The Laws of Creativity: Unlock Your Originality and Awaken Your Creative Genius

by Joey Cofone

Being creative isn’t a magical power. It isn’t a talent. It’s a skill— one that can be developed if we stop fearing and start understanding it.

These students who are highly engaged in the arts are twice as likely to graduate from college.

Adobe did multiple studies that found creative people earn 13 percent more and are 278 percent happier at work than their non-creative counterparts.

As a creative individual, you will be able to command more opportunities, attention, money, and, ultimately, more freedom in your everyday life. You’ll also have a lot more fun.

The Law of Origin Everyone, including you, started out creative. Creativity is not something you need to learn, but remember.

The Law of Expression Embrace the parts of you that others call weird. Don’t hide what makes you different. Allow those parts to float to the top and be seen by all. Your uniqueness is what makes your creations original, effective, and memorable.

Time after time, weirdness—originality—proves to be the underlying commonality amongst history’s greatest creators.

“There is only one of you in all time. This expression is unique, and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium, and it will be lost.”

It’s up to you to accept the true version of yourself. No one else has your unique combination of variables—it’s time to let them show.

The Law of Disruption You have every right to challenge, question, and improve upon the ideas that are handed to you. At some point, these ideas evolved from and innovated on what came before them. It follows, then, that they themselves will eventually be replaced.

Assumptions, which are regularly handed from person to person, oftentimes across generations, can and should be challenged.

When you enact positive change—true disruption—you leave the world better than you found it. That is progress.

Take your time, judge reality as it is rather than as you wish it were, and you will soon wield the power of rebellion for positive impact.

Ideas come and go, some last centuries, others last seconds. Stay neutral, assess fairly and without agenda, and build your own framework of assumptions from the ground up. The responsibility for managing your limitations in the world rests squarely on your shoulders.

The Law of Connection Base concepts can neither be created nor destroyed, they simply merge to form new combinations. Creativity is not about creating—it is about combining.

“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while.”

The additional nugget of wisdom here, besides that creativity is simply connections, is that it requires us to pay attention. It requires us to not only look, but see. As a designer, when I look at a graphic illustration, I see thirty-seven separate components that comprise the whole, while your average person sees the illustration as a single entity.

The Law of the Unknown Fear is necessary to all creative acts. Your goal is not to eradicate fear, but to acknowledge it and continue in defiance of your mind’s backward tugs. When you are afraid, you are on the right path.

“You will always face pushback. You will always face naysayers. You will always face difficulties. If you can make it real, you can make it happen. And by far the most important thing you can do is persevere.”

Every creative act, at some point, demands that its creator face their fear. And every successful creative act means that the person or people involved were able to overcome it. There are no exceptions.

The Law of Competition Do not compare yourself to others, but rather compare today’s you to yesterday’s. Strive to be incrementally better and you will reach new heights, untethered by the unreasonable expectations derived from comparisons to an infinite supply of others.

Why does that matter? Because by comparing yourself to others, you are giving yourself zero chance to overcome the feeling of being lesser than. There will always be someone better than you, and there will always be someone worse. It’s a statistical guarantee. Therefore, instead of focusing on others, compare yourself to—you guessed it—yourself.

Part of having a healthy outlook on life is being able to discern the difference between what you can control and what you can’t. Trying to beat others falls into the latter category. You can’t control who you’re exposed to, what they can do, the way they perform, or how you stack up. You can, however, control how you stack up against your own performance.

Let yourself travel at a natural speed. Don’t force progress. While getting better as fast as possible sounds great, you will come to realize that when you get to the distant point you imagined a few months or years ago, you will already be aiming for another point, yet again in the distance. You will never get anywhere satisfying with this approach—instead, you’ll forever be on your way. The true challenge is being satisfied with the moment while simultaneously working towards growth. To try to rush is to live in a future that never becomes the present, with success always just out of reach.

your mind reflects what it consumes. Fill your head with ideas and thoughts that expand your universe rather than collapse it.

The Law of Play When you are having fun, you are doing something of your own free will. In this state, you go further, longer, and harder with less overall effort. Identify the things you enjoy and put them at the heart of your creations—then you will find true freedom.

