Cut the Noise: A Honest Guide to Figuring Out What You Actually Want to Make

Every creative professional hits a wall at some point — not a block exactly, but a fog. You're making stuff, maybe even good stuff, but something feels off. Like you're creating for someone else's vision of who you should be. You're chasing trends you don't care about, taking commissions that drain you, posting content you think the algorithm wants instead of work that actually excites you.

If any of that sounds familiar, you're not alone. And more importantly, there's a way through it.

This isn't a listicle of quick fixes. This is a genuine, sometimes uncomfortable process of figuring out what you actually want to create — not what you think you should want, not what gets the most likes, not what your art school professors told you was serious work. What you want. Let's go.

The Dangerous Comfort of "Should"

Let's start with the word that quietly kills more creative careers than anything else: should.

"I should be painting more abstractly — that's what galleries want right now." "I should be doing video content because that's where the audience is." "I should stick to one style so I'm easier to market."

Should is almost always someone else's voice living rent-free in your head. It might be a parent, a professor, a mentor you admire, an influencer you follow, or just the ambient pressure of an industry that loves to tell people how to succeed. And while external input isn't worthless, it becomes toxic the moment it starts drowning out your own instincts.

Here's a useful exercise: grab a notebook and write down every "should" currently attached to your creative practice. Every single one. Then, next to each one, write whose voice that actually is. You'll probably find that very few of them are actually yours.

What Were You Making Before Anyone Was Watching?

One of the most revealing questions you can ask yourself as a creative is: What was I making before I had an audience?

Before you had followers. Before you had clients. Before you had anything to prove to anyone.

For a lot of people, that work looks radically different from what they're doing now. It might have been messier, weirder, more personal, harder to categorize. It probably wasn't optimized for anything except the sheer pleasure of making it.

That doesn't mean you need to go back to exactly that — we grow, our skills develop, our interests shift. But that early work often contains a kind of raw signal about what genuinely moves you. What themes kept coming up? What problems were you obsessed with solving? What made you lose track of time?

Spend some time with that old work. You might be surprised what it tells you.

The Energy Test (And Why It Matters More Than You Think)

Here's a practical framework that working artists swear by, even if they don't always call it by this name: the energy test.

The idea is simple. After you finish a creative project — or even partway through one — notice how you feel. Not whether it turned out well or got good feedback. How do you feel in your body, in your gut?

Do you feel energized, like you want to keep going, like you could talk about this work for hours? Or do you feel flat, drained, vaguely relieved it's over?

Energized = signal. Drained = signal.

This sounds obvious, but a lot of creatives have trained themselves to ignore these signals in favor of external validation. We finish a piece that leaves us cold but gets a hundred comments, and we decide that's the direction to go. Meanwhile, the weird experimental thing we made for ourselves that barely got noticed — that's the one we're still thinking about a month later.

Start paying attention to the energy, not just the metrics.

Talk to Other Artists (But Ask the Right Questions)

One of the most valuable things you can do when you're trying to find your creative direction is have honest conversations with other working artists. Not to copy their path, but to hear how they navigate the same tensions you're facing.

When you talk to people who've been making work for a long time — the ones who've built something sustainable and meaningful on their own terms — a few themes tend to come up again and again. They almost universally describe a moment when they stopped trying to fit into someone else's mold and just committed to the thing that felt most true. They describe how scary that was. And they describe how everything shifted once they did it.

Ask the artists in your life: When did you feel most alive in your work? What were you making? The answers are almost always illuminating — both for them and for you.

Create Without an Audience in Mind

This one is genuinely hard in 2024, when the pressure to document and share everything is basically baked into creative culture. But it might be the most important practice you can develop.

Set aside regular time to make work that you have zero intention of sharing. Don't photograph it. Don't post about the process. Don't even tell anyone you're doing it. Just make.

What comes out when there's no audience, no feedback loop, no performance? That's often where your truest creative instincts live. Think of it as R&D for your own soul — messy, unpredictable, and completely necessary.

Build a Simple Decision Filter

Once you have a clearer sense of what actually energizes you creatively, you need a way to protect that clarity when the noise starts creeping back in. A simple decision filter helps.

When a project, collaboration, or creative direction comes across your radar, run it through three questions:

1. Does this feel like me, or does it feel like who I think I should be?
2. Will I still care about this six months from now?
3. Am I excited about the process, or just the imagined outcome?

You don't need to answer yes to all three every time. But if the answer to all three is no, that's a pretty clear sign to pass.

The Vision Is Already There

Here's the thing about finding your creative vision: you're not building it from scratch. It already exists inside you. The work is about clearing away everything that's been obscuring it — the expectations, the comparisons, the fear of making something that doesn't land.

That process takes honesty. It takes patience. And it takes a willingness to sit with uncertainty for a while before things get clear.

But when they do get clear? When you finally feel like the work you're making is genuinely, unmistakably yours? That's when the real creative life begins.