Great ideas aren’t found, they’re made, through consistent creative practice. Creative thinking comes from creative doing.
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(highlight:: Influential painter Chuck Close said in an interview for Inside the Painter’s Studio:

Inspiration is for amateurs—the rest of us just show up and get to work. And the belief that things will grow out of the activity itself and that you will—through work—bump into other possibilities and kick open other doors that you would never have dreamt of if you were just sitting around looking for a great “art idea.”)
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Mathematically speaking, there are an infinite number of possible polyhedral shapes—just as there are an infinite number of versions and variations of each piece of work in the creative process. Each new day creates an opportunity to make a new shape. It’s through making a lot of shapes that the ones you like start to emerge.
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(highlight:: > “My observation is that the doers are the major thinkers. The people that really create the things that change this industry are both the thinker and doer in one person.”
— Steve Jobs1)
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“Many people die with their music still in them,” physicist, poet, and polymath Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. said. “Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it, time runs out.”
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There is no right way to do creative work; the only wrong way is not to do anything.
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If you haven’t made creative work a part of your life in the past and don’t know where to begin, start by taking yourself out on “artist dates,” as The Artist’s Way author Julia Cameron suggests. Visit a museum by yourself, letting your feet carry you to the work that draws you in. Go to a concert and sit as close to the stage as you can—which instrument do you find yourself hearing the loudest, which musician do you watch while the band plays? Spend three hours on Saturday reading a book outside of the genre you normally read. You may find that a clear answer emerges from expanding your horizons.
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You may also realize that, after a few days of practice, it really becomes the best (or second best, or third best) part of some of your days. This isn’t necessarily meant to be a lasting, permanent, “I’ve found the thing!” but rather, “I’ve found something.”
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- explore_vs_exploit, creativity,

In psychology, enclothed cognition covers the influence of clothes on the mind of the person wearing it.
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- 1evernote, psychology, enclothed cognition,

You can also experiment with the temperature, and be mindful of how that influences your thought process. Singer-songwriter Ester Dean says, “I always have an electric heater behind my feet, but I like to be comfortable so that I can be vulnerable.”
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test some things out that play with your senses, to see what affects your creative mind. Light a candle or apply some essential oils. Create a playlist of songs that pump you up, and then try music that calms you down. If your work is mostly done on the go and on the screen, you can also take some time to make your virtual environment—screen brightness, wallpapers, and software—more conducive to creative work.
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One of the most fascinating properties of the creative process is, every version of a piece of work can be seen as preliminary work. While you can finish different versions and variations of a project, there doesn’t have to be a final sense of completion. Pablo Picasso said, “If it were possible … there would never be a ‘finished’ canvas but just different states of a single painting.” And here’s W. H. Auden paraphrasing a line of Paul Valéry’s: “A poem is never finished, only abandoned.”
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- [note::- Preliminary, low quality work is a prerequisite of producing higher quality work (like Gall's Law - every complex system has had to evolve from a simpler system that worked)

• No project or piece of work is ever finished... only done, for now.]

Our goal here is to practice not worrying about whether or not something is perfect. Instead, it’s about creating one version of a project that will likely either be improved upon in the future or serve as inspiration for something else. The key is to cultivate the commitment and conviction to declare that something is done, for now.
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- [note::Very reminiscent of "The Cult of Done"]

Think of everything you make as a demo, a sketch, or a draft. Remove all ideas of expectations and goals, and focus simply on the process and taking a draft to a state where you declare it finished and acceptable as a working version. With every end comes a new beginning. It’s only by finishing a preliminary version of your work imperfectly, that you can start a new one.
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(highlight:: For me, a huge invisible wall was the traditional publishing system; I felt like I needed to have a book agent, write a book proposal, and build an audience, all before I could actually start to write a book. For years, I tortured myself with that idea that I needed the system’s buy-in before I could write a book. This fixation on being accepted by the traditional institutions distracted me from the clear vision of what was in front of me and the valuable experiences and ideas I already had.
The reality is, as I found out years later, I could’ve written a book at any time.)
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(highlight:: > “The most important thing I noticed today was that only in stillness can we recognize movement.”
— Marina Abramović)
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You have likely experienced this phenomenon yourself when after hours at work spent agonizing over a problem, the solution pops into your head when you get home and take the dog for a walk. This is also known as The Shower Principle—ideas come to you when you’re doing something else, like taking a shower, doing the dishes, or working on another problem entirely.
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But don’t cover your mind in Netflix or podcasts—reject media’s influence and let your brain settle down. Take a bath or long shower. Try meditating with or without an app. Go for a trail walk or bike ride. Let rest and distraction become part of your creative process.
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If you need ideas, go do improvisational comedy or try a new instrument or a sport. Rent a bicycle and go for a ride. Buy a Lego set and build. Draw a cartoon. Feed your creative practice (and well-being) by making time for play.
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Bono wrote about Frank Sinatra, “Fully inhabiting the moment during that tiny dot of time after you’ve pressed ‘record’ is what makes it eternal. If, like Frank, you sing it like you’ll never sing it again. If, like Frank, you sing it like you never have before.” This philosophy is applicable to your craft; you can pretend like it’s the last time you’re doing your work, the last chance you might be able to contribute to this piece of work. This immersion naturally lets expectations, hopes, and fears fade away; none of it matters. Treating your work like a craft will help you let go of external measures of quality and focus on what’s in front of you. Everything else is an unnecessary distraction.
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- [note::Treat your work like it's the last time you'll ever do it.]

Make your practice enjoyable. Don’t obsess over improving, or whether someone else is better or worse than you in some way. Stay focused on your own skill set and craft. Perhaps it means changing your environment or schedule. It could also mean switching the routine or the sources of inspiration.
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If you feel your expectations rising, that this project you’re working on is going to be a hit, acknowledge that there’s a chance it might also just be another project. The external measures of success might come after the next one, or the one after that. That is the beauty of consistency. You always have another shot. Another opportunity is just around the corner if you want it to be.
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The immediate goal is for you to take a very small step closer to the thing you want to do. You already know your form’s most essential element; now it’s time to build something with it. If you want to write a book, then write at least one sentence in a notebook today, building up to a daily writing practice. If you want to draw, sketch out a person or an object—don’t think too hard, just choose something in front of you and draw. If you want to make music, hum a melody into the voice memo in your phone and try to create it on an instrument or in your computer.
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If you’re uncertain, then follow the first thing that pops into your head after 30 seconds. Or do the thing you think you want to do. Or do the thing you think your best friend thinks you want to do. Or write a list out and roll dice. Don’t make your goal to “finish a thing”; make it to “start with anything.”
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- favorite,
- [note::Don't focus on trying to finish, just focus on starting ANY aspect of the larger thing to be done. What aspect you start doesn't necessarily matter - the important thing is that you start.]

(highlight:: The Musée Rodin in Paris exhibits one of 27 known variations of a bronze sculpture entitled Le Penseur—the Thinker—by sculptor Auguste Rodin. The figure is sitting on a rock, hunched over, its hand cradling its chin, and its eyes staring at the ground. Such is the archetypal image of the thinker, which has influenced how we imagine any form of thought, including creative thinking. A modern image of the thinker would still split up the act of engaging our intellectual abilities from movement and senses, though probably in a more luxurious post—say, in an expensive ergonomic swivel chair, or lying down on a chesterfield sofa.
What this image doesn’t express is the fact that we actually learn and process thought while we move and take action. Action generates creative breakthroughs.)
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- [note::"Action generates creative breakthroughs." This is a great example - "The Thinker" seems to be one of those cultural artifacts that inadvertently perpetuates harmful ideas. It serves as a symbol for the single-dimensional way society thinks about thinking (or perhaps the way we wish thinking worked). Perhaps "The Thinker" should really be named "The Ruminator" to convey that thinking without action is just rumination.]

