In Which I Rage-Write About Writer’s Block Being a Real Thing

Please stop saying it doesn’t exist!

Special note: This was written after hearing a well-known and successful public creative say writer’s block doesn’t exist. I had an angry reaction to that opinion, and this essay was what came out. It’s full of strong feeling, and I’m publishing it as I wrote it because I think it makes an important statement. It is not meant to be some kind of hot take, nor is it meant to impugn on a personal level that specific person or other people who say stuff like this (that’s why I don’t name them). Ultimately I want to give them the benefit of the doubt, that they are simply trying to help people when they say writer’s block isn’t real. And I’m sure that does help some people. But not me, and in this essay I tell you why. For an extended and more benevolent version of this essay, listen to my podcast episode on dealing with writer’s block.

Over the years I’ve heard a number of writers and other creatives deny the existence of writer’s block. I think it’s wild people would do this. It’s demonstrably false, or put another way, there’s a preponderance of evidence that it does exist: most writers have at one time or another experienced a block, even if it’s for a short period of time. So why do we still have people going on record saying shit like this? Let’s break it down.

First, a definition of writer’s block, because it’s widely misunderstood. A mistake people make is that it means you can’t write a word. More likely it manifests as a feeling of having to force the writing, feeling uninspired and finding no joy in it, and dreading having to do it. Eventually this will lead to being unable to write. I’ve experienced this in both short and longer bursts. If you learn to identify it early, you can manage your block so that its duration is shorter. The causes are usually our own fears and insecurities about our writing, but sometimes other factors are involved: mental or physical illness, exhaustion or burnout, time-management challenges. And sometimes it’s a sign that writing just isn’t your thing, or that you’re writing novels when you should be doing screenplays.

I’ve heard people say writer’s block isn’t real because its origins are often psychological: “Writer’s block doesn’t exist, it’s just your fears and insecurities getting in the way.” This is akin to saying mental health challenges don’t actually exist because they’re psychological. Writer’s block is often a mental health challenge (mine is of this type). And this kind of statement is also offensive to people who struggle with brain chemistry-related depression who are blocked. To the people saying this kind of thing: stop right now. Your mental health privilege needs to be checked.

You’ll also hear people who deny writer’s block say stuff like, “I don’t allow myself to get writer’s block.” Okay, good for you. Again, check your mental health (or other) privilege. Choose your words more wisely, have some compassion for those who struggle. Your personal reality doesn’t elide the truth of other people’s lived experiences.

I get it that many people who say writer’s block is a myth are trying to help. And it may help a minority. But mostly it sounds shockingly misguided and patronizing. And I think many people who say this kind of thing are actually getting a dopamine hit from it: it reminds them how well they’re doing with their own writing, how they’ve “conquered” their own fears and insecurities and “mastered” self-discipline. In a culture that sees hard work as a moral virtue (and writing regularly is hard work), they get to feel very good about themselves, even hold themselves up generously as an example of what “anyone” can do if they put their mind to it and simply refuse to allow writer’s block to happen.

If you are one of the majority of writers who struggles with blocks, please understand that it’s totally normal and it’s real. There’s no need to deny the existence of writer’s block in order to deal with it. In fact, accepting that it happens, that it isn’t an implication of moral weakness or inherent laziness, will help you move through these periods faster. It’s okay to feel insecure about your writing, to fear failure. If you are struggling with mental health issues that hold you back, you have my compassion and understanding: me too. Sometimes we just need a break, that’s the honest truth. I find that taking short periods away from writing every month or so helps me maintain my enthusiasm over time.

If you are experiencing a longer period of writer’s block, my deepest sympathies. After I finished my PhD, my burnout was so severe I couldn’t write much of anything for two years. I endeavored, I made strides, but I couldn’t write. To those of you who maintain writer’s block isn’t real or crow about how you don’t “allow” it to happen to you, here’s what that sounds like to me: an invalidation of those heartbreaking two years of my life, of the struggle I encountered finding my way back to writing, and of the challenges I still face in managing my mental health while pursuing my creative dreams. Do you really want to imply that I am delusional when I have writer’s block, that I’m experiencing some kind of hysteria, or that I am simply lazy, that I lack the character necessary to be a “real” writer? Please attempt some kindness and compassion. The world certainly needs more of it, and you sound like an asshole.

Finding Your People Through Finding Your Arena

Instead of looking for your people, focus on what you love to do.

The quote in the photo is attributed to Maya Angelou.

Have you ever wondered how you’re supposed to find “your people,” whatever that means? I have. I’ve been lonely all my life. In fact, some of my first memories are of feeling lonely. If anyone needs to find their people, it’s me. Maybe you feel the same.

Maybe, like me, you’ve tried and failed your whole life to do just that. I’ve tried reaching out online, going to Meetups, attending services at churches with rainbow flags prominently displayed in front, and on and on. I’ve reached deep, challenged myself, put myself out there, just like my therapists said I should. And all for nothing. I never found my people that way.

Exasperated, hopeless, angry, I resigned myself to my loner-hermit existence. Some of us are just meant to be alone. It’s okay, I thought. I’m a misanthrope, what did I expect? I don’t like people and they don’t like me. Back to my cave. It’s cozy there. I get to write and live in my head, it’s all good. So I wrote and wrote, because that’s what I love to do, and I started putting stuff out on a blog.

And then something totally astonishing happened. I mean, this was really unexpected (love it when life throws a surprise at you!). People started reaching out to me. Turns out I had been doing it all wrong before. You don’t find your people through seeking out people. You find them by establishing yourself in your arena. I still like retreating to my cozy cave, but I can feel my community around me, and the more confident I grow in my arena, the less lonely I feel.

What do I mean by arena? This term comes from Brené Brown, and she got it from a speech Teddy Roosevelt gave in Paris in 1910. The gist of Roosevelt’s arena concept is this: when you are challenging yourself in an area of life that you deeply care about, facing the inevitable failures head on, falling down and getting up over and over, you will (and this is the part Brené adds) look around and see people in there fighting with you. These are your people.

Here is the part that I add to this concept: there is more than just one arena. Imagine a complex of arenas. Over that way there’s one where they’re creating medical breakthroughs. Look the other direction and you’ll see one where they’re ministering to the sick at heart. There’s one filled with jokers and comics, because we all need to laugh sometimes. There are arenas for people who really like knitting, or parenting, or scuba diving, or playing video games. And somewhere in there is your arena. That’s what you need to find, because inside you’ll find your people.

So how do you find your arena? To some extent, it’s about experimentation. I tried the academia arena, it wasn’t for me, but I gave it a go. I tried the Washington, DC arena, and while I really enjoyed being in the midst of all the excitement, that wasn’t for me, either. I tried the internet startup arena, nope. I tried the corporate arena, NOPE. I tried the arenas of community involvement and volunteering, and while I appreciate my time spent there, ultimately they’re not for me, either.

