Create or Hate: Successful People Make Things

by Dan Norris

“Everything around you was created by people who were no smarter than you.” —Steve Jobs

According to Robert Sutton, author and Professor of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford School of Engineering, “Creativity isn’t about wild talent as much as it’s about productivity. To find a few ideas that work, you need to try a lot that don’t. It’s a pure numbers game.” Being creative isn’t magic. It’s just a person deciding to create.

Once you criticize something that someone else makes, you are under infinitely more pressure to make something great yourself.

Maxwell Maltz pointed out in his seminal book Psycho Cybernetics,

If you can fail quickly and without worry, you can correct course quicker, improve quicker, learn more, and achieve more.

Put another way, French author André Gide once said, “Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.”

“Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.” —C.G. Jung

When people complain about something someone has made, it’s often that they are simply not grateful enough for the amount of time and effort that went into making

Another trick that works well is catching yourself saying, ‘I have to do x,’ and changing it to, ‘I get to do x.’

What about the idea of Difficult Empathy Problems (DEP)?

What if you challenged yourself to feel empathy for people who you really struggle to understand? What about feeling empathy for people filled with hate?

Great marketers have deep empathy for the customer, and a true understanding of who they are, what they feel, how they speak, what they care about, and what drives them.

“Done is better than perfect”?

his excellent book Show Your Work, renowned creative Austin Kleon explains it this way:

Create More Than You Consume

Interestingly, Austin Kleon and Elizabeth Gilbert both advocate undertaking your creative projects as hobbies before making a living with them.

Rather than just absorbing information and inspiration, collect your ideas in a note-taking app and revisit them regularly.

Don’t just surround yourself with the same people from the same cliquey groups.

“Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.” —Henry David Thoreau