You get lucky as you keep moving along and learning. Or, perhaps, it’s more true to say that your unluckiness runs out.
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- [note::Love this sentiment - "I'm trying to do what I can to stop being unlucky." Related idea: Luck Surface Area]

Leonardo da Vinci called this “componimento inculto,” which biographer Walter Isaacson describes as “an uncultivated composition that helps work out ideas through an intuitive process.” Basically, thinking by sketching.
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- [note::Reminds me of "writing is thinking", embodied cognition, tools for thought.]

(highlight:: The two most common dimensions we’re constrained by are space and time. If setting a time limit is timeboxing, then perhaps the space-analogous exercise can be called sizeboxing. You pick a limited size for your work and work within that.
One popular format I’ve seen is an essay that fits in a screenshot on your phone. When working on articles, I write my notes to fit a 4-by-6-inch index card; any longer and it has to be a new note. This keeps me concise.
If you’re recording music, scale down by committing to recording a song with only two instruments if you usually use more; or if you want to produce a lot of ideas, commit to writing thirty-second melodies for one week.
If you’re working with paint, choose a surface with dimensions no more than four inches by four inches.
If you’re programming, restrict yourself to a set number of lines of code or a specific memory size. (Sizecoding might be an inspiration.)
Another version of this is filling out three pages of writing in a notebook. (If you do this without stopping, that’s what teacher, artist, and author Julia Cameron calls the morning pages.))
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- 1action, innovation, creative work, sizeboxing,
- [note::Love that I now have a name for this! A related idea is "reducing scope tends to increase idea generation rate", which might be called "scopeboxing"? Also hadn't thought about this in the context of constraining the physical space you have to work with.]

(highlight:: Photographer Ivan Chow leaves the house without his camera to practice his observation skills. He says, “By taking away the need to make photos, you’re relieving yourself of that pressure to deliver. This will allow your mind to focus solely on spotting moments that are worthy of capturing. You’ll get less caught up with what’s directly in front of you and you’ll start looking a bit further to spot potential subjects and points of interest. Being a good street photographer is all about being good at observing, and that means that you already have a very good head start.”
If your chosen creative operation is photography, you might choose to take a moment out of each day to observe a location or scene that would make for an interesting photograph. What makes it stand out to you? How can you return and recreate the moment, or would it be worth capturing in different lighting conditions? If it’s music, take a long walk and play with a melody in your head—when you take away the option of recording an idea right away, you’re forced to work with the raw materials in real time, which can lead to many surprising developments.)
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- [note::"To focus on meta-skills and foster creative play, take away all the tools or equipment that allow you to codify your work."
e.g. Cameras, paintbrushes, keyboard, your computer, musical instruments, writing tools (except those that only store your data temporarily).]

Michael Bierut assigned a project to his students: pick an activity and commit to doing it for 100 days in a row. Bierut recalls his instructions: “The only restrictions on the operation you choose is that it must be repeated in some form every day, and that every iteration must be documented for eventual presentation.”
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Using only analog equipment—nothing connected to the internet—practice your craft. Make something. Going back to basics can be a great way to revisit why you chose this work in the first place
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Vin Verma, who goes by the name Internetvin, has made music and written code every day for a year. One of his techniques is to find a way to create music or code in 20 seconds (writing just a single line of code on the days he didn’t have time or felt tired.
If you’re making music, your tactic could be to record a 10-second voice note of a new melody, or to write one bad line of a song lyric.
If you’re working in photography, take a still life of an object within arm’s reach.
If you’re writing, write one bad sentence.
The goal here is to simplify your creative operation, moving the starting point to the finish point much closer together—mere seconds apart.
While 20 seconds is an aspirational goal, realistically it may take at least a minute to complete the simplest version of your creative operation. If you’re writing every day, let it take a minute to write a sentence. Or if you’re drawing daily, then a minute enables you to quickly sketch something simple.)
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Creating acceptable ideas is a strategy that professor and author Dean Keith Simonton recommends. He writes in The Genius Checklist how the more attempts an artist or craftsperson makes, the more major works (or “hits” they create. As a general rule, Simonton suggests that mass production of these ideas is a safer approach than focusing on a single idea and trying to make it perfect.
“Giving up on perfectionism doesn’t mean that you will not produce anything perfect, but rather that perfection will happen from time to time because of the sheer mass of output,” Simonton writes.)
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- [note::Perfection is a statistical inevitability that results from producing large amounts of work (however wide the distribution of quality work is)]

DM interviews—just interview Twitter-famous people on DM/iMessage/Signal or over email for my blog, and let them know I also republish at Medium with 12k+ followers and sometimes at Fast Company as well. This should take no more than 30 mins on my end, and I can set up templated questions just like I do with Crossing the Enterprise Chasm. They can respond in text
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If you’re more interested in nonfiction or memoir writing, you can try author and speaker Suleika Jaouad’s The Isolation Journals.
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If you want to learn more, I’ve compiled a comprehensive list of 25 daily creative challenges at my blog.
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Chance plays a huge role in creativity and can be a useful generative constraint. If you want to make fewer decisions, enlist chance as an assistant. Whenever you need to make a decision, write out your options and let a coin toss, a dice roll, a results generator, or another person’s selection of multiple choice, to decide what you’ll do.
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Author Laura Huang writes a different version in her book Edge: “Different isn’t always better, but better is always different.”
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If you do your creative work in the morning, try doing it for an hour or two at night. One of my high school teachers had actually recommended waking up in the middle of the night to write. Interrupting sleep is certainly not pleasant, though the creative work you produce by shaking up your routine might be worth it.
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In addition to experimenting with time, you can also find an opposing space for one work session. If you usually work in large, open spaces, try finding one that’s extremely small (channeling your inner Jackson Pollock, who worked in a relatively modest studio, or Roald Dahl’s backyard hut). Conversely, if you usually work in a small space, try working in a big place, like the foyer of a public library or even outdoors.
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Creativity means walking a tightrope between consistency and chaos. Switch up your routines so that you naturally add more novelty and vitality to your work.
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Kuo told me, “There’s something about writing a letter that allows you to discover your conversational voice, which also means your forms of speech, your idioms, your little jokes. Sometimes, it also allows the voice to be funnier, to be self deprecating, and to desire actual connection. When a person knows who their exact audience is, it gives them more consistency, so they’re not switching between different potential targets. When you’re consistent, then the reader trusts you. An outside reader trusts you.”
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This is how originality actually works: not through a mythological lightning bolt of insight, but through constant bricolage, rediscovery, and remixing of references.
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- [note::Everything is a remix. Originality is a farce.]

In Walk Through Walls, performance artist Marina Abramović writes of an exercise where she gives her students a thousand pieces of white paper. The students write down ideas. They keep the ones they like, and trash the ones they don’t. After three months, Abramović only takes ideas from the trash cans; she calls these the “treasure trove” of the things her students are afraid to do.
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- [note::Interesting! This implies that among every set of "bad" ideas lies ideas that are potentially great, but got scrapped since they were deemed "too difficult" to develop or didn't find the right person to develop them.]