My arena is writing about ideas. I’ve always known that, but sometimes you have to venture out and apprentice yourself to life before you circle back around. In the parlance of the current era, I’m a content creator. I research, I think, I analyze, I imagine, I write. And I put that stuff out into the world through my blog and podcast. This is my joy. I never tire of doing it (or rarely), I never have a paucity of things to write or talk about, it gives me life. In this arena, I feel confident of my belonging. I don’t worry about whether or not I’m good enough; I just keep doing what I love and enjoying myself.

That’s the feeling you should be looking for. You’ll know you’ve found your arena when you are so energized and engaged by what you’re doing that you’re prepared to face the inevitable failures. You’re able to see them as part of the privilege of being there. Now, at the beginning you may still lack that self-confidence, and we all grapple with insecurity now and again, but you’ll feel that urge inside of yourself that pushes you forward. Maybe you start at the edges of the arena, and you look at the people there at the center, and you wonder if you belong.

Just keep doing what you love to do, and eventually you’ll be there at the center. And your people will be all around you.

Why I Gave Up on Ambition

The question to ask is, does ambition make us unhappy?

“So what are your long-term goals?” she asked me. “Where do you see yourself in two years, in five?”

I was interviewing for a position at a DC-based think tank. I answered, “I don’t really think about the future. I don’t care that much.”

“Well, I guess that’s…refreshing,” she said after a pause. I could tell from her expression that she did not actually find it refreshing at all, but flippant. Who was this lazy-ass person wasting her time, was what she was thinking.

Okay, the truth is I didn’t have the guts to say anything like that. I don’t remember my answer, but I’m sure I said something along the lines of “I have exciting ideas about contributions I want to make and a progressive career path blah blah blah.” After all, I used to believe that’s how I was supposed to think. Plans, goals, up and at ‘em. I used to have an ego about these things: I was going to make something of my life. I pursued an important career because I thought that’s what smart and talented people who have the privilege of opportunity do. I worked hard, too hard. I burned out.

When you live in a culture that worships ambition and the attendant hard work it requires, it can feel so wrong to say “I’m not ambitious.” But I’ve been thinking that maybe, just maybe, ambition can be damaging. During the years I had ambition, I was unhappy. I never felt like I was achieving enough. There was always something more I needed before I could finally feel like I’d arrived. I always felt like I wasn’t getting enough appreciation or recognition for my contributions. I worked so hard all the time, exhausting myself, and the rewards that accrued to me weren’t satisfying or fulfilling.

What an awful way to live. Now, I do think many ambitious people find satisfaction going that route. They must, because they keep doing things that way. They like the chase, the big dreams, the thrill of expectation that there’s always more to be had. But I found that kind of life hollow and exhausting. Happiness and fulfillment were always out there on the horizon, never right here right now.

The problem with ambition, see, is that it can make us believe that more is needed to feel satisfied, and it draws our focus away from the small moments in the here-and-now that are the true measure of happiness. Gratitude and mindfulness practices are popular because they draw us back to these present moments. But what if you lived in those moments permanently? What if in each moment you felt like you had what you needed, you felt whole, settled, and at ease? What would a life comprised of many such moments look like? Would you cease to achieve anything? Would life lose its luster when you aren’t feeling excited about all the things the future will give you?

Does giving up on ambition mean you’ll become a lazy couch potato whose biggest achievement today is putting on some pants?

Not at all. In fact, you may end up achieving even more. You’ll be focused on expending your time and energy on the things that fulfill you in the moment, which will have the effect of creating momentum in your life, and that can lead to big things. You’ll probably find that these big things begin to almost happen on their own, with comparatively little effort on your part, because you’ll be excited about the stuff you’re doing right now and that will give you the right kind of energy to tackle the challenges that come your way.

Here are some of thing things I’ve accomplished since I started living my life for the small here-and-now moments: I finished a novel (after 15 years of failing to do so); started a weekly podcast; been consistent with writing a weekly blog post. During the ambitious phase of my life I got a PhD, but here’s what I was actually doing: waking up dreading the day; doing all the things I “should” be doing, often to the bare minimum of acceptable standards; climbing back into bed exhausted and mourning the loss of another day that wasn’t satisfying or happy. Oh, and drinking to anesthetize myself, let’s not forget that part.

As soon as I gave up on big ambitions and began to focus on enjoying the moment, that’s when stuff started happening for me. I felt momentum, excitement, fulfillment. And yes, happiness. I’m not without dreams for myself, but I practice detaching from outcome. The future can, and will, take care of itself. The power to effect change in our lives lies in acting in the current moment, and leaving the future open to possibility.

How to Stop Performing and Show Up as You Are

It’s a practice, not a goal (isn’t that true of everything?).

When we’re showing up in the public spaces of the online world as creators and/or entrepreneurs, it’s easy to believe we need to perform. Public spaces are performative spaces (this is true of IRL spaces too!). A lot of people are playing parts; many treat it like a game. And that’s fine: it’s one way to be and you can find success that way. But for those of us who have an aversion to being performative (INFPs in particular hate it, and INFJs find it equally challenging but for different reasons), that kind of interaction leads to misery and burnout.

Unfortunately, we rarely feel that we are good enough just as we are. We operate on the assumption that performance of some kind is required for us to be accepted/acceptable.

It sucks to always feel like you have to be more or better to deserve your place at the table, doesn’t it?

What if it were as easy and simple as just showing up? Let’s say you’re invited to a potluck dinner. What if all you had to do was show up in whatever way naturally occurred? Straight from the gym, sweaty and tired. With some chicken McNuggets you only bought because you happened to drive by a McDonald’s and thought, why not, it’s convenient.

What if you sat at the table with everyone else and didn’t say a word all night because you’re tired and nothing worth saying came to mind? What if you got up halfway through, made your apologies, and left because you’d reached your sensory input limit?

What if all that was totally fine, and you didn’t have to worry at all about what people would think, whether they would still like you and invite you back?

Maybe you have friends like this, whose only desire is to have you there at the table, in whatever way you are able to show up. But when it comes to participating in a wider community, especially when we’re putting our work out into the world as creatives, things can feel very inhospitable. It’s easy to get caught up in beliefs about how we need to show up.

We need to be peppy, flashy, and outgoing.

We need to be attractive.

Our work needs to be on point, of excellent quality, engaging.

We need to speak to the zeitgeist (just speaking our truth isn’t enough).

All of these are really the same thing. They’re statements about how we need to be more and better to deserve our place at the table. We need to perform for our dinner. Last-minute chicken McNuggets aren’t going to cut it. Having a quiet night when we just don’t want to have to talk won’t get us a repeat invite.

I’m not going to lie. Those of us who are reserved, shy, introverted, and socially anxious are disadvantaged in some ways. But we have one major advantage, which is ironically the very thing that is also our disadvantage: our inclination toward authentic interaction. If we could just find a way to let go of all the pressure we put on ourselves to perform, to be in certain ways, we could relax into just being ourselves no matter how that manifests.

But how? Like most aspects of the creative life, this is a practice, not a goal. We may never get to a point where we are completely indifferent to how people react to us, but we can practice every day and get better over time. It does get easier, but only if you practice.

