The Creative Act: A Way of Being

by Rick Rubin

Art is confrontation. It widens the audience’s reality, allowing them to glimpse life through a different window. One with the potential for a glorious new view.

It’s a healthy practice to approach our work with as few accepted rules, starting points, and limitations as possible. Often the standards in our chosen medium are so ubiquitous, we take them for granted. They are invisible and unquestioned. This makes it nearly impossible to think outside the standard paradigm.

As you get further along in your career, a consistency may develop that’s of less interest over time. Your work can start to feel like a job or a responsibility. So it’s helpful to notice if you’ve been working with the same palette of colors all along. Start the next project by scrapping that palette. The uncertainty that results can be a thrilling and scary proposition. Once you have a new framework, some elements of your older process may find their way back into the work, and that’s okay. It’s helpful to remember that when you throw away an old playbook, you still get to keep the skills you learned along the way. These hard-earned abilities transcend rules. They’re yours to keep. Imagine what can arise when you overlay an entirely new set of materials and instructions over your accumulated expertise.

Think of a rule as an imbalance. Darkness and light are only meaningful in relationship with each other. Without one, the other wouldn’t exist. They are a matched dynamic system, like yin and yang. Examine your methods and consider what the opposite would be. What would balance the scales? What would be the light to your dark, or the dark to your light? It’s not uncommon for an artist to focus on one end of the seesaw. Even if we don’t choose to create on the other side, understanding this polarity can inform our choices. Another strategy might be to double down, to take the shades you’re currently working in to the extreme. Only through experimenting with balance do you discover where you are on the seesaw. Once you identify your position, you can move to the opposite side to find balance or go further out along the limb you’re on, creating more leverage.

While the eyes and the mouth can be sealed, an ear has no lid, nothing to close. It takes in what surrounds it. It receives but can’t transmit. The ear is simply present to the world.

Headphones create an illusion, tricking your senses into believing you are hearing everything the music is offering. Many artists refuse to use headphones in the studio as it is a poor replica of the real-world listening experience. With speakers, we are closer to the sound of instruments in the room—immersed physically in a full sonic spectrum of vibration. Many of us experience life as if we’re taking it in through a pair of headphones. We strip away the full register. We hear information, but don’t detect the subtler vibrations of feeling in the body. When you practice listening with the whole self, you expand the scope of your consciousness to include vast amounts of information otherwise missed, and discover more material to feed your art habit.

Paying attention with no preconceived ideas. The only goal is to fully and clearly understand what is being transmitted, remaining totally present with what’s being expressed—and allowing it to be what it is. Anything less is not only a disservice to the speaker, but also to yourself. While creating and defending a story in your own head, you miss information that might alter or evolve your current thoughts. If we can go beyond our reflexive response, we may find there is something more beneath that resonates with us or helps our understanding. The new information might reinforce an idea, slightly alter it, or completely reverse it. Listening without prejudice is how we grow and learn as people. More often than not, there are no right answers, just different perspectives. The more perspectives we can learn to see, the greater our understanding becomes.

Listening, then, is not just awareness. It’s freedom from accepted limitations.

There are no shortcuts. The lottery winner isn’t ultimately happy after their sudden change of fortune. The home built hastily rarely survives the first storm. The single-sentence summary of a book or news event is no substitute for the full story. We often take shortcuts without knowing it. When listening, we tend to skip forward and generalize the speaker’s overall message. We miss the subtleties of the point, if not the entire premise. In addition to the assumption that we are saving time, this shortcut also avoids the discomfort of challenging our prevailing stories. And our worldview continues to shrink.

Reading, in addition to listening, eating, and most physical activities, can be experienced like driving: we can participate either on autopilot or with focused intention. So often we sleepwalk through our lives. Consider how different your experience of the world might be if you engaged in every activity with the attention you might give to landing a plane. There are those who approach the opportunities of each day like crossing items off a to-do list instead of truly engaging and participating with all of themselves. Our continual quest for efficiency discourages looking too deeply.

Patience is developed much like awareness. Through an acceptance of what is. Impatience is an argument with reality. The desire for something to be different from what we are experiencing in the here and now. A wish for time to speed up, tomorrow to come sooner, to relive yesterday, or to close your eyes then open them and find yourself in another place.

Time is something that we have no control over. So patience begins with acceptance of natural rhythms. The implied benefit of impatience is to save time by speeding up and skipping ahead of those rhythms. Paradoxically, this ends up taking more time and using more energy. It’s wasted effort.

When it comes to the creative process, patience is accepting that the majority of the work we do is out of our control. We can’t force greatness to happen. All we can do is invite it in and await it actively. Not anxiously, as this might scare it off. Simply in a state of continual welcoming.

3 options - force it, avoid/run away from it, or presently engage with it

If we remove time from the equation of a work’s development, what we’re left with is patience. Not just for the development of the work, but for the development of the artist as a whole. Even the masterpieces that have been produced on tight timelines are the sum of decades spent patiently laboring on other works.