(highlight:: > “Ease isn’t the goal; excellence is.”
— Ed Catmull)
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Understanding quality is not difficult; it starts as you immerse yourself in a lot of really good work and develop your own opinions on them. You won’t do good work until you define what good means to you.
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I’ve developed a definition of quality for all kinds of work I create. When assessing the quality of an article idea, for example, I look at timing, societal impact, counterintuition, action steps, and prior coverage. I discovered these attributes through noticing what ideas were accepted and rejected, through patterns I noticed in what I liked to read, and through papers I read. I refine the meaning of these words often, based on feedback from editors.
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- learning, 1action,
- [note::I'd like to develop quality criteria for my own blog]

For example, in Let My People Go Surfing, Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard writes of his own list of criteria to evaluate potential product ideas: Is it functional? Multifunctional? Is it durable? Does it fit our customer? Will people be able to repair it? Is the product and line simple? Is it an innovation or invention? Is it a global design? Is it easy to care for and clean? Does it have any added value? Is it authentic? Is it beautiful? Are we just chasing fashion? Are we designing for our core customer?
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Pitches for my articles are acceptable when I’ve explained to myself and the reader why the idea is well timed, what it means to society, what people may misunderstand about it, what people can take away from this story and apply to their lives, and how few people have covered it before. If the pitch fails in some way (for example, if a lot of people have covered it before), the pitch does not pass, and it is not acceptable. I’m happy, as I didn’t need to spend time writing the entire story out only to realize this—I didn’t try to make it perfect before I made it acceptable.
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In order to improve your output, you first need to improve your input. Experiencing other people’s work is the best first step to understanding what quality might even mean in your field. Everyone who is making something, right now, has been inspired by someone else.
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(highlight:: Select a piece of work you love or that is revered in your field. Study it. Answer this question: “What makes it great?”
Write down the first thing that stands out to you about the piece of work. Then, write down the second thing. And the third thing, and so on, until you don’t notice any more unique things. Then, read someone else’s commentary on the work—or if none exists, just call a friend and ask them what they notice about the piece. What do they experience that you didn’t? What interests them? What’s the difference between what you noticed and what they noticed)
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As Maria Popova writes in The Marginalian, “I frequently use LEGO as a metaphor for combinatorial creativity—if we only have bricks of one shape, size, and color, what we build with them remains limited; but if we build with pieces of various shapes, sizes, and colors, our creations will be infinitely more interesting.”
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- [note::3 Levels of Combinatorial Creativity: Copying -> Imitating -> Remixing]

Author and Princeton instructor John McPhee writes about a technique called “greening”—to “green” an opening paragraph by three means to cut three lines out of the paragraph as a way of forcing the editing process. He writes, “Green 4 does not mean lop off four lines at the bottom. … The idea is to remove words in such a manner that no one would notice that anything has been removed.”
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(highlight:: To practice your detail-orientation, try choosing one thing to focus on for thirty minutes.
Zooming in on a small part of your work is a great interpretation of this prompt. You could focus your attention on one particular corner, or a 1-inch by 1-inch, area of your artwork. Or, if you’re making a song, focus on nailing the lyrics in the opening verse, or the harmonies on the bridge.
In music or computer hardware, you could also choose to focus on the time, pace, and tempo of your work.)
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A surface can be any place you’re performing or storing your work. One surface could be private, like a folder or a box that no one else will see. Another surface could be semi-public, one that you show to people you trust. Still, another surface could be entirely public, ready to show the world.
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- [note::How might this work digitally?

1. My Obsidian vault (private workspace)
2. Private newsletter
3. Public newsletter/blog/social media?]

(highlight:: One of the simplest ways of communicating value is showing the effort that actually went into the work. That might involve literally showing the process of making it, though it might also be more biographical. You may ask yourself, and answer, questions like:
• When did you first get the idea for this piece of work?
• How did the idea start?
• What did you see throughout this process?
• Who influenced the work?
• What parts of the work might have emerged from stories in your life?
• What skills did creating this work require? If you had these skills already, how did you hone them? If you didn’t, how did you learn them or who did you work with?
• How many times did you try making this work?)
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(highlight:: Sivers writes, “Before the conference, come up with one interesting sentence that says what you do—including a curious bit that will make them ask a follow-up question.” He gives the example of, instead of saying “I’m a bassist,” introducing yourself as “Bassist of the Crunchy Frogs—the worst punk bluegrass band ever. We’re headlining the showcase tonight. Our singer is a pirate.”
If I were talking about my book, for example, I wouldn’t say, “I’m an author,” I’d say something like, “I’m the author of Creative Doing, a book that debunks the biggest lie in creative thinking. It has 75 prompts to make the reader more creative. It’s the only book with a shape as a mascot.”)
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- [note::This is really something I need to take time to think about - what are the most interesting aspects of my work/life philosophy and how can I clearly communicate that to different kinds of people (i.e. audiences) I meet? My "personal brand" Obsidian canvas can certainly help with this.]

All too often, considering an audience gets in the way of creative work. It’s not an easy habit or thought pattern to break; even if you think you’re not making for an audience, you’ve gotten into the practice of it. The key is to practice making something you’ll never show anyone else. In doing this, you’re gaining valuable feedback from yourself.
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- [note::Make things for yourself or risk falling into the trap of making things for the enjoyment/benefit of others and having their tastes end up reducing the quality and uniqueness of your work]

(highlight:: If you’re uncertain of which questions to ask, try this ABCD framework from novelist Mary Robinette Kowal:*
• What’s Awesome?
• What’s Boring?
• What’s Confusing?
• What Didn’t you believe?
“What didn’t you believe?” may be most helpful when responding to fiction, but disbelief is a form of distraction—a part of a story that I simply can’t believe. So if “What didn’t you believe?” doesn’t seem like the right question for your work, you may ask, “What is distracting?” In other words, you’re looking for elements of your work that take away from what you’re trying to express.)
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Creative expression involves physical, mental, and emotional contributions. I like to represent these as the hands, the head, and the heart. The prompts in this book so far have helped you align your hands and your head.
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- [note::Hands = Practicing creative work
Heart = Spirit and motivation to do creative work
Head = Thinking about our creative work]

We accept the truth that in order to make something great, we must start with the courage to make and release many ordinary things. The hands don’t have an ego. The hands don’t compare. The hands don’t wonder what they don’t know. They learn by doing, they test and experiment and try. And by putting our trust in our hands, whatever unworthiness or intimidation we feel in our heads and hearts is quieted, and our creative confidence grows.
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- purpose, favorite, 1action,
- [note::I'd like to put this near my desk as a reminder to continually take an experimental approach to life]

(highlight:: In 1926, London School of Economics co-founder Graham Wallas published The Art of Thought, in which he described a four-stage creative process. The first three stages were adapted from physicist Hermann von Helmholtz, and Wallas’s descriptions are in quotes:
Preparation: “the stage during which the problem was ‘investigated … in all directions’”—think about exercises, rituals, and routines that stimulate your mind.
Incubation: “not consciously thinking about the problem”—this is about consciously letting go of the problem and relaxing your mind. It might involve going for a walk in nature, or relaxing in a shower.
Illumination: “the appearance of the ‘happy idea’ together with the psychological events which immediately preceded and accompanied that appearance”—the eureka moment, where an answer comes to you, either quietly or striking like a bolt of lightning.
Verification: “the validity of the idea was tested, and the idea itself was reduced to exact form”—the phase where an illumination is tested through feedback or, in science, proofs and matching theories.
Whether it’s a 60-second speed writing exercise, or a song that takes 5,000 hours to perfect and record, every work goes through this linear process.)
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- [note::The 4 steps of of creative thought:

1. Preparation
2. Incubation
3. Illumination
4. Verification]

In his 1984 business fable The Goal, Eliyahu M. Goldratt wrote about how any improvements or optimizations made to a single process are an illusion, unless they’re at the bottleneck. This is often the slowest step, or the weakest link. In their book Diaminds: Decoding the Mental Habits of Successful Thinkers, Mihnea Moldoveanu and Roger Martin describe this constraint as a “rate-limiting step,” and illustrate it with the example of the flexion hip joint, which gets in the way of even the fastest sprinter from being even faster.
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- 1todo evernote,
- [note::See "Theory of Constraints"]

(highlight:: Here’s a list of questions you can ask yourself to see which stage you’re getting stuck in the creative process, at the preparation, incubation, illumination, or verification stages:

1. If it’s a struggle for you to come up with enough ideas, expand your preparation phase. Find more references and spend time studying them and distinguishing between the ones you like and don’t like, and why. (See Visit the Greats.)