Here’s how I do it. It’s not anything fancy, not some brilliant hack. It’s just some basic steps. Step one is finding situations where simply showing up is enough, because this shows you what it feels like. Places where you are not called on to perform anything, and you are able to get a glimmer of what it would feel like to not be pressuring yourself all the time to be something else. You may find this in a relationship, a friend group, or an online community.

Step two is reminding yourself over and over (and over and over) that it doesn’t matter if you’re “doing it wrong.” Remind yourself of this as much as needed in places where you don’t feel as accepted, where that pressure to be more arises within you. Remind yourself that what you naturally have to offer is enough.

Step three is embracing doing it wrong. Turn that wrong into your right. After all, who’s to say it’s either wrong or right? Who has that authority? No one. Or put another way, you have as much authority as anyone else to decide what’s right (for you). Believe me when I say that it is exactly those areas where you feel you’re doing it wrong that people need to hear about!

So what if you don’t know what you naturally have to offer? What if you’ve been performing for so long, you’re a blank when it comes to who you really are? This is step four, and figuring it out is an emergent property of the practice. It will happen gradually as you learn to release the pressure you have been putting on yourself. You may be pleasantly surprised at what you discover.

What Would Betty White Say?

It’s never too late to achieve your creative dreams.

I can’t emphasize this enough: it’s not too late for you. You’re turning 40 soon and still haven’t written that novel? Not too late. Turning 60 and still haven’t written it? Not too late. In your 70s and thinking to yourself, why bother now?

What would Betty White say? I think you know what she would say.

It’s not too late for you.

Here’s something I like to say: late bloomers bloom the brightest. Why? All kinds of reasons. You can probably think of a few yourself. I’m not going to list any here because my intention with this post is different. I’m here to tell you not only that being a late bloomer is awesome—better than being an early bloomer!—but also that we all have the capacity to be late bloomers, regardless of whether we already bloomed early.

That’s because what we all are is repeat bloomers. We are perennials, not annuals. We are meant to live out many iterations of blooming throughout the length of our stay here on earth. We excel at reinventing ourselves if we give ourselves permission to do that regardless of age.

You want to be a painter at 50? Go do that. Learn classical guitar? Do it. Make the rest of your life the brightest blooming part of it.

Never stop blooming.

Get Friendly With Your Ultradian Rhythm

Learning to trust our intuitive preferences is essential.

Back in the olden days when I thought that being a “real” writer meant developing certain specific writing habits and hitting explicit targets like word count, an author I admired did an interview about her work routine. She said that when she finally decided to get serious about writing, she committed herself to writing four hours a day. For a long time, much longer than I like to admit, I thought that four hours a day was what you had to put in to be a real writer. But now I understand that’s bullshit.

I think that four hours is too much time to dedicate to writing. To any single task. And while it may work for that particular author, in general trying to remain focused that long is not only difficult but can actually be harmful. This is because humans operate in accordance with an ultradian rhythm. You have no doubt heard of the circadian rhythm that governs each 24-hour day. The ultradian rhythm governs our biological functions throughout the day in 90-minute increments. For example, when we sleep we cycle in and out of REM sleep on an ultradian rhythm. Our ultradian rhythm also governs how long we can focus deeply on any particular task before our brains give out.

Before I learned about ultradian rhythms, I thought something was wrong with me that I only seem to be able to sit down and write for about an hour, hour and a half max. The thought of writing for four hours straight seems nuts to me. I suppose in rare cases I could power through such a session if I had to (I’ve never had to, even when writing my dissertation), and I don’t doubt that some people like working in longer sessions. But most of us will only be able to do around 90 minutes of focused work before we fade (and that’s an average—my ultradian intervals seem to be around 60 minutes; some people’s may be closer to two hours).

If you pay attention, you’ll be able to pinpoint the exact moment that brain fade happens. Your brain basically says, “Yep, I’ve had enough now.”

Learning to stop when that happens is essential to developing a sustainable writing habit (or any other kind of habit), because it allows you to rest and regenerate before you’re entirely depleted. As I’ve talked about recently on my podcast, it can take a lot longer to recover from burnout than it would have taken for you to rest and regenerate in order to avoid it. While it’s possible to power through in the short term, you’re harming your chances of being able to sustain your motivation over the long term.

Many people can only do one ultradian period of highly focused work in a day. But I find it’s possible to do two or more periods of around 60+ minutes as long as I make sure to rest during (learning how to strategically use procrastination and distraction can help) and between. I use these periods for creative work. Other activities in my life, such as admin work and household chores, don’t require that kind of focused energy, so I intersperse that stuff in between my creative sessions. And of course I also schedule copious amounts of rest and rejuvenation periods, which include taking walks, watching TV, or journaling.

I find that chunking my daily life according to a loose ultradian rhythm feels natural and relaxing. It just makes sense in some deep way—because it makes biological, physiological sense. Throughout the night I usually wake up around every 90 minutes (particularly in the first half), and I no longer view that as indicating I’m doing sleep wrong. I’m just cycling out of an ultradian interval.

Learning about the ultradian rhythm made me realize just how important trusting my intuitive preferences is. I’ve always naturally found myself doing writing sessions of 60 to 90 minutes; it’s what feels good to me. I could have saved myself years of angst if I’d just accepted that as how much I need to work. Instead, I felt bad about myself, tried to force more. How many other intuitive behaviors do we have that we don’t accept and learn to work with because culture tells us they’re wrong? If we paid attention to what feels good to us and let that guide us, we’d probably find that life starts to feel a whole lot better. And we may even end up getting more done, because we’re working with our energy cycles, not against them.  

Why Do We Talk So Much About Goals?

It’s okay to not have goals.

Have you ever noticed how much we talk about goals in our culture? From new year’s resolutions to aspirational advertising, we live in a very future-oriented, acquisition-based, improvement-obsessed paradigm. We rarely question the assumption that we need goals. But do we?

The problem with a goals mindset is that it orients us permanently toward the future. We are always thinking about the arrival. Achievement, satisfaction, even happiness all exist in the space where the goal is realized. But of course when we get there, we realize there are ever more goals. It never ends. There’s always more to do, always more to get. There’s nothing wrong with having ideas about where we’re headed, nothing wrong with dreams. But if we’re regimenting our lives around goals, we risk neglecting the quality of our lives.

Is this the case for you? Only you can decide if it is, and what that means to you, but if the space of your day is taken up by how much you can get done, and you find yourself exhausted, dissatisfied, and experiencing existential terror as the years tick by and you still haven’t found purpose or fulfillment, you may want to examine your relationship with goals and their associated outcomes.

Consider that you may not want what you think you do.

I used to have a big dream for myself. I wanted to get a novel published. And I failed. It devastated me. I wasn’t able to write another novel for fifteen years. Now I’m on the road to publication again, but I’m going about it differently. While I nominally have a goal of publishing my novel, I recognize that what I really want is how I imagine publishing will make me feel. Like I’ve arrived, like I’m a real writer.

