In Pursuit Of Creativity and Becoming One’s Best Version

A study by Way Walker conducted across painters, poets, musicians, and filmmakers—spanning many outstanding artistic creations and pursuits, domains, genres, and movements—reveal five key discoveries.

1. Don't Go Wide but Go Deep

Don't try hard to create something that everyone will like, though that sounds reasonable. The greatest creators did not go wide; they went deeper. They created art for one person, one group, or a younger or future emotional avatar of themselves. It is made for one feeling, one version of self that needed the message the most. The goal of art need not be to make something universal or make something big. Van Gogh did not paint for the world; he painted for his brother. Maya Angelou wrote poetry to address her wounded self. This is the paradox: the more personal it is, the more universal it becomes. You start trying to impress everyone, you end up impressing no one. Go out and touch one person deeply, and you will end up moving thousands. Once you know for whom that art is made—perhaps for someone who is in love, or has fallen out of love, or has faced loss—the work finds its authentic voice.

This counter-intuitive relationship suggests that artists who attempt to create broadly appealing work often produce generic output that fails to connect meaningfully with any audience. This phenomenon can be understood through the lens of phenomenological authenticity. When artists create for a specific emotional state or individual, they bypass the mediating filters of anticipated audience reception, allowing for more direct access to genuine emotional content. The specificity of this emotional targeting paradoxically creates work that speaks to fundamental human experiences shared across diverse populations.

2. Build Your Voice and Style

Style and voice are not found but built. Through hundreds of experiments and works, repetitions, experiments, and reflections, a pattern, a voice, and a perspective emerge. Stay with it, create a lot of art, and slowly you will have constructed your voice, style, and perspective.

This constructionist view of artistic development has profound implications for creative pedagogy. Rather than waiting for the emergence of a "natural" style, artists must engage in deliberate practice and systematic experimentation to build their distinctive creative vocabulary. The development of voice becomes a process of archaeological excavation, gradually revealing patterns and perspectives through sustained creative output.

3. Art Is Not So Much About Inspiration but About Obsession

Inspiration is fleeting—don't keep chasing it. On the other hand, obsession stays with you. It pushes you to create. Michelangelo worked on the Sistine Chapel for four years. Ask yourself: what would you be doing if no one else were seeing you? That is where your obsession lies.

The romanticisation of inspiration as the primary creative force obscures a more fundamental truth: sustainable artistic creation depends not on fleeting moments of inspiration but on sustained obsession with craft and subject matter. Obsession provides sustainable creative fuel.

4. Perfection Kills More Art Than Failure

Perfection looks like ambition, but it is actually fear in disguise. Do not wait for perfection. Make as much art as possible. Beyoncé made 80 songs for her Lemonade album before narrowing them down to just twelve. Picasso made 147,800 works in his life. Stephen King writes 2,000 words every day without exception. They never waited for either inspiration or perfection, but just kept creating. They became great because they made a lot, and that is what made them reach perfection more often. In creativity, quantity creates quality. Set a release rhythm like one piece a day or five pieces a week. Momentum sharpens your craft. Create, receive feedback, process it, and create again.

This principle aligns with deliberate practice theory, which emphasises the importance of volume and repetition in skill acquisition. Each creative work provides opportunities for experimentation, feedback integration, and skill refinement that perfectionist approaches preclude.

5. Don't Make Time for Creativity, Live Inside It

Creativity is a lifestyle, not a weekend project. Be devoted to your craft, be obsessed every day; there must be total lifestyle integration. This lifestyle approach creates conditions for sustained creative development that episodic engagement cannot match. Continuous creative engagement maintains momentum, preserves creative insights, and allows for the gradual development of artistic voice that sporadic practice prevents.

Implications, Critique and Limitations

These findings have significant implications for artistic education, creative mentorship, and individual artistic development. By understanding creativity as a learnable set of principles rather than a mysterious gift, artists can develop more effective approaches to their craft while avoiding common psychological traps that impede creative growth.

The paradox that personal specificity generates universal resonance suggests that authenticity, rather than calculated appeal, represents the most reliable path to meaningful artistic impact. This insight offers both liberation from the impossible task of pleasing everyone and direction toward more fulfilling creative engagement.

While these principles demonstrate empirical support across multiple artistic domains, several limitations warrant consideration. The study's focus on recognized masters may introduce survivorship bias, overlooking artists whose adherence to these principles did not result in public recognition. Additionally, the emphasis on quantity over quality may not apply uniformly across all artistic mediums, particularly those requiring extensive technical preparation or resource investment.

The lifestyle integration principle may also privilege artists with economic stability and social support systems that enable total creative commitment. This raises questions about the democratisation of artistic achievement and the role of material conditions in creative development.

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