To see what no human has seen before, to know what no human has known before, to create as no human has created before, it may be necessary to see as if through eyes that have never seen, know through a mind that has never thought, create with hands that have never been trained. This is beginner’s mind—one of the most difficult states of being to dwell in for an artist, precisely because it involves letting go of what our experiences have taught us.

There’s a great power in not knowing. When faced with a challenging task, we may tell ourselves it’s too difficult, it’s not worth the effort, it’s not the way things are done, it’s not likely to work, or it’s not likely to work for us. If we approach a task with ignorance, it can remove the barricade of knowledge blocking progress. Curiously, not being aware of a challenge may be just what we need to rise to it.

Talent is the ability to let ideas manifest themselves through you.

Inspiration It appears in a moment. An immaculate conception. A divine flash of light. An idea that would otherwise require labor to unfold suddenly blooms in a single inhalation. What defines inspiration is the quality and quantity of the download. At a speed so instantaneous, it seems impossible to process. Inspiration is the rocket fuel powering our work. It is a universal conversation we yearn to be part of. The word comes from the Latin—inspirare, meaning to breathe in or blow into. For the lungs to draw in air, they must first be emptied. For the mind to draw inspiration, it wants space to welcome the new. The universe seeks balance. Through this absence, you are inviting energy in.

Taken more spiritually, inspiration means to breathe life into. An ancient interpretation defines it as the immediate influence of the divine. For the artist, inspiration is a breath of creative force drawn in instantly from outside of our small selves. We can’t be sure where this spark of insight originates. It’s helpful to know it’s not us alone.

When inspiration does arrive, it is invariably energizing. But it is not something to rely on. An artistic life cannot be built solely around waiting. Inspiration is out of our control and can prove hard to find. Effort is required and invitations are to be extended. In its absence, we may work on other areas of the project independent of this cosmic transmission.

In terms of priority, inspiration comes first. You come next. The audience comes last. These are special moments and are to be treated with the utmost devotion. Our schedules are set aside when these fleeting moments of illumination come. Summon your strength and commit yourself on behalf of this offering, even when it arises at an inopportune time. This is the serious artist’s obligation. John Lennon once advised that if you start a song, write it through to the end in that sitting. The initial inspiration has a vitality in it that can carry you through the whole piece. Don’t be concerned if some of the parts are not yet all they can be. Get through a rough draft. A full, imperfect version is generally more helpful than a seemingly perfect fragment. When an idea forms, or a hook is written, we may feel that we’ve cracked the code and the rest will take care of itself. If we step away and let that initial spark fade, we may return to find it’s not so easy to rekindle. Think of inspiration as a force not immune to the laws of entropy.

Good habits create good art. The way we do anything is the way we do everything. Treat each choice you make, each action you take, each word you speak with skillful care.

Consider establishing a consistent framework around your creative process. It is often the case that the more set in your personal regimen, the more freedom you have within that structure to express yourself. Discipline and freedom seem like opposites. In reality, they are partners. Discipline is not a lack of freedom, it is a harmonious relationship with time. Managing your schedule and daily habits well is a necessary component to free up the practical and creative capacity to make great art.

Approaching the practical aspects of your day with military precision allows the artistic windows to be opened in childlike freedom. Creativity-supporting habits can begin the moment you arise each day. These might include looking at sunlight before screenlight, meditating (outdoors if possible), exercising, and showering in cold water before beginning creative time in a suitable space.

Find the sustainable rituals that best support your work. If you set a routine that is oppressive, you’ll likely find excuses not to show up. It’s in the interest of your art to create an easily achievable schedule to start with.

Put the decision making into the work, not into when to work. The more you reduce your daily life-maintenance tasks, the greater the bandwidth available for creative decisions.

Thoughts and habits not conducive to the work: Believing you’re not good enough. Feeling you don’t have the energy it takes. Mistaking adopted rules for absolute truths. Not wanting to do the work (laziness). Not taking the work to its highest expression (settling). Having goals so ambitious that you can’t begin. Thinking you can only do your best work in certain conditions. Requiring specific tools or equipment to do the work. Abandoning a project as soon as it gets difficult. Feeling like you need permission to start or move forward. Letting a perceived need for funding, equipment, or support get in the way. Having too many ideas and not knowing where to start. Never finishing projects. Blaming circumstances or other people for interfering with your process. Romanticizing negative behaviors or addictions. Believing a certain mood or state is necessary to do your best work. Prioritizing other activities and responsibilities over your commitment to making art. Distractibility and procrastination. Impatience. Thinking anything that’s out of your control is in your way.

It’s generally preferable to accumulate several weeks’ or months’ worth of ideas and then choose which of them to focus on, instead of following an urge or obligation to rush to the finish line with what is in front of us today. The more seeds you’ve accumulated, the easier this is to judge. If you’ve collected a hundred seeds, you might find that seed number fifty-four speaks to you in a way that none of the others do. If number fifty-four is your only choice, without other seeds for context, it’s more difficult to tell.

