Your paintings, your stories, your client pitches, your presentations, your advertisements, your photographs. You don’t have much business and you don’t have people ecstatic about what you do for them.
It’s always just good enough to blend in, but never great enough to stick out. How can you possibly change that?
We must be able to exercise our creativity fearlessly and as unboundedly as possible, but we must take care not to spiral out of control and produce art that has no soul, feeling, depth, or direction.
The trick is to start with the end. Target what you want, the feeling you wish to envoke, the end of the story you’re telling, the conclusion the client needs for that pitch deck, etc…
Then it's simple: use your creativity to build to that point.
By starting where you want to finish, you can step backward and build to that finish point faster and more precisely. Your friends, clients, and fans (yeah, you’ll have some of them when you create art with soul) will love you and your work more.