2. If you find you’re coming up with a lot of ideas, but none are resonating, expand your incubation phase. Give your brain more time to rest and relax. (See Make Idle Time.)

3. If you find you’re missing breakthroughs, pay more attention. Write each breakthrough down whenever you feel your mind making a connection, whether it’s a small one or a big one. Don’t distinguish or edit what your mind is telling you. (See Write Down 10 Ideas.)

4. If you find that you don’t have enough time and energy to make acceptable work, redefine what quality means to you at this point in your life. In all likelihood, you have to assess how much time, money, energy, and other resources you have to verify—edit, polish, refine, design—and lower the fidelity and scope you are shipping your ideas with. (See Complete Your Operation in Seconds.)
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(highlight:: I realized through listening to myself that one of the blocks I face as an author is, “I don’t want to write this, it’s too obvious.” This feeling of a lack of originality is a challenge that I’ve seen other writers face as well.
For me, I came across a few sources of consolation. First off, I saw a tweet from marketer and software engineer Patrick McKenzie assuring the reader, “You radically underestimate both a) how much you know that other people do not and b) the instrumental benefits to you of publishing it.” McKenzie also linked to New Science executive director and blogger Alexey Guzey’s writing about the value of unoriginality, “Because it helps in the process of discovery and in the process of supporting underappreciated ideas.”
I also noticed how a handful of “obvious” ideas other people had made an impact on me and my friends. For me, two examples were author Seth Godin’s “Talker’s Block”—which asks why writer’s block exists when nobody gets talker’s block—and Roy Bahat’s “Forwardable email,” which suggests that readers shouldn’t ask for an email introduction, and instead make a request for someone to forward their email along.)
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- 1todo evernote,
- [note::The originality of an idea depends on its audience and context]

(highlight:: Naturally, as we start making creative work, we see the distance between what we call good and what we’re making. The fear dawns on us: What if we make something bad?
This is the gap between taste and ability that everyone starts with. As broadcaster and producer Ira Glass says, “It’s only by actually going through a volume of work that you’re actually going to catch up and close that gap. The work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions.”
The quantity of work is essential. We’ll make mistakes, pretend we know what we’re doing, say the wrong things, imitate people, and find new ways of working that we swore we’d never do.
We need to set the expectation with ourselves that we will probably look foolish as we make our early work. In fact, we need to lean into it and accept it.)
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(highlight:: As Marina Abramović wrote in Walk Through Walls, “I always question artists who are successful in whatever they do. I think what that means is that they’re repeating themselves and not taking enough risks.”
“Safe” means creating something you’re most familiar with, that is, your “style.” Making something risky might mean dialing your style up to the maximum, or flipping it to be the complete opposite. Or it might just mean doing something completely out of the blue—that exceeds my capacity for suggestion.)
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(highlight:: The late Intel chief Andy Grove writes of a simple rule in High Output Management: “All production flows have a basic characteristic: the material becomes more valuable as it moves through the process.” That’s because more time and energy have been spent on the material to make it a final product.
One implication of this idea is the earlier you stop working on something, the fewer resources you waste. For example, if I’m coming up with a pitch, a quick Google search could tell me if someone else has written about the thing I want to write about. If someone has, in exactly the way I wanted to write about it, then I can easily shelve the idea in its current state, as it’s not acceptable to me. If I didn’t come across the prior coverage until later in my process, I’d have to give up the idea after hours spent researching and writing (which has happened before).)
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(highlight:: Look at a completed version of your work and write down five things that are working well. Here are some potential starting points:
• If you have been practicing or developing a certain technique, analyze your development and how it contributes to the piece. (For example, if you’d been practicing crosshatching—did it improve in this piece? For me, maybe I’ve been practicing writing headlines—does this headline pique my own curiosity, more so than the ones I’d written previously?)
• Reflect on your process. If you set out to work consistently, did you meet your goal? If you’re setting out to explore new or groundbreaking subject matter, are you getting closer to that?
• What did you learn from this week’s work sessions? Are there lessons you’ve learned outside your creative process that you can apply to it?
• What would a supportive friend say about this? What would an imaginary biggest fan say? What would a family member say?
• How do the lessons you’ve learned and your current work set you up for the future? What are some directions it can take you in, towards where you want to go?)
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(highlight:: > “If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.”
— Unknown)
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He urged listeners not to confuse being happy with being enviable, and said, “Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement.”
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- 1todo evernote,
- [note::Do not confuse being happy with being enviable]

(highlight:: What are you doing, and why are you doing it?
If we don’t make time to reflect on why we are creating, then political, economic, and social incentives all have a way of seeping in and causing us to make decisions based on their values. As Watterson said, “Selling out is usually more a matter of buying in. Sell out, and you’re really buying into someone else’s system of values, rules and rewards.”)
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Maybe you are setting out to express or expose some sort of truth, or to discover it, and to figure it out. Or you’re just trying to refine your techniques. Whatever it is—make it an internal mission, and not an external one.
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(highlight:: Make the case for each of them, by answering some of these questions:
• Why is this mission important to you?
• What idea or experience inspired you to take on this mission?
• What will the world look like after you accomplish your mission?
• Can you imagine the world without you accomplishing your proposed mission?
• Who or what does your mission serve? Who or what will your mission honor?)
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Kuo recalls focusing, instead, on simpler metrics: “​​Am I writing?” “Am I showing up?” “Am I discovering something new about these experiences or about this world?” “Am I having new encounters alone?” These types of qualitative metrics, more grounded in the process than the outcome, will enable you to get back to what really matters: your creative work.
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For me, the most valuable thing about creative doing is reiterating the role of action in thinking. We learn not only by thinking, we learn by doing. We set ourselves from the paralysis of analysis by taking action, which is something we knew as children and learn to stop doing as we grow up. If we want to be more creative, we need to reconnect with our inner instinct to make and be open to introducing some chaos into our structured lives.
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The creative process is, similarly, two sided. It involves structure and chaos, freedom and constraint, and spontaneity and consistency. Of course, it also involves both creative thinking and creative doing. To neglect one is to neglect the other.
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(highlight:: > “Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you.”
— Steve Jobs8)
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Mason Currey is the author of the Daily Rituals books, featuring brief profiles of the day-to-day working lives of more than 300 great creative minds. If he didn’t start the genre, Mason definitely popularized public interest in routines, which I’ve found to really benefit my creative process.
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Lindsay Jean Thomson is a writer and community builder. She facilitates #The100DayProject, a free global art project taking place online. I would be entirely unsurprised if the next generation’s artists emerge from Lindsay’s project or other work.
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Great ideas aren’t found, they’re made, through consistent creative practice. Creative thinking comes from creative doing.
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(highlight:: Influential painter Chuck Close said in an interview for Inside the Painter’s Studio:

