What motivates you to get out of bed in the morning? If you’re like a lot of people, it’s a combination of necessity (rent/mortgage must be paid) and love. It can be love for a spouse or partner, a dear friend or a child; or it can also include love for the creative work you do.

 

This issue, I explore five ways to stay connected to what I call a "worthy project." A simple definition of a worthy project is any creativity-focused endeavor that enables you to make meaning of your experience—your life experience as a whole or your specific experience as a creative person.

 

When I wrote about worthy projects on my blog a few years ago, I had this to say about why they were important:

 

 

 

In other news, I’m happy to announce that I have partnered with Dee Wilcox of Creative Perch blog to develop a new podcast series, “Interviews with Innovators.” The podcasts will be posted on Dee’s site, but I will link to them regularly from Creative Liberty. My first podcast should be online soon.

 

For the past couple of years in the weeks leading up to Valentine’s Day, I’ve blogged about the concept of a “worthy project” and its ability to motivate creative people to keep at their chosen discipline(s). Having a worthy project is an antidote to being blocked—with the momentum that the project generates for you, it’s much easier to move past setbacks, disappointments, and loss.

 

I’ve outlined the basics of my ideas about worthy projects here and here. Today, I’d like to offer five methods for keeping in touch with the positive energy that worthy projects can generate. These suggestions allow you to channel your passion and allow its flow to carry you along, even on days when you feel like quitting.

 

1. Build a passion dashboard.  One way to keep enthusiasm high for a project is to immerse yourself in it. You can bring dozens of RSS feeds and handy online tools for following your heart’s desire together in one convenient place by building a passion dashboard using free RSS feed aggregators such as iGoogle, My Yahoo or Pageflakes. I wrote a short tutorial in 2008 on how to construct a dashboard for your worthy project; Guy Kawasaki wrote a similar post in December 2009 that promotes building a customized MyAlltop page a customized MyAlltop page as a holiday present. Both posts give a nice introduction to the practice of pulling all your passion-related online stuff together so you can attend to it daily—if you make it your home page, you can access it every time you open your browser.

 

2. Draft a “bucket list.” What, specifically, do you want to accomplish in your area of creative enthusiasm? Which activities or projects will you look back on (if you do them) at the end of your life and be glad you made the effort?

A bucket list is a note – which may be 20, 50, 100 or more items long – that details the projects you (quite literally) do not want to live without. This post by Darren Rowse, writing on his Digital Photography School website, gives a good idea about how to proceed with your list. Photographers can also take advantage of a recent book, “David Busch’s Digital Photography Bucket List,” for inspiration when composing their list; the rest of us can use their examples as a launching pad for charting the trajectory of our own dreams.

 

3. Meet up with like-minded souls. There are so many ways to find others who may share your desire to pursue a project. You can create community online, on standard or custom-tailored sites, or dig through the events section of your local paper or the meetings register of a nearby community center to find individuals and groups that might reflect some of your interests. You can use these resources to start your own group related to your worthy project, or you might offer your project as a cause that an existing group could “adopt” to help you bring it to completion.

 

4. Blog/post on social media. Writing about your ongoing projects, even in Twitter-sized bites, provides you with an avenue for remaining accountable for your progress, but it also does something far more important: it allows you to tap into the reciprocal energy that is the currency of social media. You may find, if you document your progress online, that fans, friends and followers offer praise, tips or resources to you. It helps if you intentionally gather a network around you that will be interested in what you’re working on for the long haul.

 

5. Let creative tension show you the next step. Composer, author and business consultant Robert Fritz has written about cultivating creative tension as a necessity in the creation process. He asserts that developing a strong vision of what you want to do or create (remember that bucket list?), and pairing that vision with a clear-eyed view of your current reality (remember your blog?), generates a tension that will motivate you to discover the next logical step to fulfill your desire. Fritz maintains that using creative tension to energize your quest is more effective than brainstorming techniques, because it provides an “economy of means” that allows you to move forward with your project much more quickly. In other words, you will spend less time dithering and more time taking action.