It's okay to want those feelings. But it’s important to recognize that publishing isn’t the only, or even the best, way to get them. And letting a goal dictate how you feel about yourself is a dangerous game. The world is full of stories of middle-aged folks having crises because the things they thought they wanted didn’t make them feel happy or fulfilled.

I only started feeling like I was a real writer, like I’d arrived, when I started taking myself seriously despite any goal and achievement thereof. This is what brings fulfillment and eventual happiness: the ability to find value in the self for how you live rather than in what you achieve. Achievements are nice but they’re icing. When you live based on a clear understanding that it’s the feelings around achievement that you are actually craving, you can begin to look for other, smaller ways in your daily life to attain those.

Here's what that looks like in reference to my example of wanting to feel like a real writer: I write as much as I can, I regularly put stuff out on a blog while I toil away at the larger project of my novel, I insist on seeing myself as a real writer and describing myself as such. Together all this adds up to a feeling of arrival. What about publishing my novel? I still really want that! But I feel good about the journey now, as challenging as it can sometimes be. That’s a big win.

Goals talk is only just talk because that’s what it’s supposed to be.        

We all know go-getter types who actually do set goals and achieve them, as if they’re part machine, but most people we know probably spend more time talking about their goals than they do actually achieving them. We’re probably a bit like that ourselves. Most of us use goals talk to feel like we’re doing goals. Imagining accomplishing our goals feels like we’re actually doing it in the moment. But the come-down is that later we feel awful when we don’t accomplish them. It’s a bit like a drug reaction. But if we understand that this is what goals can do for us, give us a chance to test out ideas and have good feelings in the moment, we can have fun goals talk without the hangover.

I’ve learned over time that goal setting is best done sparingly, if at all. My quality of life is higher without them. As I point out above, this doesn’t mean living without any idea of the direction I’m headed. But I no longer use a goal setting methodology (visualize outcome, create steps for achievement, feel bad when things aren’t going well, consider it a failure if I don’t realize the goal…). Instead I focus on how I want each day to feel. Sometimes I want to feel busy and accomplished, and sometimes I just want to sink into an endless peaceful moment. Then I find activities that go with those feelings. Somehow the stuff that needs to get done gets done. Most of the time haha.

Doubling Down on Creativity in Difficult Times

Make your creative practice sacred.

When life gets busy and we’re stressed out and exhausted, what are some of the first things we jettison? You’d think it would be what’s causing us so much anxiety, but no, we double down on those things. If we just work harder, faster, more, we’ll get things right and life will feel good again. It’s the pleasurable activities we jettison: our hobbies, our leisure time. Let me just get through this busy period, we think, and then I’ll have time for the fun stuff.

I’ll have time this weekend to write. I’ll have the energy then. Maybe.

I want to wait until I have the space to really focus on my music. Next month after all these deadlines, then I’ll be able to really dedicate myself to it. Maybe.

My new year’s resolution is going to be to spend more time painting. Next year is going to be my year. Maybe.

How many weeks, months, and years have gone by like this? Life always gets in the way somehow, doesn’t it? And meanwhile we still don’t feel creatively fulfilled or like we’re fulfilling our potential. I’ll get to it when life doesn’t feel so hard, we promise ourselves. Except life always feels hard.

I spent years of my life making promises to myself that I’d finally finish a novel, and I never did. Until I realized something about creativity that changed everything for me. Creativity isn’t a luxury. It’s not something we have to wait until we are free and clear of life difficulties so we have the space and time to do it. Creativity is the way through difficulties. We have evolved the capacity for creativity because it’s how we move through challenge.

Think about it. Which of our ancestors were more likely to survive existential threats? Often it was probably the ones who were willing to get creative. Creative thinking has been selected for throughout the evolution of human beings. Creativity isn’t something that is gifted on some and not others. It’s a type of cognition and energy we can all tap into that can lead us through difficult times in life if we trust it.

Instead of waiting for the space and time for creativity, we can use creativity to make time and space for ourselves. The key is to find a creative practice that is generative for you (energy-producing rather than energy-draining), and use it as a way to heal and regenerate from the daily traumas of life. When you hear people talking about creative practice as sacred or spiritual, this is what they mean. It is a way to step away from ordinary, stressful life and reestablish your connection to your inner peace and joy. This is creative practice as sabbath, or as a meditation or mindfulness practice. It is creativity as refuge.

It sounds good, but perhaps isn’t easy to put into practice, right? Like any habit, in the beginning it requires a little pushing, but not in the form of a grand plan or schedule. Not in the form that has failed in the past: I’ll carve out some time this weekend, next month, next year. I’ll put in fifteen minutes a day, starting Monday. The problem with plans is that they always start in the future. Plans are thoughts, not action. And when you make a plan for something that is in actuality quite a tricky thing to establish as a habit, there is going to be a high failure rate.

The secret to having a creative practice is to do it now. That’s right. Why not now? But you have all this stuff you have to get done…. Do you, though? Right now, this instant? Do you have five minutes? That’s enough to start. Make a doodle. Write three sentences. Sing something. Then go do those things you feel you have to do, and let the knowledge that you just experienced something creative, sacred, all your own go with you as you continue through your day.

That’s your start. Do it again the next time you think about being creative. How about now? Be creative now. Let that part of yourself lead you through a few minutes of special space and time that is your secret little sabbath-in-the-middle-of-the-day.    

Change Your Future by Switching Out This One Word

The difference between “look” and “feel.”

So I know that’s a bit of a dramatic title. But this one little trick really can make a huge difference in your life if you let it. First, though, let me ask you a question.

Do you remember what you wanted your grownup life to look like when you were a kid?

I love asking people that question, because you get the most diverse answers. One of my friends told me she doesn’t remember having any specific dreams about the future. Another said she wanted to be a professional thinker (hey, me too!).

We are often asked to visualize our futures. It’s almost a cliché that at some point you’ll be asked where you see yourself in six months, a year, five years. Our perspective of the future is very conceptual. We are encouraged to think about what we want it to look like, in order to set goals we can then work toward.

What if instead we asked ourselves what we want our future to feel like?

To do this effectively, we need to eliminate all visual aspects of our answer. Our first reaction to this question is probably to imagine a situation, thing, or person we think will make us happy. Try cutting out the visual. Close your eyes and go into your body and ask it how it likes to feel. Pay attention to your body’s response when you ask it what feeling good is like.

For me, feeling good is a lightening and lifting in my chest, like I’m uncurling from a fetal position and throwing out my arms to embrace the sky, sun warm on my face. That’s how I want my life to feel like.

Now comes the challenging part. It’s tempting to want to embed your desired feeling back into a visual picture of all the stuff that’s going to make you feel that way. Resist this temptation! Nothing’s wrong with wanting things, but we’re trying to work a little mental magic here, so we need to de-link our desired feeling from our conceptualized futures. Instead, think about the things in your life that make you feel the way you want to feel now.

For me, it’s when I’m authentically who I am online in a way that leads to genuine connection with others. Or when I’m reading, researching, thinking, or writing. Or when I’m being my natural, unguarded and un-boundaried self with my dogs.