Inspiration is for amateurs—the rest of us just show up and get to work. And the belief that things will grow out of the activity itself and that you will—through work—bump into other possibilities and kick open other doors that you would never have dreamt of if you were just sitting around looking for a great “art idea.”)
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Mathematically speaking, there are an infinite number of possible polyhedral shapes—just as there are an infinite number of versions and variations of each piece of work in the creative process. Each new day creates an opportunity to make a new shape. It’s through making a lot of shapes that the ones you like start to emerge.
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(highlight:: > “My observation is that the doers are the major thinkers. The people that really create the things that change this industry are both the thinker and doer in one person.”
— Steve Jobs1)
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“Many people die with their music still in them,” physicist, poet, and polymath Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. said. “Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it, time runs out.”
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There is no right way to do creative work; the only wrong way is not to do anything.
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If you haven’t made creative work a part of your life in the past and don’t know where to begin, start by taking yourself out on “artist dates,” as The Artist’s Way author Julia Cameron suggests. Visit a museum by yourself, letting your feet carry you to the work that draws you in. Go to a concert and sit as close to the stage as you can—which instrument do you find yourself hearing the loudest, which musician do you watch while the band plays? Spend three hours on Saturday reading a book outside of the genre you normally read. You may find that a clear answer emerges from expanding your horizons.
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You may also realize that, after a few days of practice, it really becomes the best (or second best, or third best) part of some of your days. This isn’t necessarily meant to be a lasting, permanent, “I’ve found the thing!” but rather, “I’ve found something.”
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In psychology, enclothed cognition covers the influence of clothes on the mind of the person wearing it.
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- 1evernote, psychology, enclothed cognition,

You can also experiment with the temperature, and be mindful of how that influences your thought process. Singer-songwriter Ester Dean says, “I always have an electric heater behind my feet, but I like to be comfortable so that I can be vulnerable.”
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test some things out that play with your senses, to see what affects your creative mind. Light a candle or apply some essential oils. Create a playlist of songs that pump you up, and then try music that calms you down. If your work is mostly done on the go and on the screen, you can also take some time to make your virtual environment—screen brightness, wallpapers, and software—more conducive to creative work.
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One of the most fascinating properties of the creative process is, every version of a piece of work can be seen as preliminary work. While you can finish different versions and variations of a project, there doesn’t have to be a final sense of completion. Pablo Picasso said, “If it were possible … there would never be a ‘finished’ canvas but just different states of a single painting.” And here’s W. H. Auden paraphrasing a line of Paul Valéry’s: “A poem is never finished, only abandoned.”
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- [note::- Preliminary, low quality work is a prerequisite of producing higher quality work (like Gall's Law - every complex system has had to evolve from a simpler system that worked)

• No project or piece of work is ever finished... only done, for now.]

Our goal here is to practice not worrying about whether or not something is perfect. Instead, it’s about creating one version of a project that will likely either be improved upon in the future or serve as inspiration for something else. The key is to cultivate the commitment and conviction to declare that something is done, for now.
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- [note::Very reminiscent of "The Cult of Done"]

Think of everything you make as a demo, a sketch, or a draft. Remove all ideas of expectations and goals, and focus simply on the process and taking a draft to a state where you declare it finished and acceptable as a working version. With every end comes a new beginning. It’s only by finishing a preliminary version of your work imperfectly, that you can start a new one.
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(highlight:: For me, a huge invisible wall was the traditional publishing system; I felt like I needed to have a book agent, write a book proposal, and build an audience, all before I could actually start to write a book. For years, I tortured myself with that idea that I needed the system’s buy-in before I could write a book. This fixation on being accepted by the traditional institutions distracted me from the clear vision of what was in front of me and the valuable experiences and ideas I already had.
The reality is, as I found out years later, I could’ve written a book at any time.)
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(highlight:: > “The most important thing I noticed today was that only in stillness can we recognize movement.”
— Marina Abramović)
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You have likely experienced this phenomenon yourself when after hours at work spent agonizing over a problem, the solution pops into your head when you get home and take the dog for a walk. This is also known as The Shower Principle—ideas come to you when you’re doing something else, like taking a shower, doing the dishes, or working on another problem entirely.
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But don’t cover your mind in Netflix or podcasts—reject media’s influence and let your brain settle down. Take a bath or long shower. Try meditating with or without an app. Go for a trail walk or bike ride. Let rest and distraction become part of your creative process.
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If you need ideas, go do improvisational comedy or try a new instrument or a sport. Rent a bicycle and go for a ride. Buy a Lego set and build. Draw a cartoon. Feed your creative practice (and well-being) by making time for play.
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Bono wrote about Frank Sinatra, “Fully inhabiting the moment during that tiny dot of time after you’ve pressed ‘record’ is what makes it eternal. If, like Frank, you sing it like you’ll never sing it again. If, like Frank, you sing it like you never have before.” This philosophy is applicable to your craft; you can pretend like it’s the last time you’re doing your work, the last chance you might be able to contribute to this piece of work. This immersion naturally lets expectations, hopes, and fears fade away; none of it matters. Treating your work like a craft will help you let go of external measures of quality and focus on what’s in front of you. Everything else is an unnecessary distraction.
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- [note::Treat your work like it's the last time you'll ever do it.]

Make your practice enjoyable. Don’t obsess over improving, or whether someone else is better or worse than you in some way. Stay focused on your own skill set and craft. Perhaps it means changing your environment or schedule. It could also mean switching the routine or the sources of inspiration.
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If you feel your expectations rising, that this project you’re working on is going to be a hit, acknowledge that there’s a chance it might also just be another project. The external measures of success might come after the next one, or the one after that. That is the beauty of consistency. You always have another shot. Another opportunity is just around the corner if you want it to be.
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The immediate goal is for you to take a very small step closer to the thing you want to do. You already know your form’s most essential element; now it’s time to build something with it. If you want to write a book, then write at least one sentence in a notebook today, building up to a daily writing practice. If you want to draw, sketch out a person or an object—don’t think too hard, just choose something in front of you and draw. If you want to make music, hum a melody into the voice memo in your phone and try to create it on an instrument or in your computer.
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If you’re uncertain, then follow the first thing that pops into your head after 30 seconds. Or do the thing you think you want to do. Or do the thing you think your best friend thinks you want to do. Or write a list out and roll dice. Don’t make your goal to “finish a thing”; make it to “start with anything.”
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- [note::Don't focus on trying to finish, just focus on starting ANY aspect of the larger thing to be done. What aspect you start doesn't necessarily matter - the important thing is that you start.]

(highlight:: The Musée Rodin in Paris exhibits one of 27 known variations of a bronze sculpture entitled Le Penseur—the Thinker—by sculptor Auguste Rodin. The figure is sitting on a rock, hunched over, its hand cradling its chin, and its eyes staring at the ground. Such is the archetypal image of the thinker, which has influenced how we imagine any form of thought, including creative thinking. A modern image of the thinker would still split up the act of engaging our intellectual abilities from movement and senses, though probably in a more luxurious post—say, in an expensive ergonomic swivel chair, or lying down on a chesterfield sofa.
What this image doesn’t express is the fact that we actually learn and process thought while we move and take action. Action generates creative breakthroughs.)
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- [note::"Action generates creative breakthroughs." This is a great example - "The Thinker" seems to be one of those cultural artifacts that inadvertently perpetuates harmful ideas. It serves as a symbol for the single-dimensional way society thinks about thinking (or perhaps the way we wish thinking worked). Perhaps "The Thinker" should really be named "The Ruminator" to convey that thinking without action is just rumination.]