There are countless directions to explore, and we never know which will guide us to a dead end and which will lead to new realms until we test it. In the case of a song, a vocalist might respond very quickly to a musical track and the melody will immediately reveal itself. Other times, although the singer finds the musical track compelling, they will listen to it a thousand times and nothing will come from it. In this phase, we are not looking at which iteration progresses the quickest or furthest, but which holds the most promise. We focus on the flourishing and wait to prune. We generate possibilities instead of eliminating them. Editing prematurely can close off routes that might lead to beautiful vistas previously unseen.

Not every seed must grow. But it may be there is a right time for each one. If a seed does not seem to be developing or responding, consider storing it rather than discarding it. In nature, some seeds lie dormant in anticipation of the season most conducive to their growth. This is true of art as well. There are ideas whose time has not yet come. Or perhaps their time has come, but you are not yet ready to engage with them. Other times, developing a different seed may shed light on a dormant one.

Some seeds are ready to germinate instantaneously. You may start experimenting and find yourself completing the work and being pleased with the result. Or you may get halfway through the project, then feel unsure where it wants to go. As we lose enthusiasm, we often continue to labor on a seed, believing that the work has to turn out for the better because we’ve invested so much time in it. If the energy continues to drop, it does not necessarily mean that the seed is bad. We just may not have found the right experiment for it. Perhaps we need to step away for a time and shift perspective. We may choose to start over with it, or set it aside for a while and sift through the others.

If you know what you want to do and you do it, that’s the work of a craftsman. If you begin with a question and use it to guide an adventure of discovery, that’s the work of the artist.

When a plant is flourishing, we can see the life spring forth from every stalk, leaf, and flower. How do we know when an idea is flourishing? Often the most accurate signposts are emotional, not intellectual. Excitement tends to be the best barometer for selecting which seeds to focus on. When something interesting starts to come together, it arouses delight. It’s an energizing feeling of wanting more. A feeling of leaning forward. Follow that energy. During the Experimentation phase, we are paying attention to this natural reaction of enthrallment in the body. There is a time for the head work of analysis, but not yet. Here, we follow the heart. At some point, we may be able to look back and understand why the feeling arose.

Failure is the information you need to get where you’re going.

To dismiss an idea because it doesn’t work in your mind is to do a disservice to the art. The only way to truly know if any idea works is to test it. And if you’re looking for the best idea, test everything. Ask yourself as many “what if” questions as you can. What if this were the first painting anyone saw in their life? What if I removed every adverb? What if I made all the loud parts quiet? Look for different polarities and see how they affect the piece.

Perhaps take on the temporary rule that there are no bad ideas. Test them all, even the ones that seem underwhelming or unlikely to work. This method becomes especially useful in group efforts.

We want to set up an environment where the decision making occurs free of the misguiding force of persuasion. Persuasion leads to mediocrity. To be evaluated, ideas have to be seen, heard, tasted, or touched.

When working through ways of solving a puzzle, there are no mistakes. Each unsuccessful solution gets you closer to one that works. Avoid becoming attached to the particulars of the problem. Widen your field of view. If the idea takes the project somewhere with a stronger energetic charge, follow the new direction.

Taking a wrong turn allows you to see landscapes you wouldn’t otherwise have seen.

Often unbeknownst to us, we find ourselves in the Craft phase. Now comes the labor of building. We work to add to a foundation that has revealed itself through our experimentation. The lines have been drawn. Now we’re filling in the colors. Where the earlier phases were more free and open-ended, the inspirations and ideas that appear now are more directly related to issues at hand. We are looking for a shape that fits a specific hole, whereas before we were just looking for shapes.

In some ways, the Craft phase is one of the least glamorous parts of the artist’s job. There is creativity involved, but it often carries less of the magic of exploration and more of the labor of brick-laying. This is the point in the journey where some struggle to carry on. For now, we need to look away from the open field and turn toward a winding staircase a hundred stories tall. A long, precarious climb lies ahead. We may be tempted to turn back and chase the thrill of feeling the light bulb flicker on above our heads. But the first two phases have little purpose or meaning on their own. Art may only exist, and the artist may only evolve, by completing the work.

How do we decide which experiment to craft? We continue to follow hints of excitement. Each one of us has to find our own path. If several directions seem captivating, consider crafting more than one experiment at a time. Working on several often brings about a healthy sense of detachment.

Stepping away and returning with fresh eyes brings clearer insight into next steps. Switching to other projects will engage different muscles and patterns of thinking. These may shed light on paths otherwise unseen.

In the Experimentation phase, we planted the seed, watered it, and gave the resulting plant time to grow in the sun. We let nature take its course. Now, in this third phase, we are bringing ourselves to the project to see what we can offer. This is one reason the boundary between the Experimentation and the Craft phases isn’t a linear progression. We often move back and forth between the two, because sometimes what we add isn’t as good as what nature is bringing. When we realize this, we stop and go back to where nature left off.