You’ve got to eat the whole pie

This piece is a bit longer than normal, but I’ve got an idea that I’d like to explore. It involves two of my favourite things: creativity and pies.

Let’s say every creative endeavour is like a pie with three slices: product, process, and practice. The first two, you’ll know. The product is the finished thing; the process is how you made it. But these two slices on their own do not make a complete and nourishing pie.

You also need the slice called practice. This represents your creative engagement with the world beyond executing processes to complete products. It’s not practice in the sense of doing something again and again until you can do it well. It’s about the skills, habits, inspirations, and ways of thinking, doing and being that make process and product possible.

Creative practice is an integral part of a happy and rewarding creative life. You can eat the rest of the pie, but if you don't eat this slice too, you’ll always feel hungry.

Everyone doing creative work – writing, designing, leading, “entrepreneuring”, whatever – has a creative practice of some form, even if they don’t call it that. I think it’s worth reflecting on what this slice of the pie represents for you, and how it’s different to the other two slices – especially process.

A non-pie example: a friend recently showed me a photo of the climbing frame he’d built for his two young sons: ladders, monkey bars, a swing, two slides. He designed it, bought the materials, fetched his power tools, and finished it in a weekend.

He started with a clear and fixed idea of what he wanted to make (product). He had a well-planned process for making it. And crucially, he had a long-standing practice to support that process – years of successful DIY projects, an understanding of wood, the right tools, etc.

If I’d built a play structure for my kids, we’d have gone about it differently. Mucking about in the woods, stacking branches into a makeshift castle, wondering if we could climb up it.

That kind of practice is playful, exploratory, comfortable with ambiguity. The process would be whatever emerged in the moment, the product whatever it turned into.

Of course, my structure wouldn’t last as long as my friend’s, but maybe playfulness has its own legacy?

Back to pies: in each example, the creative pie is cut differently, but there are always three slices. I’d cut a big slice of practice, a modest piece of process, and a slither of product. My friend, much more product. The key thing is this: we’re both eating the whole pie.

Now, what’s important, I think (and bear with me as I stretch this metaphor to breaking point) is to cut your pie in the way that feels right and satisfying to you – knowing that nobody’s going to judge you, and future pies can be cut differently.

Sometimes we can feel stuck or discouraged when the pie is sliced in a way that feels off. I’ve seen this with people I coach or meet in workshops. Someone wants to write a novel, but their habits, skills and inspirations are all tuned to short-form writing. The work stalls and they ask themselves, I really want to write this novel, so why aren’t I doing it?

Or someone wants to write a poetic memoir, but they ‘waste time’ getting lost in ‘irrelevant’ historical research. Maybe following tantalising breadcrumbs (pastry flakes?) is an important – yet excluded – part of their practice? Making space for it now could result in a richer product, and feed future work too. And overall, a more satisfying pie.

Or perhaps now is the time to set the research aside and focus more on the product – not because you’ve been wasting time, but because process and product are calling for more attention.

And sometimes the real issue is simply space. If you want to produce something big and detailed but your life is already full of other commitments, it’s not a moral failing if the product isn’t appearing. It might just be time to choose a different product for now. Instead of a multi-layered pie with exotic fillings that are hard to find, freshly foraged apples and blackberries?

Again, it’s about how you slice your pie – cutting it in a way that supports how you want to live and work, and what you feel called to bring into the world (Or even, if you got out of the way for a while, what wants to emerge through you).

When the balance feels off, the answer isn’t always to push harder with the process so you get the product done – it might be to pause long enough to hear what your practice is trying to tell you.

By “balance feels off,” I don’t mean those fertile spaces of not knowing that are often a rich and necessary part of the work. I’m talking about the self-critical frustration that tells you you’re somehow failing. So, remember: you’ve got to eat the whole pie. No one will call you greedy.

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What do you think of this product, process, practice model? My caution is that any model is always wrong – because it’s abstracted from lived experience, which is always messy, complex and shifting. But that doesn’t mean a model can’t be useful. How might it be useful to you? I’d love to hear.