It’s simple: you can’t stand out and fit in at the same time. If you never make anything, if you make only what you’re comfortable making, or if you make but you never share, you’re hiding. Once you start hiding, you stop growing. Part of you goes to sleep.

The only thing that matters is that you take action. Start creating. The burden of tamping down your creativity every minute of every day is exhausting. It makes you sick, sure—stress and anxiety have proven negative health consequences—but it also drains your soul.

And I learned that technically owning your code and intellectual property isn’t enough; you need to be able to put your hands on it.

I wrote this book to help you unlock a hidden part of yourself, a critical space sorely neglected in our culture. So many of us live our lives with a nagging sense that something important is missing.

When you create, you’re not just creating art or a product or a business, you’re creating possibilities.

Most of us have a gap in our lives between where we find ourselves and the life we actually want to be living. It’s time for you to look at that gap, acknowledge it, and then use your innate creative capacity to close it. Stop acting out someone else’s script and write your own: What do you want to make? More important, who do you want to be?

You can love your family. You can trust your friends. You can listen to their encouragement. You can hear their concerns. But in the end, you must decide what works for you. Your life is not a democracy.

Creativity requires risk, real risk—something has to be at stake for you. What you’re doing has to matter. Mistakes should hurt. All those bruised hips and scraped knees taught me how to ride a skateboard. If you know what the outcome will be before you start working or you don’t care what happens either way, where’s the lesson? Where’s the growth?

it’s the small risk taken to satisfy a creative whim that is more likely to lead to a real-world success than the triple-down, bet-the-house investment with some enormous hope at the other end of it.