Discovering Your Voice Through Action

"Clarity comes from engagement,
not thought." ~Marie Forleo

I'm often asked how I devise my designs, how the planning process works. As I've discussed in my post on Spontaneous Creativity, I very rarely plan anything. My designs happen as organically as possible by sitting down with random cuts of wires and a pair of pliers and getting to work. So, what is the simplest answer regarding designing, planning and discovering your aesthetic? Action.

The act of doing.

Act every day. Create every day. Use tutorials if you have them, if inspiration eludes you (and it eludes the best of us on the best of days), but just act. Even if you don't know where to go with it, even if it turns into a hot, tangled mess, just do something. The more you make and don't like, the closer you get to discovering your own creative voice, your own aesthetic, no matter what craft, hobby or skill in which you invest yourself.

It is okay to fail. As Edison once said "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that didn't work". And the same is true for your artistic experiments. You have to have tried something to know it doesn't fit your aesthetic, or the design is flawed. Without action, you have only a vague idea about the direction of your work. 

Even if you understand design, movement, flow... even if you've discovered your own aesthetic, all of it is useless and wandering, thought without action, vision without results. To gain clarity, you must act.