Writer and producer Andrew Yang told Fast Company, "You should be surprising yourself. You should be challenging yourself. Playing within the bounds of what everything you've seen before has done, you can get somewhere with that. But I feel like it's most exciting when you can show people something new and really surprise them."
What stands in the way usually is our inner critic, the voice that says, "Isn't that too different? If that would work, wouldn't somebody else have done it already?"
I think the best strategy for overcoming that is to tell yourself, "Let's play with this for a while and see what happens." Winning over your inner critic is challenging, but getting it to reserve judgment for a while is easier.
Years ago I decided I wanted to start a newsletter. It wasn't long before I found myself thinking, "Will people really be interested?" and "Won't it take too much time?" and "How would I distribute it?"
I managed to fend off my inner critic enough to play around with the format and content and put together a rough version.
I found that I enjoyed the process and that the material could be useful to aspiring screenwriters like me.
That gave me the momentum and confidence to keep going. I went ahead and published the newsletter and a mention in the Los Angeles Times helped launch it. After a few years, when scriptwriting was keeping me busy, I sold the newsletter on to a friend who ran it for several years and then sold it on to someone else.
What ideas do you have that your inner critic has been blocking? Make a deal to play around with the idea for a while.
You may surprise yourself.
