Pixel by Pixel - The Creative Trance

What I've learned about patience, discipline, and perseverance from building websites.

It’s no secret that the creative flow of designing websites fills me with immeasurable joy. But with long hours as a common stress within web design, how do you find patience, discipline, and perseverance in this process? I've learned that the secret lies in lessons from where poetry, my first creative love, intersects with my current dedication to web design. From pentameters to pixels, the never-ending creative trance brings the answers behind what skills you may need to develop to be a successful website designer, and person, to the surface.

Before I became immersed in the digital world, my true love was the tangible act of writing poetry. This was a physical pursuit; my hands, dry and often cramped, wrote vigorously for hours on end, filling countless notebooks with stanzas and verses. There was a raw, unfiltered joy in the scratch of pen on paper, a feeling that a screen could never truly replicate. It was this intense, all-consuming creative energy that, many years later, I would discover could be translated into the language of pixels and color.

I became infatuated with poetry for many reasons - the diversity of what you can write, the technicalities, and the formations amongst other aspects of this art form. I was passionate about the creative flow that began to control every inch of me as I aged. This trance was unbreakable, and for better or worse, it was all-consuming.

The artistic daze that took over me led to many exhilarating ideas swimming in my head. The trance was in various ways uncontrollable, as if a magnetic force was pulling me to each creative pursuit. Shortly after my multi-year stupor for poetry simmered down, a new tenderness arose for website design.

At first, the blank digital canvas evoked a feeling in me that I had felt often in my poetry: writer’s block. The eerie white background and new platform was a learning curve, and a feeling of stagnation overtook me.

As I progressed in skill, I became intertwined with the rhythmic movement of the graphics, the riveting animations, and the beauty of copywriting. Soon I had moved on from poetry, and shortly after I became obsessed.

After many months of being preoccupied by web design, I felt varying degrees of burnout start to kick in. The long hours spent working on projects felt more like a chore than a passion.

When burnout had begun to spread throughout my body in the past, I allowed it to take over. Most of the time I stopped pursuing my hobbies until the burnout left every inch of my body, often many days after I began my break. This time was different. Instead of allowing stagnation to take place, I found relief in patience, discipline, and perseverance.

I changed my routine. Rather than long hours of designing, I used the Podomoro technique that I had previously reserved for studying. 25 minutes of work, then 5 minutes of a break (or an adjacent timeframe). Contrary to what I had initially assumed, I found that those 5 minutes led to a significant increase in the amount of work I could accomplish in a day, and a reduction of burnout.

Alongside the Podomoro technique, I practiced discipline. I once heard a piece of advice that changed my perspective: 'motivation is a transient feeling, but discipline is forever.' I based a lot of my practice on this theory. By telling myself “I can do 5 more minutes,” or, “I’ll just do it even though I don’t want to” I increased both my work ethic and my work efficacy. My discipline, although not perfect and often reserved for more interesting passions, has become stronger, and my self-belief has surpassed my expectations.

Additionally, I have found that practicing patience has led me to be a better web designer. We all know that feeling when something doesn’t go our way - but the value of taking a step back and approaching the issue with a calm and clear mind is momentous.

All of these skills (perseverance, discipline, and patience) when balanced and combined have proved to be an effective improvement within not only website design, but life. In work, school, or anything you desire, if you practice all three of these skills, I believe that you can and will be successful. Not just as a web designer, but as an empathetic, balanced individual.

Relaxing moments on the beach in Maine - finding balance between the creative trance and rest