Knowing what you’re going to draw
Do you know what to draw? Perhaps — if someone has told you to draw it.
Do you know what you’re going to draw? That’s a different question. It implies that you have some agency to draw what and how you like.
Beginning creation
Picasso answered the second question like this:
“To know what you’re going to draw, you have to begin drawing.” —Pablo Picasso, Conversations with Picasso by Brassaï
Creating anything, there’s a moment when you begin. Picasso is saying you begin without having a completely predetermined plan of what you’re going to create and the process you will use.
This doesn’t just apply to creating what we think of as art.
Programming machines
For a quarter of a century, I wrote computer software. In that time I wrote and maintained around a million lines of code. Initially, I never thought of what I was doing as creative. I was writing instructions for a machine to process. The machine did exactly what I told it to do. How creative could that be?
My first inkling that programming might be creative came when I began teaching it. When the introductory class started, I gave students homework problems that needed perhaps ten lines of code to solve. To my surprise, I discovered that each student wrote a slightly different program. What’s more, within a few weeks I could look at one of their pieces of code and know who had written it.
As the problems got harder, it became clear that some students were more creative programmers than others.
This made me think about my own programs. I realized that I was doing creative work. Many of the programs I wrote for clients solved problems in ways that I had not foreseen when I started.
Continuing creation
Another way to look at creating something is explored in my post Process, not product. All too often, we focus on a desired finished product, rather than the moment-by-moment process of creation. This is typical when we perform mundane tasks. Needing chopped onions for a vegetable stew, we automatically slice them, one more task on the list. The mindful person is one with the chopping — they “chop wood, carry water” [XinXin Ming].
Closing creation
Finally, there is a moment when you finish creating something. Let’s be clear; creating something requires ending its creation. Billions of pages of never finished novels attest to this. Those novels never saw the light of day.
So, when do you know that something is finished? Before that moment, it was almost impossible to predict! Afterward, especially if it was a big task like writing one of my books, you may remember the moment. But don’t reinterpret that memory as something planned.
Creating something is much more mysterious than that.
Images attribution:
By <a href="//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Picasso" title="Pablo Picasso">Pablo Picasso</a> - <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.nationalgalleries.org/collection/artists-a-z/P/2628/artist_name/Pablo%20Picasso/record_id/2224">National Galleries, Edinburgh</a>, PD-US, Link
By <span lang="en">Anonymous</span> - <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://www.photo.rmn.fr/archive/98-021978-2C6NU0XWEWEW.html">RMN-Grand Palais</a>, Public Domain, Link
How are eventprofs feeling during COVID-19? Over the past few weeks amid the novel coronavirus pandemic, I’ve listened to hundreds of people 
I estimate that about 85% of the event professionals I listened to shared feelings of fear, compared to about 65% of the general population. The most common description I heard was anxiety/anxious. But strong expressions like “scared”, “terrified”, and “very worried” were more common than I expected (~5-10%).
About half of event professionals, and slightly less of everyone I heard, shared feeling unsettled. “Unsettled” is a mixture of fear and sadness we may feel when we experience the world as less predictable and our sense of control or comfort with our circumstances reduced.
I was surprised that about half of the general populace mentioned feeling some form of hopefulness about their current situation. Event professionals were far less likely to share feeling this way. This discrepancy is probably because some of the non-event industry people were retirees, and others have escaped significant professional impact.
How I got here?
Attending a private independent school with experienced teachers and small class sizes greatly increased my likelihood of access to higher education. On graduation, I won a second scholarship to Oxford University.
What’s the most important life lesson that you wish you learned ten years earlier? ![The first hill is the hardest: a photograph of a man running on a flat country dirt road. Photo attribution: Jenny Hill jennyhill [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons](https://www.conferencesthatwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Runner_in_Stainburn_Forest-640x426.jpg)
I still remember the day, several months after I started, when I ran the whole route.
In 2005, I joined a men’s group. Eight of us get together for two hours every fortnight. One man chooses a topic and leads the meeting. A couple of months ago, Brent offered the following life story exercise via a preparatory email sent in advance.
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