Now comes the easier part. Keep doing the things that make you feel the way you want to feel. Do them more. Do them every day. Find more things that make you feel that way. After a while, you’ll discover you attach your happiness less and less to the stuff you think you want, and more and more to the things you’re actually doing. You’ll have learned how to be in the moment rather than the imagined future.

But we still need or at least want goals, right? It’s difficult to live 100% in the present moment. Most of us are working toward something in life most of the time. Let’s take a look at how we can rewrite goals so they put us into the present moment rather than that imagined future.

Here are some of the things I think about when I am imagining what I want my life to look like:

• Thousands of Instagram followers.

• Money coming in.

• More friends.

When we switch out that one little word, go from look to feel, it changes how we see things. Here are some things I think about when I am focused on what I want my life to feel like:

• Having fun making dorky TikTok videos.

• Challenging myself to develop a business that fits into a creative model rather than trying to fit my creativity into a business model.

• Meaningful connection with other creatives who are putting their work out there.

See the difference? The second list of goals is both more specific and focused on how I feel. It is oriented around values such as having fun, challenging myself, and creating meaning for myself and others. Plus, these are all things that are already a part of my life. By doing this exercise, I’m learning how to value what I already have and training myself to focus on my feelings rather than acquisitions. This frees up my mind to find other creative and fun ways to continue to feel good about my life.

It takes practice to change how you think about your future, but if you work at it you’ll get to a place where you realize your happy future has arrived, and you’re already living it! 

Movement as Part of Creative Practice

Physical activity is the flip side of the coin to creative work.

I’ve noticed that the most creative people I know have a physical activity that they regularly practice. I know musicians who run, writers who do yoga, visual artists who hike. I personally love to take walks. When I ask my coaching clients to describe how their creative practice fits into their life, many talk about their physical exercise as something that is at odds with their creative practice. Exercise is often a priority for them because of its physical and mental health benefits, but they don’t generally see it as directly related to their creative practice. I encourage them to see physical activity as a part of their creative practice, the flip side of the coin to doing dedicated creative work.

The reason so many creative people have a physical practice is that movement actually makes you more creative. Most people don’t consciously understand this connection. They may think that the elevated mood generated by exercise is conducive to getting their creative work done, because it’s easier to do stuff when you’re feeling good. But actually, this isn’t the reason exercise enhances your creativity. That endorphin high from exercise is a parallel benefit to enhanced creativity but is not causally related to it. The exercise itself is what makes you more creative.

Creatives through the ages have used physical activity as a component of their creative practice, even if they do not explicitly frame it as such. The American Transcendentalist writers Emerson and Thoreau were well-known for their lengthy nature walks. Thoreau walked, or “sauntered,” as he called it, for at least four hours a day. He identified it as a spiritual practice, but the way he saw spirituality is very much how we see creativity today: as an understanding of life that arises as we gaze through the lens of our inner selves at the outside world. The Transcendentalist perspective emerged in part as a reaction to the development of empirical science that posited that the world can only be known through our observations of the material realm.

The Transcendentalists understood that an intuitive experience of the world is essential to the flourishing of the creative soul. Thoreau intentionally used his sauntering habit as a way to harmonize his body and mind and thus elicit creative thinking. In fact, he did not believe that a mind could be properly inspired unless the body was, too*, making physical activity both advantageous for and integral to creative thought.

Ironically, empirical science now backs that up. Numerous studies have shown the benefits exercise has on creative thinking (this NYT article has a good summation of them). However, some types of physical activity do serve creativity better than others. It is not a coincidence that creatives generally prefer solitary or semi-solitary types of exercise: running, yoga, hiking. Team sports, where your mind is engaged with the other players around you and the strategy of the game, are not conducive to creative thought because they focus your mind too much on the outward circumstances of the game. The goal with a physical activity as part of your creativity practice is to soothe your mind into a state where its subconscious cognitive processes switch on. These are where creativity is born and develops. Thoreau saw this method of unfocused yet guided cognition as thinking with “carelessness.”†

I encourage you to see your physical activities as part of your creative practice. Even activities like gardening count. The only requirement is that they be the type of activity that doesn’t require too much active focus on your part, so that you can give your brain the space to activate its subconscious, intuitive thought processes. Creativity thrives when we expand our perception of what counts as creative work. It’s not just the moments we sit down and start doing our creative work. There is so much that goes on behind the scenes in our brains to make those moments of “performance” possible, and you will reap the benefits if you give your brain the space and time it needs to fully access its creative potential. Integrating your physical activities into your perception of what comprises creative practice is one way to do this.

*This and other insights related to Thoreau were inspired by David C. Smith, 1991, “Walking as Spiritual Discipline: Henry Thoreau and the Inward Journey” in Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 74:1/2, 129-140. You can find the article here. It is not open access, but you can sign up to the database (JSTOR) using your personal email and read up to 100 articles a month for free.

† Ibid., 134.

Interlude: What I Do When I'm Just Not Feeling It

Instead of pushing through, pivot.

You know those weeks that are an almost-comical series of awful and exhausting things? I’ve just had one of them. The blog post I was trying to write, well, it’s just not done. I could push through, put it up, but I wouldn’t feel good about it. I haven’t said all the things I want to say in it yet. It needs more time to develop.

This desire to give it more time clashes with my equally strong desire to be consistent about putting up a new blog post here every Friday. And for all the time I’ve been writing this blog, this is the first week I’ve ever felt this conflict. I’m sure it won’t be the last, though!

The usual response to this type of thing is to push through, right? I’ve made a commitment to putting up a weekly blog post. And while there will undoubtedly be weeks when I do have a good excuse for not following through, this doesn’t feel like one of them. But I’m equally committed to not forcing myself when I feel resistance turn into that particular brand of anxiety known as dread. And I’ve been feeling that this week.

I’ve written about how I believe creativity should be enjoyable. Not all the time, but most of the time. There are two reasons for this. One, if it’s not enjoyable, eventually you’ll be forcing yourself through it every time, and that’s neither sustainable nor conducive to doing your best work. Two, if it’s not enjoyable, what’s the point? Creativity is what makes my life feel like it’s worth living. It’s what gets me out of bed every morning. For me, it has to be enjoyable.

You can see my conundrum. Do I fail at my deeply held belief that creativity should not be forced, and finish that blog post even if it feels awful? Or should I fail at following through on my commitment to my readers to have a weekly blog post up on Friday?

I finally realized that this perspective was too either/or. It was so constrictive and uninspiring that it was depressing me. What was the third option here? I thought about what is exciting me right now. My fiction. This summer I’m trying to finish the third draft of my novel, The Gentle History. This is a big deal, because it will be the first finished draft of a novel I’ve been able to complete in 15 years. And I’m loving the process, which is itself also a big deal (my attempts to finish novels in the past only led to misery because I was - you guessed it - forcing things).

So I decided that this week in lieu of my typical blog post, I would post some excerpts of my novel. Will people want to read them? Maybe, maybe not. That’s not the point. The point is, I feel excited about it, and it has allowed me to continue to be in touch with my creative flow of inspiration even in an impossible week. It gives me a way of honoring my goal of putting up a weekly post, and it’s a way of sharing my process, which is also something I’m committed to. So many boxes ticked!

