If you are a creative professional, you may be more of a magician than you realize.

Stage magic, tricks, illusions, sleight of hand… they are all the products of intense planning and practice, not otherworldly forces. For the budding creative professional, the person who practices lateral action, the magician is an excellent role model and source of inspiration. Let’s have a look at a few professional magicians and see what we can learn from them that we can apply to our own creative work.

Prolific Creativity

1,000 magic tricks.

Just ponder that for a moment.

How many ways can you levitate people, cut them in half, pick out a mystery card, or make something disappear? Most of us can’t do any of these things (at least, not on purpose). Many magicians probably learn five or ten ways to do each of these common tricks.

Stewart James, on the other hand, had seemingly limitless creative ability. David Ben wrote about James in his book Advantage Play: The Manager’s Guide to Creative Problem Solving. Ben wrote that James invented more than 1,000 magic tricks in his lifetime. Ben examined James’s methods for developing magic tricks and concluded that James was “the most prolific inventor of magic in the 20th century”.

How does one person create so many magic tricks? The answer might surprise you.

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• Why is it when some people hate you, you’re doing something right?
• What’s the most effective form of online marketing?
• How do you decide what to make and sell?
• Why is doing less the key to achieving more?
• What’s more important, talent or action?

These are just a few of the topics from my discussion with Jason Fried, President of 37signals, and the co-author of Getting Real and the New York Times bestseller Rework.

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• Why is it so hard to pursue our dreams, and get started on the creative challenges that mean so much to us?
• How can we overcome our inner Resistance to doing the things that matter?
• What rewards can we expect from persevering in the face of difficulties?
• What are the creative opportunities — and pitfalls — of social media and digital publishing?

These are some of the questions I put to bestselling author Steven Pressfield in this fascinating audio seminar about the creative process and the life lessons he’s learned.

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This post is part of the Break Through Your Creative Blocks series.

If you have a creative block you’d like some help with, tell us about it – details in the first article in the series.

If you’re not careful, one of the greatest blessings of the creative mindset can turn into a huge curse.

You see opportunities everywhere. Things you read, people you meet, places you go, experiences at work, at home, even in love – all of them are liable to spark a new idea for a great project or piece of work. You imagine how great the finished outcome will be, and enthusiastically start work. But if you keep doing this, day after day, you will inevitably find yourself starting more projects than you can possibly finish. It’s the creative equivalent of having ‘eyes bigger than your stomach’.

And if you have a thriving network of creative contacts, new ideas and opportunities will come to you every day, in your inbox, in meetings, text messages and casual conversations. Because of the way our mirror neurons work, it’s easy to get infected with other people’s enthusiasm (the invisible carrot); and you’re a nice person, so you hate to disappoint anyone by saying ‘no’ when they come to you with a proposal (the invisible stick).

All of which adds to a pile of projects on your desk. You feel stressed, overloaded, guilty, rushing around yet feeling that you’re getting nowhere. Something has to give. And that something is your creativity.

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You’ve probably had it happen to you: eager, excited, ready to share your article or painting or blog design, you show a friend and ask, “What do you think?”

The friend, being the honest and straightforward person he is, believes you really want to know what he thinks, so he launches into his opinions. Pointing out errors both gross and miniscule, he goes on and on. Or he says “It’s nice.” Either way, the feedback is far from useful; it became a bomb that blew your project to pieces.

As a coach for creatives, I’ve seen how feedback can devastate people and annihilate their creative dreams.

One man in his seventies showed up in a writing group I was leading. He had received negative feedback on his writing twenty-five years earlier from a teacher he trusted. The teacher told him he had not talent whatsoever. Decades later, he had worked up the courage to try writing again.

Feedback is a necessary part of succeeding as a writer or artist, so it’s wise to disarm the feedback bombs in advance. Here are five strategies that will help you become a master at eliciting and using constructive feedback.

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