How to Create, Perceptions and Being Creative
Hey friends!
Here’s what I learnt this week.
Collector to Creator Course
Yesterday, I went to the first Collector to Creator live session! It’s a course about increasing your creative output and being consistent in publishing and creating. It’s only the first live session, but I’ve been enjoying it so far!
I tweet my takeaways here
A Quote From What I’m Currently Reading
It’s the simple things in life that are the most extraordinary; only wise men are able to understand them.
Source: The Alchemist
What I Read and Applied
There is no good or bad without us, there is only perception. There is the event itself and the story we tell ourselves about what it means.
Source: The Obstacle is the Way
Focusmate
Focusmate is an app where you virtually work with strangers who have committed to being accountable for finishing their work.
It works quite simply: You pick a time to work, and Focusmate matches you with a partner for a live virtual coworking session that keeps you on task.
Take my word for it: Since I’ve used it, I’ve been more productive in terms of studying! I struggle with studying from my room, so having someone to keep me accountable was a massive productivity boost!
Creativity Faucet
Here’s an interesting idea I read this week
The most valuable writing skill is generating a high frequency of novel ideas.
Last year, I stumbled into a mental model to achieve this.
I was watching a documentary on songwriter Ed Sheeran. In it, he described his songwriting process. It struck me as identical to the process that author Neil Gaiman detailed in his Masterclass.
Here’s the thing.
Ed Sheeran and Neil Gaiman are in the top 0.000001% of their fields. They’re among, say, 25 people in the world who consistently generate blockbuster after blockbuster. If two world-class creators share the exact same creative process, I lean in.
I call their approach the Creativity Faucet:
Visualize your creativity as a backed-up pipe of water. The first mile of piping is packed with wastewater. This wastewater must be emptied before the clear water arrives.
Because your pipe only has one faucet, there’s no shortcut to achieving clarity other than first emptying the wastewater.
Let’s apply this to creativity: At the beginning of a writing session, you must write out every bad idea that reflexively comes to mind. Instead of being self-critical and resisting these bad ideas, you must openly accept them.
Once the bad ideas are emptied, strong ideas begin to arrive.
Here’s why: Once you’ve generated enough bad output, your brain starts to reflexively identify which elements cause the badness. Then it begins to avoid them. You start pattern-matching novel ideas with greater intuition.
Most creators never get past their wastewater. They resist their bad ideas.
If you’ve opened a blank document, scribbled a few thoughts, then walked away because you weren’t struck with gold, then you too didn’t get past it.
Neil and Ed know they’re not superhuman. They simply respect the reality of human creativity: The brain has a linear pipeline for creativity, and the pipe needs clearing. In every creative session, they allot time for emptying the wastewater.
They’re not worrying whether clear water will eventually come. It always does:
Your work start as a weak imitation.
You identify what makes the imitation weak.
You iterate on the imitation until it’s original.
Here’s an interview where Ed talks about it.
Thanks for reading!
Haikal