Sharing excerpts from a novel is challenging, because novels are longform, and excerpts are short. So these are really more vignettes, in no particular order, that give a feel for the novel.

The Gentle History a novel about a woman who discovers she drowned as a child. It best fits into the genres of literary slipstream, dark psychological, and mystery/thriller.

Draft 3; excerpts.

Sometimes I get flashes in my mind of geometric shapes sliding together, gone so fast that what I sense are afterglows, more a feeling of something visual; apparition. I wonder if they are brief revelations of the inner workings of my mind. Not its organic workings, but the way it perceives how the world fits together. Angles and planes, points and ledges, moving across and over each other, merging, folding, subsuming.

The way yesterday slides under today. Then today bends and buckles at its own horizon, and yesterday emerges again. Yesterday contracts, lengthening into a line that arrows forward in a loop that comes back around to pierce the center of a disc that is another day.

I am a single point that sometimes becomes a line and sometimes a spiral. I spin under the water, a whirlpool, I come up as a wave. I can’t remember what I remember. So I start back at the beginning.

It was dark, and I was alone.

*

When I struggle up through layers of hangover-laced sleep and open my eyes to the pitch black of my basement apartment, I can believe that this is some strange afterlife or purgatory. The house phone’s ringing upstairs. It rings and rings, stops, then begins again and seemingly again and again. Or maybe this happened over the space of days. Or all at once, just one everlasting ringing. I close my eyes on it all.

Later, I pad to the bathroom, the glow of my laptop on my bed my guiding light, keeping the door open so I can pee without turning on the overhead bulb. Then I turn on my coffee maker, which I miraculously stocked at some point so it’s ready. Coffee, a bit of milk from a fridge with the inside bulb screwed out - I find the milk by feel - and I’m back on my bed, leaning on a stack of pillows propped up against the wall, laptop on my thighs. I go straight to the Bandits & Bureaucrats webpage to see if there are any new pictures from the weekend gig.

Paige has a kickass life, she somehow made it and I didn’t. The thing is, I was always ok with that, or I think I was. She was the one who couldn’t handle things. She acted like I was jealous of her success with music and all her cool music friends, but I wasn’t. Things just started getting dark for me. I was less and less of a real person, and she took it personally. At least I think that’s what happened. But I’m not sure, sometimes I’m so utterly confused by it all.

Bandits & Bureaucrats have gotten pretty big in Philadelphia. Paige plays the cello, which makes the band stand out. I’ve never been much into music, but I liked going to Paige’s gigs. Cello is definitely my favorite instrument. I can’t stand violin, it’s too high-pitched, but cello is in the right vibrational zone for me.

Tonight there are some new pictures of their Saturday night gig. Paige sits in a purple-pink haze at the left of the stage, wrapped around her cello. Her expression is what it always is when she’s playing, serious and lost-in-it, eyes gazing at things the rest of us can’t see. In one photo she holds her bow at the ready, head cocked to one side. Her brown hair is pulled back, her face sheened with rose from the lights. She’s beautiful. I mean, really.

No, I was never jealous of her when we were still friends. I’m jealous of her now, though. All the photos of her and the band, her husband, other friends who show up here and there, all people I know but not on my own, outside of Paige…it makes me feel sick. But still I look. I want to see.

*

Minutes pass, or don’t pass. The river moves. A light in an apartment across the way comes on and is extinguished almost immediately. Another light, this time left on for an indeterminate time. I don’t notice when it goes off, only that it is no longer on. The river moves some more. I have another mini vodka, and then one more. It’s the hour of nothing, the empty hour between three and four in the morning. The space between the end and the beginning. My time. It just feels so good to sit here alone in the dark office, drinking, watching the river and the apartments across the way.

Then, there’s something in the water. It floats along near to the shore and catches in some debris. It’s large and lengthy, and it takes my brain some time to catch up with what my eyes are telling it. It looks like a person, possibly face down, what seems like its head bobbing against the debris it’s caught up in. The leg end floats wide, circles, dislodges the head, and it continues its slow float past the office. I stand, peering at it until it disappears under the bridge a few hundred feet down the river.

In this empty hour, I’m not sure I’ve seen what I think I have. Across the way, the condos are all dark now except for one, where there’s a blue flickering from a tv. I stare at it, idly trying to discern a pattern to its intermittent flash, and wondering what I should do. Was it really a body? It could have been a log, it could have been a long cushion or piece of foam – hell, it could have been just a bunch of trash traveling en masse down the watery avenue. Why had I assumed it was a person, a dead person? Now, in retrospect, it seems quite obvious that it wasn’t. I sit again and scoot the chair up to the desk, eyeing the phone. I could call it in, but if it was a dead body, does it matter if I do? There’s no one to save here. I quail at the thought of speaking to a 911 dispatcher. I’ve never called 911 before, and assume they will want me to stay here to speak with the police about what I saw. I clearly can’t do that, they might smell alcohol on me. I really can’t be sure, after all, that I really saw a dead body. It was dark, the lights along the river are not strong enough to illuminate details. More and more I am convinced what I saw was nothing more than trash, an illusion of a body.

“Dammit,” I whisper. I turn on the computer and log on. Can I send an email about it? I do a quick online search. Doesn’t look like it. There is a phone tip line. I could probably call it in anonymously.

But even doing that, for something that is increasingly vague in my mind, feels like too much. I’d be wasting their time, calling. Now I don’t even know if I saw anything at all. I could just be having flashbacks of a dream from last night, or something that came from my subconscious. It’s already gone, a phantom, another lost memory.

The Difference Between Becoming More vs. Less of Who You Are

What if we leaned into the stuff that’s “wrong” about us?

One of the most intriguing aspects of modern culture is our deeply ingrained belief that we must continually be working on improving ourselves. There’s always something we need to work on. Better time management, less lazy. More veggies, fewer bowls of pasta. This work never ends. Some of this has to do with capitalism – most of the things we buy aren’t necessities, they’re to improve ourselves and our lives. Self-improvement is big business and a ubiquitous advertising technique. And some of our obsession with self-improvement is a consequence of reaching a level of wealth where we have leisure time to spend on it. But I believe part of it is that we are afraid being ourselves. Think about it. Most of the self-improvement we are called to do involves becoming less of who we are, not more. Like there’s some kind of magical state of moderation of the personality, where our “good” traits at least equal if not outweigh our “bad.” And we apply this to our lives, too, where we are always trying to balance out or overload the productive/good side of the scale.

When our work begins to drain us and we feel such dread about it that our productivity falls, what is our response? To try harder, stay later, feel bad about ourselves. When we slack off on our exercise routine because life is calling us to focus on other things right now, what is our response? To try harder, bleed more moments from the day and more energy from our muscles, and feel bad about ourselves.

Let’s try a more amorphous type of dissatisfaction. What if you feel like something’s just not right with your life, you’re not sure what, but you are plagued by a constant sensation that there’s more out there for you. But you have a good job, many privileges, and you’re cognizant of that. What do you do?

