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.

The internet is a wonderful thing, especially for creative people looking for entertainment and new ideas. Never before have so many different sources of inspiration been so freely available. But as many of us have discovered to our cost, you can have too much of a good thing. Too many websites to visit, too many blogs to read, too many videos to watch, too much music to listen to, too many links to click on Twitter, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Digg… And that’s before you’ve even opened your e-mail!

Some days, it feels like your laptop is a Pandora’s Box – open it and you unleash all kinds of digital distractions, that make creative work an impossibility. Or to change the metaphor, information overload is in danger of crushing your inspiration.

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Image courtesy of The 99 Percent

This week I published a couple of guest articles that tackle the perennial challenge for creators:

How can you find the time, focus and resourcefulness to create something extraordinary, in the midst of daily pressures and a world that seems happy to settle for mediocrity?

The Key to Creating Remarkable Things describes the simple change I made in my working habits a few years ago, which has made the biggest difference to my creative output. It’s published at The 99 Percent, a terrific online magazine for creative professionals, where I’m a regular(ish) columnist.

And if you’d like to know what Johann Sebastian Bach can teach writers, internet marketers and entrepreneurs, head over to Copyblogger.com and read The 7 Essential Steps to Creating Your Content Masterpiece.

Passion takes inspiration and turns it into something you’re proud of.

Passion motivates you in the morning and fires you up when you are immersed in your work.

Passion is an unlikely breeding ground for a creative block.

However, as an artist, writer or musician, there is a fine line at the far end of the passionate spectrum that can lead you into the realms of ‘perfection’.

Whilst passion makes you care about your work, perfection can make you unhealthily obsessed about your work.

Striving for perfection can stop you from even starting a piece. Or make you so inflexible that you hold onto ideas with a vice-like grip and miss out on valuable opportunities.

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We’ve all been there. Staring down the barrel of some crazy, ambitious goal, some dream, wondering how the heck we’re ever going to pull it off.

A trend I notice in my own life is a lot of amazing artists and creatives doing awesome work dreaming of someday making a living from it. We want to get started, but we’re missing a lot of important pieces. We look at everyone that’s making it and think we need what they have just to get a foot in the door.

That’s not actually true.

There are all kinds of things we could have before we start selling our art, but the reality is that we don’t actually need most of them. They’re just barriers that we put up to keep from taking a risk and doing what’s really important – actually selling our work.

Here are the top 5 things that you absolutely, positively do not need in order to sell your art (and the top 5 things you actually do need).

Image by *eddie

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I’m running a couple of public workshops in London next month, so if you’re in that part of the world it would be great to see you:

Time Management for Creative People — 7 July

Manage the mundane – create the extraordinary. Essential skills to maximise your creativity and minimise your stress levels at work.

This is the workshop where I give you the inside track on my own working habits and show you how to use the same principles to turbo-charge your creative output while keeping on top of those pesky e-mails and other incoming demands. It includes the core structure I use to organise my workflow, which I’ve never published online.

Full details + booking here: http://www.wishfulthinking.co.uk/time-management-creativity

How to Motivate Creative People (Including Yourself) — 14 July

Motivate yourself to overcome obstacles and create amazing work – and a sustainable career.

In this session I show you how to use four powerful types of motivation to fire yourself up for work on a daily basis, even when things get tough. I also explain why the right type of motivation is critical to creative performance, and how to avoid some of the most common creativity killers.

Details and booking here: http://www.wishfulthinking.co.uk/motivate-create/

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