The Creative Act: A Way of Being: The Sunday Times bestseller

There is no more valid metric to predict what someone else might enjoy than us liking it ourselves.

A rule is a way of structuring awareness.

The general principle is to be protective and limit people you’re working with from experiencing things that could interfere with their creative process. Limit the information to the barest of sketches. If you want creators to bring all of themselves to something, give them the most freedom to create. If you give a screenwriter a book, an outline,

If you tend to write in style x, it can be interesting to choose an artist who is the polar opposite of x. This doesn’t mean the song will be good. It’s just interesting to see where it leads. And sometimes it leads you right where you’re going. Like the other exercises, this can be applied to any craft. If you’re a painter, creating an original ne

Whatever the situation, if a task is challenging to accomplish, there’s often a way to design the surroundings to naturally encourage the performance you’re striving for.

The Beatles were inspired by American rock and roll, artists like Chuck Berry and the Shirelles. But when they played, it was different. It wasn’t different because they wanted it to be so. It was different because they were different. And the world responded. There are countless examples of imitation turning into legitimate innovation. Having a ro

Carl Rogers said, “The personal is the universal.”

Sometimes solutions to these difficult pieces will reveal themselves once the overall context has emerged. A bridge is easier to build when it’s clear what’s on either side of it.

Another challenge we might call demo-itis. Demo-itis happens when the artist has clung too tightly, for too long, to their first draft. The danger of living with the unfinished project for too long is that the more often an artist is exposed to a particular draft of a work, the more final that form can become in their mind. A musician might record