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

To quote Archimedes, give us a place to stand, and with this lever, we will move the world.

The first and most powerful step in reopening your creative channel isn’t learning a certain skill or uncovering a hidden talent. It’s just identifying—remembering, really—one important thing: YOU ARE CREATIVE.

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.

For whatever reason, you don’t have enough: talent, recognition, money, time, followers.

I still felt like a newcomer, an outsider, a fake.

Most of us don’t have a coach standing over us telling us when it’s time to throw in the towel and when we need to stand our ground. Without a single-minded focus, even obsession, it can be hard to justify spending time in the studio when you have a new baby at home, a work emergency, or a bad cold. The problem is, once you start prioritizing other

AMBITIOUS PRO. You identify as a serious, professional creator—even if your work isn’t your primary source of income—and you want to take your work and its public reception to the next level. STUCK CREATOR. You want to make work, but you’re not getting anywhere, whether because of conformity, economic pressure, or fear. You’re open to a creative re

Clearly, I needed to get into the pro scene to assemble the winning elements. Once I’d reached the aspirational locations, I’d find the top-tier athletes. Once I’d found the top-tier athletes, I’d have to connect with them somehow to capture one of them in action. That method of deconstructing what works into its component elements has been the key

worked steadily and published regularly. Pros go to work whether they’re inspired or not. They allow for imperfection in their work. They finish what they start. They share their work when it’s finished. The exceptions only prove the rule.

Traditional schooling irons out our creative impulses in order to prepare us for the factory and the cubicle. Our educational system was made this way with the best of intentions, but that way of operating is wildly obsolete.