Think of the ability to have fun as if it were a superpower. With it, you can stop clocks, think clearer, and last longer. As with all superheroes, it takes time and practice before you reach your true potential. Don’t fret if, in the beginning, you find yourself disheartened. The mind is a powerful tool, you must put in the work if you want to wield it with effect.

“Sometimes we make the process more complicated than we need to. We will never make a journey of a thousand miles by fretting about how long it will take or how hard it will be. We make the journey by taking each day step by step and then repeating it again and again until we reach our destination.” —Joseph B. Wirthlin

Questions are journeys: the ones worth going on hold unknown destinations.

Share your answers and your questions. Overlap your reality with those of others. And you will always find your way back to what is real and true.

The Law of the Muse Do not start from zero. Do the necessary research to collect relevant ideas. Use these as inspiration, plucking the best parts of each to combine into something of your own. Don’t wait for the muse to strike—reach out and strike it yourself.

The more you pay attention to the world around you—the more concepts you collect—the more ideas you are bound to produce. Remember, creativity isn’t about creating, it’s about combining. With a vast collection of inspiration, you will inevitably combine ideas in the same way Mestral did on his hike.

Stay curious, keep your senses engaged—and the universe will provide you with more ideas than you can ever possibly bring to life.

Charles Mingus, the American jazz musician, said it well: “Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple—that’s creativity.”

Creating something simple is a complex endeavor. If you do it right, you will see that less is more, slow moves fast, and small gets big—all on their own.

The Law of Beginning By its very nature, your creative destination cannot be perfectly predicted or precisely planned for. Do not waste time wondering about what could happen. Instead, take sensible precautions and simply begin.

The fear of judgment—from ourselves and others—exponentially magnifies the actual mental risk involved in a creative act, which, in reality, is almost zero.

When in doubt, ask yourself: What’s the worst that could happen? Then follow that question through to an answer. As you learned in the Law of Continuity, answers to questions like this are rarely as scary as the questions themselves.

The emotional self has a natural inclination to treat everything you do as precious. It gets caught up in the moment-to-moment work, alternating between foolish pride and unnecessary fear. It distracts from the simple truth that your creative work develops best when you allow a healthy detachment from it. You are not the things you create. You are you. The emotional self conflates the two, often intertwining your identity with your inventions.

For your logical self: “It is unreasonable to expect to get things right on the first try. I

will not wait until I feel ready, for that feeling will never come. Instead, I will begin with the understanding that failure is a part of the process. I am always and never ready.” • For your emotional self: “I am not my creations. However important they are to me, ultimately my creativity—and the things I create—is just one aspect of my identity. My failures, and my successes, do not define me.”

As discussed in the Law of the Unknown, fear is an incredible tool. It shows you your boundaries. Like being in prison, there’s so much more outside the walls of your cell and even more outside the walls of the facility. Fear points you in the direction of things you should do because those are the things that will expand your boundaries. Facing those fears will make your world bigger.

The vast majority of creations never follow a linear path. They often have so much excess—effort that doesn’t directly contribute to the finished product, or things that get outright thrown away or replaced—that it can outweigh what does make it to the end.

The Law of Ideation Take your idea and make it real, no matter how rough. The final step is only attainable by taking the first step. Once you have something to look at and adjust, you can begin the journey towards completion.

It’s incredibly easy to forget that the journey of a thousand miles must start with a single step.

Whether by drawing, writing, or crafting—take your ideas out of your head and make them real as early as possible. Don’t concern yourself with how beautiful or accurate they are. The sooner you can materialize your ideas, the faster you can bring them to life.

The Law of Iteration Do not concern yourself with quality. Rather, prioritize quantity through iteration—even at the expense of quality. Over time, quality will emerge. The more versions you make, the better the results.

For every single creative success, not stopping when the journey gets tough is a requirement. From the high-tech phone in your pocket to the radio waves and battery technologies that power it, the creator of every component failed before they succeeded. This loop, the process of starting and failing in succession, is called iteration—and it’s the underlying superpower behind creativity.

Do not expect to find the right solution on the first try. Instead, expect to find the wrong ones. With the correct mindset, you will no longer view an unsuccessful iteration as a failure, but as an opportunity to learn.

The act of collaborating is as simple as getting together and being honest. Ensure that the goals are clear from the start.