If you’re like many of my clients, this is what you do: tell yourself you should be grateful for what you have, that something’s wrong with you for not being able to be satisfied with it, and you try harder, stay later, bleed more moments from the day and more energy from your soul, and feel bad about yourself.

But what if the answer is to step further into all the stuff we feel guilty about? Yes, you have privilege. But you’re still unhappy. That’s okay! It’s allowed! Step into that. You can appreciate your privilege but you don’t have to feel grateful for stuff that makes you feel like shit. Got it?

What about this one. You got a degree, maybe even multiple degrees, for a certain type of job. You invested time, money – maybe even other people’s money – in them. Then you get the job. You don’t like it. It drains you to the extent that your life feels dull, gray, and perhaps full of dread. What do you do?

Do you tell yourself that there are things you do like about the job, that you appreciate this or that aspect, that it’s a good job and you’re grateful for it? Do you expend major energy convincing yourself that you can like it enough to keep doing it, because after all it’s what you’ve trained for?

What if the answer is to step into your dislike? What if you stopped punishing yourself into “liking” your job and just decided you’re going to be honest about what you hate about it? What if you let yourself feel the full extent of your antipathy toward what you are forcing yourself to do every day? What if you let yourself stop feeling grateful?

Your life would stop being so dull and gray, that’s for sure. And you’d realize that you probably have to do something about your situation, that it’s not okay to just exist in it and keep going for as long as you can until you burn out completely. Things would become a bit clearer. And all you need is a little crack in that shell of excuses to begin to move forward.

Instead of punishing ourselves into doing things “right,” what if the answer is to step more fully into our “wrongs”? What if leaning into our lazy allows us to find more time and space to do what really matters to us? What if leaning into the boredom or dread we feel about our job gives us the impetus we need to take steps to change our situation?

What if we don’t need to change ourselves at all, but become more of what we already are?

How to Be a Late Bloomer

Or better yet, how about being a repeat bloomer?

This blog post is now a podcast episode!

Why would you want to be a late bloomer, you ask? Why not? Even if you were an early bloomer, nothing is more liberating and life-giving than feeling that life can have a second act, or a third. Or more! In fact, instead of calling it late blooming, let’s call it repeat blooming. Why wouldn’t you want to be a repeat bloomer? If you’re feeling stuck or bored in life, or if you’re prone to existential despair at seeing your years slip away and your accomplishments remain mediocre, take heart. We are all capable of being repeat bloomers, and I’m going to tell you why that is and how to do it.

Let’s look at this through a lens of what holds us back from being late bloomers. First, we’re told our brainpower declines as we age, so we think there’s no way we’ll accomplish anything at a later age comparable with what we could have accomplished in youth – so why even try? Despite what we’re led to believe, overall cognitive function does not decline with age. One type does, but another type actually improves. The type that declines – it peaks around age 20, so it starts declining before life has even really fully begun – is called fluid intelligence. This is the basic reasoning capacities of our brains, the functions that don’t rely on prior learning. Crystallized intelligence, which is the kind that builds over time as you learn and experience life, continues to increase slowly and then remains stable for much of adult life. But even when it, too, begins to decline, this isn’t necessarily associated with the loss of an ability to continue functioning at a high level.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta tells a story about operating on the brain of a 93-year-old man who fell off a roof while using a leaf blower. Dr. Gupta found him waiting for the operation fully conscious and reading about elections in East Africa on his iPhone. This was clearly a very high functioning old guy, and Dr. Gupta was curious as to what shape he’d find his brain in. What do you think he saw in there? Here’s what: a shriveled-up 93-year-old brain. As Dr. Gupta puts it, this aged brain “had almost no correlation to his function… We think of our organs as having this natural deterioration, and they do, but that doesn’t mean they can’t function like they did when you were much younger.” The incredible plasticity of the brain well into old age is something new research is revealing. I don’t know about you, but it makes me feel a lot better about the prospect of aging.

But that’s just brain function. What holds most of us back from being late bloomers is psychological. Our culture tells us that we become irrelevant as we age, and that the time for achieving big successes or making great contributions has passed. The insidious part of this is that while it’s demonstrably false – there are plenty of examples of highly successful late bloomers – the fact that our culture believes it means that it has the power of truth in our lives. Dr. Nell Painter, a successful and lauded historian, found this out when she decided to get an MFA in art in her 60s. As she describes in her memoir, Old in Art School, her classmates, all many decades younger, weren’t even interested in evaluating her work during critique sessions, because her much advanced age created in them an “assumption of my inconsequence” (Dr. Painter is also Black, which added another dimension to this dismissal). Being a late bloomer means facing our own irrelevance in the eyes of the culture at large. As Dr. Painter’s experience shows, having the potential to be a “successful” artist is associated with being young. Indeed, potential is seen as equivalent with youth. And if you don’t have potential, i.e. youth, what’s the point?

Let’s take a closer look at potential. While youth is infused with hopes and dreams for the future, maturity is about having already arrived. As we mature and age, we are no longer looking at our potential as a future destination. We enter the era of living our potential. Knowing this is the key to being a late bloomer. When we start learning something new at an older age, we can leapfrog right over that stage where potential is something we are only ever grasping at and step right into the heart of it. The potential of youth is in the eyes of beholders, the gatekeepers who judge your progress and your possibility of future success. The potential of older age is something you possess and have sovereignty over. Put succinctly, you can do away with giving a shit what the gatekeepers and naysayers think. You’ve earned your right to define yourself and what your potential looks like.

In his book Late Bloomers, Rich Karlgaard lists the strengths of late bloomers, including insight, resilience, compassion, and wisdom, but one stands out to me more than others: late bloomers maintain a youthful and vigorous curiosity. Curiosity often appears as whims, and late bloomers tend to take those whims seriously, regardless of how “important” they seem or - and this is important - their future potential. Late bloomers know the secret, that pursuing your curiosity for the sake of appeasing it is what blooming is all about. The potential is in the pursuit. Something will come out of it, assuredly, because older people have more creative and wide-ranging cognitive resources at their disposal, but you can let that part develop naturally as you go along.

Being a late bloomer is a boon because there is less future ahead. It gives us reason to focus on what really matters about our activities: the process of actually doing them. Whereas a young “aspiring” artist may have big dreams about a career trajectory of prestige gallery showings and art-world esteem, an older artist can more easily understand and embrace the idea that it’s the practice that makes you an artist. And this goes for any activity you choose as your late-bloomer project. You no longer have the luxury of time to be “aspiring.” You must simply be. Being a late bloomer isn’t something you might be later if you accomplished something at some point. You must see yourself as a late bloomer now, as already having arrived there.

Where Creativity Resides: Making Space For Your Essential Creative Self

What are we missing because of our rational conditioning?

This blog post is now a podcast episode!

(This is a follow-on post to last week’s. I guess I just wasn’t finished with this topic!)