You get lucky as you keep moving along and learning. Or, perhaps, it’s more true to say that your unluckiness runs out.
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- [note::Love this sentiment - "I'm trying to do what I can to stop being unlucky." Related idea: Luck Surface Area]

Leonardo da Vinci called this “componimento inculto,” which biographer Walter Isaacson describes as “an uncultivated composition that helps work out ideas through an intuitive process.” Basically, thinking by sketching.
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- [note::Reminds me of "writing is thinking", embodied cognition, tools for thought.]

(highlight:: The two most common dimensions we’re constrained by are space and time. If setting a time limit is timeboxing, then perhaps the space-analogous exercise can be called sizeboxing. You pick a limited size for your work and work within that.
One popular format I’ve seen is an essay that fits in a screenshot on your phone. When working on articles, I write my notes to fit a 4-by-6-inch index card; any longer and it has to be a new note. This keeps me concise.
If you’re recording music, scale down by committing to recording a song with only two instruments if you usually use more; or if you want to produce a lot of ideas, commit to writing thirty-second melodies for one week.
If you’re working with paint, choose a surface with dimensions no more than four inches by four inches.
If you’re programming, restrict yourself to a set number of lines of code or a specific memory size. (Sizecoding might be an inspiration.)
Another version of this is filling out three pages of writing in a notebook. (If you do this without stopping, that’s what teacher, artist, and author Julia Cameron calls the morning pages.))
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- 1action, innovation, creative work, sizeboxing,
- [note::Love that I now have a name for this! A related idea is "reducing scope tends to increase idea generation rate", which might be called "scopeboxing"? Also hadn't thought about this in the context of constraining the physical space you have to work with.]

(highlight:: Photographer Ivan Chow leaves the house without his camera to practice his observation skills. He says, “By taking away the need to make photos, you’re relieving yourself of that pressure to deliver. This will allow your mind to focus solely on spotting moments that are worthy of capturing. You’ll get less caught up with what’s directly in front of you and you’ll start looking a bit further to spot potential subjects and points of interest. Being a good street photographer is all about being good at observing, and that means that you already have a very good head start.”
If your chosen creative operation is photography, you might choose to take a moment out of each day to observe a location or scene that would make for an interesting photograph. What makes it stand out to you? How can you return and recreate the moment, or would it be worth capturing in different lighting conditions? If it’s music, take a long walk and play with a melody in your head—when you take away the option of recording an idea right away, you’re forced to work with the raw materials in real time, which can lead to many surprising developments.)
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- [note::"To focus on meta-skills and foster creative play, take away all the tools or equipment that allow you to codify your work."
e.g. Cameras, paintbrushes, keyboard, your computer, musical instruments, writing tools (except those that only store your data temporarily).]

Michael Bierut assigned a project to his students: pick an activity and commit to doing it for 100 days in a row. Bierut recalls his instructions: “The only restrictions on the operation you choose is that it must be repeated in some form every day, and that every iteration must be documented for eventual presentation.”
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Using only analog equipment—nothing connected to the internet—practice your craft. Make something. Going back to basics can be a great way to revisit why you chose this work in the first place
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Vin Verma, who goes by the name Internetvin, has made music and written code every day for a year. One of his techniques is to find a way to create music or code in 20 seconds (writing just a single line of code on the days he didn’t have time or felt tired.
If you’re making music, your tactic could be to record a 10-second voice note of a new melody, or to write one bad line of a song lyric.
If you’re working in photography, take a still life of an object within arm’s reach.
If you’re writing, write one bad sentence.
The goal here is to simplify your creative operation, moving the starting point to the finish point much closer together—mere seconds apart.
While 20 seconds is an aspirational goal, realistically it may take at least a minute to complete the simplest version of your creative operation. If you’re writing every day, let it take a minute to write a sentence. Or if you’re drawing daily, then a minute enables you to quickly sketch something simple.)
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Creating acceptable ideas is a strategy that professor and author Dean Keith Simonton recommends. He writes in The Genius Checklist how the more attempts an artist or craftsperson makes, the more major works (or “hits” they create. As a general rule, Simonton suggests that mass production of these ideas is a safer approach than focusing on a single idea and trying to make it perfect.
“Giving up on perfectionism doesn’t mean that you will not produce anything perfect, but rather that perfection will happen from time to time because of the sheer mass of output,” Simonton writes.)
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- [note::Perfection is a statistical inevitability that results from producing large amounts of work (however wide the distribution of quality work is)]

DM interviews—just interview Twitter-famous people on DM/iMessage/Signal or over email for my blog, and let them know I also republish at Medium with 12k+ followers and sometimes at Fast Company as well. This should take no more than 30 mins on my end, and I can set up templated questions just like I do with Crossing the Enterprise Chasm. They can respond in text
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If you’re more interested in nonfiction or memoir writing, you can try author and speaker Suleika Jaouad’s The Isolation Journals.
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If you want to learn more, I’ve compiled a comprehensive list of 25 daily creative challenges at my blog.
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Chance plays a huge role in creativity and can be a useful generative constraint. If you want to make fewer decisions, enlist chance as an assistant. Whenever you need to make a decision, write out your options and let a coin toss, a dice roll, a results generator, or another person’s selection of multiple choice, to decide what you’ll do.
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Author Laura Huang writes a different version in her book Edge: “Different isn’t always better, but better is always different.”
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If you do your creative work in the morning, try doing it for an hour or two at night. One of my high school teachers had actually recommended waking up in the middle of the night to write. Interrupting sleep is certainly not pleasant, though the creative work you produce by shaking up your routine might be worth it.
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In addition to experimenting with time, you can also find an opposing space for one work session. If you usually work in large, open spaces, try finding one that’s extremely small (channeling your inner Jackson Pollock, who worked in a relatively modest studio, or Roald Dahl’s backyard hut). Conversely, if you usually work in a small space, try working in a big place, like the foyer of a public library or even outdoors.
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Creativity means walking a tightrope between consistency and chaos. Switch up your routines so that you naturally add more novelty and vitality to your work.
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Kuo told me, “There’s something about writing a letter that allows you to discover your conversational voice, which also means your forms of speech, your idioms, your little jokes. Sometimes, it also allows the voice to be funnier, to be self deprecating, and to desire actual connection. When a person knows who their exact audience is, it gives them more consistency, so they’re not switching between different potential targets. When you’re consistent, then the reader trusts you. An outside reader trusts you.”
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This is how originality actually works: not through a mythological lightning bolt of insight, but through constant bricolage, rediscovery, and remixing of references.
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- [note::Everything is a remix. Originality is a farce.]

In Walk Through Walls, performance artist Marina Abramović writes of an exercise where she gives her students a thousand pieces of white paper. The students write down ideas. They keep the ones they like, and trash the ones they don’t. After three months, Abramović only takes ideas from the trash cans; she calls these the “treasure trove” of the things her students are afraid to do.
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- [note::Interesting! This implies that among every set of "bad" ideas lies ideas that are potentially great, but got scrapped since they were deemed "too difficult" to develop or didn't find the right person to develop them.]

