A lil post on creativity that I posted on Twitter recently as an experiment. Realized it would probably be beneficial to post it here too (duh). Hope you enjoy~

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In the world of creative excellence, everybody seems to be talking about art block, writer’s block and whether creativity is something you achieve by simply showing up, or something that strikes when you least expect it.

While I’ve seen both approaches work, for whatever reason there are a lot of important nuances that always get left out of the conversation.

Not all work sessions are created equal. Very often for myself and many other creatives 20 mediocre sessions might be worth less than 1 extraordinary session. Just because you show up to do the work everyday doesn’t change that your effective output may come 70% or more from those times when you’re really on your A game. The flip-side of this, is that unless you create the space and put forth the attempt to be creative, you may never end up with that extraordinary work.

Second, there are different types of creativity. You have the sort of creativity that is born from conscious effort, professionalism, positive constraints and the kind of western effort based approach that most of us are familiar with. Then you have the creativity which is more inspired by dreams and psychedelic like experiences, that strikes like lightning and seems to come and go like a karma chameleon. The great debate between chasing the muse and showing up to be professional is really people that simply lean to one side or the other talking past each other.

Now of course you can combine both of these strategies and almost all of us inevitably do, consciously or not, but I still think this is a useful framing to work in.

The very real conflict between these different modes of creativity is that they are in some ways mutually exclusive. You can’t effort your way to effortlessness, and you can’t necessarily productivity hack being mindfully plugged into the world. The problem with the idea of chasing the muse, the source, the Tao or whatever word we want to use, is that it flies in the face of work as usual. We’re all mostly trained to think in terms of results by volume and proportional, linear reward structures which are at odds with states of super-performance, power laws, and leverage.

The thing that’s really missing here is a way to properly wed the hyper-performance of flow and strikes of brilliance with the rational professional way of approaching creativity. I can’t claim to have everything all figured out, but as someone who grapples with this stuff a ton I’ve found a handful of things to be extremely useful.

1)Total Immersion & Solitude

Probably one of the biggest reasons why people fail to consistently get into states of peak performance is because they are attempting to recover their focus from constant distraction and irrelevant stimuli. Breaking addiction to social media and the like is a horse that’s been beaten enough, but one that has not is the importance of sacred, uninterrupted solitude. Something that many high performers and brilliant minds have in common, is long hours of time alone doing deep and intense creative work. I think most of the genius we observe from the Isaac Newtons and modern day effective creative problem solvers, like Nassim Taleb or Josh Waitzkin and too many more to name, is lots of time to think and meditate. It is somewhat cliché that breathwork or walking barefoot on grass will give you all can want (no it won’t) but it does do a lot more than you would think.

One important thing to add is you need an environment that is conducive to your focus and relaxation. Even if you think you thrive in chaos, a work environment perforated by construction sounds and notifications every 6 minutes while stacks of unread books and unfolded laundry fall on you is unlikely to produce your best work.

2)Sleep and Stress Management

In my experience, my creative blocks are mostly born from feeling objectively terrible. Whether it’s a carb coma, poor sleep or stress overload, if I can’t relax or focus to begin with then I’m probably not gonna write or draw well. This bullet point always seems obvious, but sleep is so under-emphasized that most of us have very incomplete information when it comes to sleep. Without going into arduous detail, sleep quality is much more important than the hours you spend in bed. It doesn’t matter if you were unconscious for 8 hours or more if it was a sugar, alcohol or sleeping pill induced sedation. Sedation and sleep are not the same thing, and even if you don’t immediately recognize the difference, oh boy will you feel it. In other words, if you never really feel rested and it isn’t something obvious, get a sleep study, or attempt to track and hack your sleep. As someone that has struggled with insomnia for decades, I can confidently say that 8/10 sleep and 4/10 sleep are universes apart.

Stress is essentially the same sort of problem. Of course there is the obvious sort of stress when you have a heated fight with a romantic partner or a loved one passes away unexpectedly, but the overwhelming majority of stress is really of the ambient variety. Most of us don’t even know when our posture is slipping or our neck is tight, or we haven’t had any water for 4 hours, we just keep on keepin’ on until we have some event that reminds us our health requires maintenance. If you have to faint behind the wheel before you incorporate more R&R, this is going to be a very painful journey indeed.

3)Triggers

Something that I’ve experimented with a lot more recently is the old-fashioned use of triggers for accessing flow states. Plenty of people know that you can chew the same type of gum when you study as you do on exam day to improve recall, but I think few people actually use these types of strategies regularly and deliberately. I’ve always been a fan of visualization and breathing techniques to quickly get into the zone, but more recently I’ve been playing various types of music like lofi to switch into a relaxed state of intense focus. Hell I’m listening to it while I type this. Other things could be jumping jacks, cold showers, short walks, throwing a ball around like Gregory House (I had to) or really anything that helps you get into creative mode. The key is to use whatever the thing is as a primer for the kind of thing you wanna get done. You could get pretty nerdy and optimized about this if desired, but I tend to keep it fairly simple myself and stick with easy stuff I know I’ll actually do. As the saying goes, “the perfect routine is the one that you’ll follow.”

As a small aside for people that wanna get jiggy with it, experiment with all the senses. Audio cues and taste are somewhat common, but what about smell, or touch? Maybe a note on your monitor gets you primed for high performance, or the fragrance of a certain tea. Squeezing your lucky, fuzzy red dice (IDK). Possibilities are basically endless.

4)Selecting The Right Things

There is some sense I’ve gotten from various people that flow is more easily achieved when the task is interesting, not super stressful and not too easy or difficult. While there is some truth to this framing, I think the problem is the word flow is easily associated with only doing comfortable things. You can achieve flow whether the task is easy, boring or crushingly hard. Flow is just an approach or way of being that changes how you interact with everything. One of the things that I love about Rick Rubin’s perspective, is he frames flow as being a finely tuned antennae for whatever is already there and getting really good at honing in on the signal. I think this is a really fantastic way of thinking about it. It’s not about changing the world, it’s about being really deliberate about how we engage with it.

5)Meditation

Yes I brought breathwork up earlier but I would be totally remiss to not at least touch on meditation. I know that meditation is pseudo-mainstream these days but I think it’s become the sort of thing we’ve all crammed on our to-do lists rather than something we actually perform habitually. I’m not necessarily an advocate of the 20 minute twice a day modality because frankly meditation is really fucking hard and trying to start off with that much is like throwing a new cyclist into the Tour De France. Instead of setting yourself up to be averse of meditation, I like to use it in short stints really as needed to achieve desired states. Instead of meditating for x minutes with some app, why not simply close your eyes and take a handful of conscious breaths? I know some people might say “that’s not really mediation” but my counterpoint is that for most of us being a contemplative mystic that does the thing right is not the point. The point is stress management, focus and centering allowing us to have improved judgment and performance. 20 minutes twice a day totally works if you can actually bring yourself to do it, but so does 2 minutes or 5 and so on. There is no magical number, it’s better to do what you can handle than screw yourself by doing too much too soon.

Whew… that ended up being a lot. Hope this was helpful, I’m experimenting to see if anyone actually likes this kinda nerdy shit so lemme know. Love to hear what you guys do to improve creativity. If you like stuff like this please consider punching in your email to get my content straight to your inbox. Thanks~