Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life

Elite athletes and other top performers use mental and physical rituals to prime themselves to begin. So do many creators. Rituals help settle down the conscious mind—the source of all resistance and distraction—and marshal our subconscious creative power.

No, a calling is an intuitive hint, a tug we experience when we’re doing something that feels right:

creativity is dangerous. All that energy has to go somewhere. It must be released through a regular creative practice. Bottled up, it can go critical, become toxic. Unexpressed, your creativity can poison your life.

The beauty of the path we walk is that no action is ever wasted—through all the twists and turns, you’re never truly lost no matter how far you’ve wandered. This is the nature of the creative process: It all matters.

There’s no such thing as creative people and non-creative people. There’s just people who use their creativity and people who don’t. And not using it doesn’t go without penalty. As it turns out, unused creativity is not benign, it’s dangerous.

Creators create. Action is identity. You become what you do.

Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn’t, it is of no use. . . . One makes for a joyful journey; as long as you follow it, you are one with it. The other will make you curse your life. One makes you strong; the other weakens you.

Creativity is a natural, life-sustaining, human function that is essential to our health and well-being. It’s as natural as breathing.

Creativity is the practice of combining or rearranging two or more unlikely things in new and useful ways. That’s it, though this simple definition has hidden depth.