(highlight:: > “Ease isn’t the goal; excellence is.”
— Ed Catmull)
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Understanding quality is not difficult; it starts as you immerse yourself in a lot of really good work and develop your own opinions on them. You won’t do good work until you define what good means to you.
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I’ve developed a definition of quality for all kinds of work I create. When assessing the quality of an article idea, for example, I look at timing, societal impact, counterintuition, action steps, and prior coverage. I discovered these attributes through noticing what ideas were accepted and rejected, through patterns I noticed in what I liked to read, and through papers I read. I refine the meaning of these words often, based on feedback from editors.
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- [note::I'd like to develop quality criteria for my own blog]

For example, in Let My People Go Surfing, Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard writes of his own list of criteria to evaluate potential product ideas: Is it functional? Multifunctional? Is it durable? Does it fit our customer? Will people be able to repair it? Is the product and line simple? Is it an innovation or invention? Is it a global design? Is it easy to care for and clean? Does it have any added value? Is it authentic? Is it beautiful? Are we just chasing fashion? Are we designing for our core customer?
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Pitches for my articles are acceptable when I’ve explained to myself and the reader why the idea is well timed, what it means to society, what people may misunderstand about it, what people can take away from this story and apply to their lives, and how few people have covered it before. If the pitch fails in some way (for example, if a lot of people have covered it before), the pitch does not pass, and it is not acceptable. I’m happy, as I didn’t need to spend time writing the entire story out only to realize this—I didn’t try to make it perfect before I made it acceptable.
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In order to improve your output, you first need to improve your input. Experiencing other people’s work is the best first step to understanding what quality might even mean in your field. Everyone who is making something, right now, has been inspired by someone else.
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(highlight:: Select a piece of work you love or that is revered in your field. Study it. Answer this question: “What makes it great?”
Write down the first thing that stands out to you about the piece of work. Then, write down the second thing. And the third thing, and so on, until you don’t notice any more unique things. Then, read someone else’s commentary on the work—or if none exists, just call a friend and ask them what they notice about the piece. What do they experience that you didn’t? What interests them? What’s the difference between what you noticed and what they noticed)
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As Maria Popova writes in The Marginalian, “I frequently use LEGO as a metaphor for combinatorial creativity—if we only have bricks of one shape, size, and color, what we build with them remains limited; but if we build with pieces of various shapes, sizes, and colors, our creations will be infinitely more interesting.”
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- [note::3 Levels of Combinatorial Creativity: Copying -> Imitating -> Remixing]

Author and Princeton instructor John McPhee writes about a technique called “greening”—to “green” an opening paragraph by three means to cut three lines out of the paragraph as a way of forcing the editing process. He writes, “Green 4 does not mean lop off four lines at the bottom. … The idea is to remove words in such a manner that no one would notice that anything has been removed.”
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(highlight:: To practice your detail-orientation, try choosing one thing to focus on for thirty minutes.
Zooming in on a small part of your work is a great interpretation of this prompt. You could focus your attention on one particular corner, or a 1-inch by 1-inch, area of your artwork. Or, if you’re making a song, focus on nailing the lyrics in the opening verse, or the harmonies on the bridge.
In music or computer hardware, you could also choose to focus on the time, pace, and tempo of your work.)
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A surface can be any place you’re performing or storing your work. One surface could be private, like a folder or a box that no one else will see. Another surface could be semi-public, one that you show to people you trust. Still, another surface could be entirely public, ready to show the world.
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- [note::How might this work digitally?

1. My Obsidian vault (private workspace)
2. Private newsletter
3. Public newsletter/blog/social media?]

(highlight:: One of the simplest ways of communicating value is showing the effort that actually went into the work. That might involve literally showing the process of making it, though it might also be more biographical. You may ask yourself, and answer, questions like:
• When did you first get the idea for this piece of work?
• How did the idea start?
• What did you see throughout this process?
• Who influenced the work?
• What parts of the work might have emerged from stories in your life?
• What skills did creating this work require? If you had these skills already, how did you hone them? If you didn’t, how did you learn them or who did you work with?
• How many times did you try making this work?)
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(highlight:: Sivers writes, “Before the conference, come up with one interesting sentence that says what you do—including a curious bit that will make them ask a follow-up question.” He gives the example of, instead of saying “I’m a bassist,” introducing yourself as “Bassist of the Crunchy Frogs—the worst punk bluegrass band ever. We’re headlining the showcase tonight. Our singer is a pirate.”
If I were talking about my book, for example, I wouldn’t say, “I’m an author,” I’d say something like, “I’m the author of Creative Doing, a book that debunks the biggest lie in creative thinking. It has 75 prompts to make the reader more creative. It’s the only book with a shape as a mascot.”)
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- [note::This is really something I need to take time to think about - what are the most interesting aspects of my work/life philosophy and how can I clearly communicate that to different kinds of people (i.e. audiences) I meet? My "personal brand" Obsidian canvas can certainly help with this.]

All too often, considering an audience gets in the way of creative work. It’s not an easy habit or thought pattern to break; even if you think you’re not making for an audience, you’ve gotten into the practice of it. The key is to practice making something you’ll never show anyone else. In doing this, you’re gaining valuable feedback from yourself.
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- [note::Make things for yourself or risk falling into the trap of making things for the enjoyment/benefit of others and having their tastes end up reducing the quality and uniqueness of your work]

(highlight:: If you’re uncertain of which questions to ask, try this ABCD framework from novelist Mary Robinette Kowal:*
• What’s Awesome?
• What’s Boring?
• What’s Confusing?
• What Didn’t you believe?
“What didn’t you believe?” may be most helpful when responding to fiction, but disbelief is a form of distraction—a part of a story that I simply can’t believe. So if “What didn’t you believe?” doesn’t seem like the right question for your work, you may ask, “What is distracting?” In other words, you’re looking for elements of your work that take away from what you’re trying to express.)
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Creative expression involves physical, mental, and emotional contributions. I like to represent these as the hands, the head, and the heart. The prompts in this book so far have helped you align your hands and your head.
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- [note::Hands = Practicing creative work
Heart = Spirit and motivation to do creative work
Head = Thinking about our creative work]

We accept the truth that in order to make something great, we must start with the courage to make and release many ordinary things. The hands don’t have an ego. The hands don’t compare. The hands don’t wonder what they don’t know. They learn by doing, they test and experiment and try. And by putting our trust in our hands, whatever unworthiness or intimidation we feel in our heads and hearts is quieted, and our creative confidence grows.
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- purpose, favorite, 1action,
- [note::I'd like to put this near my desk as a reminder to continually take an experimental approach to life]

(highlight:: In 1926, London School of Economics co-founder Graham Wallas published The Art of Thought, in which he described a four-stage creative process. The first three stages were adapted from physicist Hermann von Helmholtz, and Wallas’s descriptions are in quotes:
Preparation: “the stage during which the problem was ‘investigated … in all directions’”—think about exercises, rituals, and routines that stimulate your mind.
Incubation: “not consciously thinking about the problem”—this is about consciously letting go of the problem and relaxing your mind. It might involve going for a walk in nature, or relaxing in a shower.
Illumination: “the appearance of the ‘happy idea’ together with the psychological events which immediately preceded and accompanied that appearance”—the eureka moment, where an answer comes to you, either quietly or striking like a bolt of lightning.
Verification: “the validity of the idea was tested, and the idea itself was reduced to exact form”—the phase where an illumination is tested through feedback or, in science, proofs and matching theories.
Whether it’s a 60-second speed writing exercise, or a song that takes 5,000 hours to perfect and record, every work goes through this linear process.)
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- [note::The 4 steps of of creative thought:

1. Preparation
2. Incubation
3. Illumination
4. Verification]

In his 1984 business fable The Goal, Eliyahu M. Goldratt wrote about how any improvements or optimizations made to a single process are an illusion, unless they’re at the bottleneck. This is often the slowest step, or the weakest link. In their book Diaminds: Decoding the Mental Habits of Successful Thinkers, Mihnea Moldoveanu and Roger Martin describe this constraint as a “rate-limiting step,” and illustrate it with the example of the flexion hip joint, which gets in the way of even the fastest sprinter from being even faster.
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- 1todo evernote,
- [note::See "Theory of Constraints"]

(highlight:: Here’s a list of questions you can ask yourself to see which stage you’re getting stuck in the creative process, at the preparation, incubation, illumination, or verification stages:

1. If it’s a struggle for you to come up with enough ideas, expand your preparation phase. Find more references and spend time studying them and distinguishing between the ones you like and don’t like, and why. (See Visit the Greats.)

