determines what it will take for his creation to succeed. From there he or she designs another experiment and starts again. Each success, and each failure moves the scientist closer and closer to success. Basically creatives often fail and quit. Scientists experiment, fail, and experiment again as often as possible, until something works. Scientists fail forward.
We creatives need to do the same.