“Every morning I wake up and think of what I need to do, and I’m afraid,” Ayse Birsel confesses. “What if I don’t come up with a good idea? The only remedy to that is to start doing it.”
But Birsel, who’s the cofounder and creative director of design studio Birsel + Seck and the author of Design the Life You Love, knows it isn’t easy pushing past that fear in order to get started on something. “It’s the kind of thing I forget every night and have to remember every morning. I put myself under pressure to come up with this great idea, and it never comes like that–sometimes it takes 10 minutes, sometimes it takes an hour, or a whole month–but this exercise is a way to get over that fear.” To help, Birsel takes a cue from illustrator Keri Smith, who has shared an exercise in which she scavenges objects from her home and the floor of her studio, then rearranges them in order to jumpstart her creativity.
In Birsel’s riff on Smith’s prompt, you don’t need a spacious art studio with a whimsically cluttered floor–you just need a desk with a few ordinary items on it.