2. If you find you’re coming up with a lot of ideas, but none are resonating, expand your incubation phase. Give your brain more time to rest and relax. (See Make Idle Time.)

3. If you find you’re missing breakthroughs, pay more attention. Write each breakthrough down whenever you feel your mind making a connection, whether it’s a small one or a big one. Don’t distinguish or edit what your mind is telling you. (See Write Down 10 Ideas.)

4. If you find that you don’t have enough time and energy to make acceptable work, redefine what quality means to you at this point in your life. In all likelihood, you have to assess how much time, money, energy, and other resources you have to verify—edit, polish, refine, design—and lower the fidelity and scope you are shipping your ideas with. (See Complete Your Operation in Seconds.)
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(highlight:: I realized through listening to myself that one of the blocks I face as an author is, “I don’t want to write this, it’s too obvious.” This feeling of a lack of originality is a challenge that I’ve seen other writers face as well.
For me, I came across a few sources of consolation. First off, I saw a tweet from marketer and software engineer Patrick McKenzie assuring the reader, “You radically underestimate both a) how much you know that other people do not and b) the instrumental benefits to you of publishing it.” McKenzie also linked to New Science executive director and blogger Alexey Guzey’s writing about the value of unoriginality, “Because it helps in the process of discovery and in the process of supporting underappreciated ideas.”
I also noticed how a handful of “obvious” ideas other people had made an impact on me and my friends. For me, two examples were author Seth Godin’s “Talker’s Block”—which asks why writer’s block exists when nobody gets talker’s block—and Roy Bahat’s “Forwardable email,” which suggests that readers shouldn’t ask for an email introduction, and instead make a request for someone to forward their email along.)
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- 1todo evernote,
- [note::The originality of an idea depends on its audience and context]

(highlight:: Naturally, as we start making creative work, we see the distance between what we call good and what we’re making. The fear dawns on us: What if we make something bad?
This is the gap between taste and ability that everyone starts with. As broadcaster and producer Ira Glass says, “It’s only by actually going through a volume of work that you’re actually going to catch up and close that gap. The work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions.”
The quantity of work is essential. We’ll make mistakes, pretend we know what we’re doing, say the wrong things, imitate people, and find new ways of working that we swore we’d never do.
We need to set the expectation with ourselves that we will probably look foolish as we make our early work. In fact, we need to lean into it and accept it.)
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(highlight:: As Marina Abramović wrote in Walk Through Walls, “I always question artists who are successful in whatever they do. I think what that means is that they’re repeating themselves and not taking enough risks.”
“Safe” means creating something you’re most familiar with, that is, your “style.” Making something risky might mean dialing your style up to the maximum, or flipping it to be the complete opposite. Or it might just mean doing something completely out of the blue—that exceeds my capacity for suggestion.)
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(highlight:: The late Intel chief Andy Grove writes of a simple rule in High Output Management: “All production flows have a basic characteristic: the material becomes more valuable as it moves through the process.” That’s because more time and energy have been spent on the material to make it a final product.
One implication of this idea is the earlier you stop working on something, the fewer resources you waste. For example, if I’m coming up with a pitch, a quick Google search could tell me if someone else has written about the thing I want to write about. If someone has, in exactly the way I wanted to write about it, then I can easily shelve the idea in its current state, as it’s not acceptable to me. If I didn’t come across the prior coverage until later in my process, I’d have to give up the idea after hours spent researching and writing (which has happened before).)
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(highlight:: Look at a completed version of your work and write down five things that are working well. Here are some potential starting points:
• If you have been practicing or developing a certain technique, analyze your development and how it contributes to the piece. (For example, if you’d been practicing crosshatching—did it improve in this piece? For me, maybe I’ve been practicing writing headlines—does this headline pique my own curiosity, more so than the ones I’d written previously?)
• Reflect on your process. If you set out to work consistently, did you meet your goal? If you’re setting out to explore new or groundbreaking subject matter, are you getting closer to that?
• What did you learn from this week’s work sessions? Are there lessons you’ve learned outside your creative process that you can apply to it?
• What would a supportive friend say about this? What would an imaginary biggest fan say? What would a family member say?
• How do the lessons you’ve learned and your current work set you up for the future? What are some directions it can take you in, towards where you want to go?)
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(highlight:: > “If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.”
— Unknown)
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He urged listeners not to confuse being happy with being enviable, and said, “Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement.”
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- 1todo evernote,
- [note::Do not confuse being happy with being enviable]

(highlight:: What are you doing, and why are you doing it?
If we don’t make time to reflect on why we are creating, then political, economic, and social incentives all have a way of seeping in and causing us to make decisions based on their values. As Watterson said, “Selling out is usually more a matter of buying in. Sell out, and you’re really buying into someone else’s system of values, rules and rewards.”)
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Maybe you are setting out to express or expose some sort of truth, or to discover it, and to figure it out. Or you’re just trying to refine your techniques. Whatever it is—make it an internal mission, and not an external one.
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(highlight:: Make the case for each of them, by answering some of these questions:
• Why is this mission important to you?
• What idea or experience inspired you to take on this mission?
• What will the world look like after you accomplish your mission?
• Can you imagine the world without you accomplishing your proposed mission?
• Who or what does your mission serve? Who or what will your mission honor?)
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Kuo recalls focusing, instead, on simpler metrics: “​​Am I writing?” “Am I showing up?” “Am I discovering something new about these experiences or about this world?” “Am I having new encounters alone?” These types of qualitative metrics, more grounded in the process than the outcome, will enable you to get back to what really matters: your creative work.
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For me, the most valuable thing about creative doing is reiterating the role of action in thinking. We learn not only by thinking, we learn by doing. We set ourselves from the paralysis of analysis by taking action, which is something we knew as children and learn to stop doing as we grow up. If we want to be more creative, we need to reconnect with our inner instinct to make and be open to introducing some chaos into our structured lives.
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The creative process is, similarly, two sided. It involves structure and chaos, freedom and constraint, and spontaneity and consistency. Of course, it also involves both creative thinking and creative doing. To neglect one is to neglect the other.
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(highlight:: > “Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you.”
— Steve Jobs8)
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Mason Currey is the author of the Daily Rituals books, featuring brief profiles of the day-to-day working lives of more than 300 great creative minds. If he didn’t start the genre, Mason definitely popularized public interest in routines, which I’ve found to really benefit my creative process.
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Lindsay Jean Thomson is a writer and community builder. She facilitates #The100DayProject, a free global art project taking place online. I would be entirely unsurprised if the next generation’s artists emerge from Lindsay’s project or other work.
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