From time to time, there is a little deck of cards that I pick from for inspiration. It is called the Oblique Strategies, and it was developed by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt as a way to help people get past creative block.
The other day, I picked a card, which read:
Don't stress one thing more than another.
Anyone familiar with modern business culture knows that prioritization — stressing one thing more than another (or, in most cases, many others) is often viewed as good practice. Sometimes, however, prioritization can serve to make one focus too much on one thing, at the cost of others that may be worthy of more focus. What you end up with, then, is a lopsided ship — one that becomes harder to sail, because it takes more work just to keep it upright. You would be surprised at how often we end up getting stuck in just this balancing act. We're either stuck because we get exhausted doing it — and can't muster up the energy to do anything else, or we get stuck because we keep getting the same results from our lopsided approach, and things become stale. Here — from Eno and Schmidt — we have an alternative approach to help address this problem.
Shifting Focus
To unwrap this strategy a bit, the suggestion is to take a step back from your work, and look at it from the highest level you can. When you do, the first thing you will notice is that you've been stressing one thing over others. If you're saying "but my work is just one thing!" then you have proven the point — you've been stressing one thing so much that you've forgotten that there are actually other things!
If you take the time to look,you will likely find that even the things that seem to be one simple thing are actually complex and interrelated systems of things. So, look again. Ask yourself what are the pieces of this thing you're doing? What are the cogs that move this machine (or don't, depending on how badly things are going), and how do they connect with everything else?
What you get here — at this highest level — is a view of the parts of your work, and the relations between those parts — ultimately to the whole of your work. You also get a view of how this project, and your work in general, hooks up to other aspects of your thinking and other aspects of your life. This is a valuable change in perspective, and as a creator — as someone striving to innovate and blaze trails — a change in perspective like this can be oh so valuable. The perspective allows you to discover new relationships and connections — ones you previously hadn't explored, but may provide immense benefits. Realizing and leveraging the relationships between things — whether in a project, an organization, or a single piece of creative work — is often fertile ground for breakthroughs.
Uncertainty
From a new perspective, it is also easier to ask more fundamental questions, and to answer them, because you're less likely to be hindered by the blinders you put on when focusing on one project or aspect of your work and life. But the point of the strategy is to not stress one thing more than another, so you will have to put in the cognitive work of adopting a large-scale view where nothing is more in focus than anything else. This in and of itself can be very difficult because our tendency is to hone in on certain aspects of work and life. But this honing in has a the potential to be costly.
Consider a simplified version of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle: the more precisely the position of some particle is determined, the less precisely its momentum can be known, and vice versa.
Extend this principle to your work, to your thought processes, to your life as a whole. Could you be losing your grasp of the other aspects of your work and life, as you continue to stress a single aspect? Sure, this disproportionate stressing may have worked for a while — you make improvements, and get decent results. But I submit that it is not sustainable. The gains are asymptotic; that is what can be so insidious about this focus. You find yourself gaining less and less as you stay focused on one aspect, but you are still gaining a little, so you keep working, keep focusing on that one thing.
I think we tend to do this — in nearly every case — at the cost of our grasp on the rest of our work and life. The stress that was so useful at first then serves to cause damage to rest of your latticework of ideas, and your other efforts. You know the exactitudes of the spin of your one idea, while you are blind to how everything else is spinning wildly away from you, and blind to important connections between your thoughts and between your thoughts and the world. That blindness can be destructive and limiting; it can keep you from some valuable insights.
The process of pulling back so as to not stress on thing over others requires you to adopt a high-level perspective. Aside from the benefits that this can bring (described above), the very act of adopting this perspective can cause you to be more agile, which will prove useful in the long-term — no matter what your creative venture.