Rating- 8/10
Date finished- November 3, 2020
Summary +High Yield Notes
âI think I need to keep being creative, not to prove anything but because it makes me happy just to do it . . . I think trying to be creative, keeping busy, has a lot to do with keeping you alive.â âWillie Nelson
1. Everyday is ground hog day
Take one day at a time
The creative life is not linear. Itâs not a straight line from point A to point B. Itâs more like a loop, or a spiral, in which you keep coming back to a new starting point after every project. No matter how successful you get, no matter what level of achievement you reach, you will never really âarrive.â Other than death, there is no finish line or retirement for the creative person.
Figure out a daily practice
Identify what you want to spend your time on and then work at it every day, no matter what.
âHow we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.â âAnnie Dillard
Establish a daily routine-
âA schedule defends from chaos and whim,â writes Annie Dillard. âIt is a net for catching days.â
When you donât have much time, a routine helps you make the little time you have count. When you have all the time in the world, a routine helps you make sure you donât waste it.
Finish each day and be done with it-
Every day is like a blank page: When youâre finished filling it, you can save it, you can crumple it up, or you can slide it into the recycling bin and let it be. Only time will tell you what it was worth.
Before bedtime, make a list of everything you did accomplish and anything that you want get done tomorrow and then forget about it.
2. Build a bliss station
Disconnect with the world to connect with yourself- Retreat from the world at times in order to think, practice your art and bring forth something worth sharing with others.
Designate a room, an hour or a day where you don't know what you owe anybody or what anybody owes you. This is a place of creative incubation.
Don't wake up to the news- The first hours of the day are the most potentially fertile moments in the life of a creative person.
Thereâs almost nothing in the news that any of us need to read in the first hour of the day. When you reach for your phone or your laptop upon waking, youâre immediately inviting anxiety and chaos into your life.
Switch your phone or tablet to airplane mode at times.
Saying ânoâ to the world can be really hard, but sometimes itâs the only way to say âyesâ to your art and your sanity.
3. Forget the noun do the verb
'Creative' is not a noun- Focus on the process not the destination.
4. Make gifts
Resist the urge to monetize every single bit of your creative process.
Ignore the numbers- Don't focus on the likes, shares, retweets, website visits, followers, viewers etc
An Amazon rank doesnât tell you whether someone read your book twice and loved it so much she passed it on to a friend. Instagram likes donât tell you whether an image you made stuck with someone for a month. A stream count doesnât equal an actual human being showing up to your live show and dancing.
Ignore the quantitative measurements and focus on the qualitative measurements instead. Is it good? Do I like it?
When there is no gift, there is no art- Make something special and give it to your audience once in a while.
5. The ordinary + extra attention= Extraordinary
You have everything you need- Everything we need to make extraordinary art can be found in our everyday life. Just pay more attention to the world.
In order to pay proper attention to our life, we need to slow down enough that we can actually look.
Pay attention to what you pay attention to-
Set up a regular time to pay attention to what youâve paid attention to. Reread your diary. Flip back through your sketchbook. (The cartoonist Kate Beaton once said if she wrote a book about drawing sheâd call it Pay Attention to Your Drawings.) Scroll through your camera roll. Re-watch footage youâve filmed. Listen to music youâve recorded.
By going back through your work, you can better se the bigger picture of what you have been up to, and what you should do next.
6. Slay the art monsters
Art is supposed to make our lives better.
If making your art is ruining anyoneâs life, including your own, it is not worth making
Now, we all have our own little Art Monsters inside us. Weâre all complicated. We all have personal shortcomings. Weâre all a little creepy, to a certain degree. If we didnât believe that we could be a little better in our art than we are in our lives, then what, really, would be the point of art?
7. You are allowed to change your mind
Be open to possibility and allow yourself to be changed.
No, if youâre going to change your mind, you might have to go off-brand, and offline is the place to be off-brand. Your bliss station, your studio, a paper journal, a private chat room, a living room full of trusted loved ones: These are the places to really think.
Like-minded vs like-hearted- If you want to explore ideas, you should consider hanging out with people who arenât so much like-minded as like-hearted. People who are generous, kind, caring, and thoughtful. People who, when you say something, âthink about it, rather than just simply react.â People you feel good around.
Visit the past- Read old books. Every problem we have has probably been written about by some other human living hundreds if not thousands of years before us.
Seneca(Roman statesman and philosopher): âWe are excluded from no age, but we have access to them all,â he said. âWhy not turn from this brief and transient spell of time and give ourselves wholeheartedly to the past, which is limitless and eternal and can be shared with better men than we?â (He wrote that almost two thousand years ago!)
A dip into Henry David Thoreauâs journals paints a portrait of a plant-loving man who is overeducated, underemployed, upset about politics, and living with his parentsâhe sounds exactly like one of my fellow millennials!
8. When in doubt, tidy up
Keep your tools tidy and your materials messy- Creativity is about connections, and connections are not made by siloing everything off into its own space. New ideas are formed by interesting juxtapositions, and interesting juxtapositions happen when things are out of place.
We are often most creative when we are least productive.
John T Unger: âKeep your tools very organized so you can find them,â he says. âLet the materials cross-pollinate in a mess. Some pieces of art I made were utter happenstance, where a couple items came together in a pile and the piece was mostly done. But if you canât lay your hands right on the tool you need, you can blow a day (or your enthusiasm and inspiration) seeking it.â
Tidying is exploring-
âI can never find what I want, but the benefit is that I always find something else.â âIrvine Welsh
By working through the clutter, we rediscover things
Sleep tidies up the brain-
Make a habit of taking naps during the course of the day. It often leads to new ideas.
Part of the artistâs job is to help tidy up the place, to make order out of chaos, to turn trash into treasure, to show us beauty where we canât see it.
9. Demons hate fresh air
Walking really is a magic cure for people who want to think straight. âSolvitur ambulando,â said Diogenes the Cynic two millennia ago. âIt is solved by walking.â
Henry David Thoreau: âMethinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.â
When weâre glued to our screens, the world looks unreal. Terrible. Not worth saving or even spending time with. Everyone on earth seems like a troll or a maniac or worse. But you get outside and you start walking and you come to your senses. Yeah, there are a few maniacs and some ugliness, but there are also people smiling, birds chirping, clouds flying overhead . . . all that stuff. Thereâs possibility. Walking is a way to find possibility in your life when there doesnât seem to be any left.
Get outside each and everyday. Take long walks and carry a notebook or a camera to capture an image or a thought in the process.
10. Plant your garden
Creativity has seasons-
You have to pay attention to the rhythms and cycles of your creative output and learn to be patient in the off-seasons. You have to give yourself time to change and observe your own patterns. âLive in each season as it passes,â wrote Henry David Thoreau, âand resign yourself to the influences of each.â
Go easy on yourself and take your time. Worry less about getting things done. Worry more about things worth doing. Worry less about being a great artist. Worry more about being a good human being who makes art. Worry less about making a mark. Worry more about leaving things better than you found them.