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about how our socialization into the rational paradigm of understanding the world results in negative outcomes that we’re largely unaware of. In last week’s post, I looked at how our societal preference for rational cognition can impede creative thinking. The reasons for this have to do with how different, even contradictory, rational and creative modes of cognition are. For those who are very entrenched in the logical, analytical, causal model of rational thinking, the ambiguous, often even paradoxical, nature of creative thought goes against everything they’ve been taught about how the world works and what comprises intelligent understanding. Today I want to explore another pitfall of exclusively using the rational paradigm to understand the world: an associated tendency to overlook information that cannot be understood via a rational approach.

This is an ironic pitfall, because what I’m talking about here is a version of the confirmation bias, a type of cognitive bias that rationalism is very keen on eliminating. A confirmation bias is the tendency to seek out or only recognize information that confirms previously held beliefs. A rational approach to creating knowledge about the world has failed if it falls prey to confirmation bias. The problem is that the rational approach is itself a biased perspective, so inevitably it can only be used to understand phenomena that adhere to rational standards. Not everything does.

We know this already, of course. Scientific approaches to understanding human behavior, for example, are imperfect, because human beings can be irrational. Behavioral economics is a field that arose because older models of humans as rational “utility maximizers” were failing to be sufficiently explanatory. It is possible to study irrational aspects of our world through a rational approach. What concerns me, however, are the things we are not even aware of because of our rational cognitive bias. We tend to dismiss out of hand anything that cannot be rationally explained. And no, I’m not talking about paranormal or similar phenomena here. I’m talking about what our intuitive, creative natures already understand: that reality is pure potentiality and paradoxical. As conscious beings we live in a world that we must at least partly understand rationally, but our creative selves reside in that plane of pure potentiality and paradox.

Creativity exists outside of time. It is nonlinear and anti-analytical. Sure, we can practice creativity within a rational framework, but it will only be a shadow of itself, a projection on a screen, a second-hand version. If you feel like you are forcing your creative practice, it’s because your rational mind has you in a stranglehold. Creativity can feel free, easy, and joyful. It can feel life-giving, life-sustaining. It can heal. But it needs free reign to do that.

The rational mind likes things to be onerous, because rational thought is itself effortful and time-consuming. But creative thought is light and lighting fast. It works by flashes of inspiration, not linear, progressive reasoning. For those flashes to occur, there must be space. You must let your creative self reside in that plane of pure potentiality, the place of nonsense and no-time. And that’s scary. It goes against everything we’ve been taught is right, correct, sane, beneficial, rational. The good news is that you don’t have to make all the space for creativity to shine. Just a little bit of space. A crack. Creativity is like water or light – it is irrepressible, and it will find that crack. But these cracks aren’t where creativity gets in. It’s where the creativity that already resides in you gets out, and shines its light into the world.

I’ll leave you with a passage from Alan Lightman’s novel Einstein’s Dreams. Lightman is a theoretical physicist who was one of the first people to receive a joint appointment in the sciences and humanities at MIT. Einstein’s Dreams is a collection of mini-essays about the nature of time, and each one describes a dream Einstein has about a world where time works in unique and sometimes non-rational ways. In one, causality gets mixed up. Cause and effect are erratic and random, effect sometimes occurring before cause.

Einstein dreams: In this acausal world, scientists are helpless. Their predictions become postdictions. Their equations become justifications, their logic, illogic. Scientists turn reckless and mutter like gamblers who cannot stop betting. Scientists are buffoons, not because they are rational but because the cosmos is irrational. Or perhaps it is not because the cosmos is irrational but because they are rational. Who can say which, in an acausal world?

In this world, Einstein dreams, artists are joyous. Unpredictability is the life of their paintings, their music, their novels. They delight in events not forecasted, happenings without explanation, retrospective… It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity. It is a world in which every word spoken speaks just to that moment, every glance given has only one meaning, each touch has no past or no future, each kiss is a kiss of immediacy.

Cultivating a Generalist Mindset for the New Era

Not an expert at anything? Maybe that’s a good thing.

This blog post is now a podcast episode!

I had a friend who said one day, apropos of nothing, “I want to be an expert. I don’t care what in, I just want to be an expert in something.” I wish I’d asked him then what it was about being an expert that he desired. I can’t ask him now, because he’s passed away, and I don’t know if he ever became an expert in anything. But I’ll always remember that offhand comment, because in a way, I understood what he meant. We admire experts in our society, as well we should. Most spend years learning their subject and know what they’re talking about. We should be listening to them. Except we often favor experts, i.e. specialists, at the expense of generalists, and that’s problematic, because generalists have so much to offer, especially now.

Generalists don’t have much cachet in our society. Even the term “generalist” sounds inferior, doesn’t it? It has that flavor of the dilettante about it: jack of all trades, master of none. Unfortunately, we tend to see generalists as people who haven’t put the time and commitment into becoming a specialist, perhaps because they’re too lazy or scatterbrained. But what if generalism is actually its own brand of specialist knowledge? What if generalists are valuable because they’re not experts in one specific area? Should we all be trying to cultivate a generalist mindset?

I think we should, and here’s why. The world is changing, and along with it, all the rules. We’re in an era of tremendous shift: our former reality is dying and a new one is forming. We all feel it, and most of us are scared. But if you have multiple talents and interests, you have a greater chance of thriving. The old world was set up for specialists. We were expected to specialize, each a cog in the machine. And now that machine is becoming obsolete. The highly specialized cogs, the ones that are only good at doing that one thing they were constructed to do, aren’t going to fare so well. Generalists will have an easier time repurposing their talents to match circumstances.

Here’s the good news: we are all natural generalists. We are all multitalented, but we’re not trained to see ourselves that way. Not sure what you have to offer the world? You’re already doing it, I can guarantee you. Take a look at your life, the activities you come back to again and again, that you’ve committed time and energy to. What do you always want to learn more about? What do you spend money you don’t have on? And perhaps most importantly, what do you find yourself “wasting” time on? It may not be obvious at first how it all fits together. Let me give you an example.

The generalist Tim Ferriss, most known for his enormously popular podcast and his bestseller The 4-Hour Work Week, found his first success with a sports supplement company he started from scratch. As a college student he used to mix up his own supplement powders from specialized mail-order ingredients. He combined this interest with skills and contacts he gained from a sales job he had at an IT firm just before the dot-com bust. But here’s the cool part. It wasn’t the sales job that made him so good getting people to buy his product. It was insomnia. As a kid, he couldn’t sleep, and he’d watch TV all night. And what’s on TV at night? Infomercials. He became obsessed with sales techniques, even calling up the companies to see how they attempted to close the deal once they had you on the phone. Because Tim Ferriss had insomnia and wasted all that time watching useless late-night television, and because he was obsessed with supplement formulas, he was able to become a successful entrepreneur.

What are you wasting your time, energy, or money on? What are the useless things in your life that might not actually be so useless?

Here’s the secret successful generalists understand: what you have to offer the world isn’t any one particular skill, talent, or area of knowledge, or even a combination of them. What you have to offer is YOU. Your whole self. You are your own brand. And what that means is that everything about your life is valuable in terms of the skills, knowledge, and experience it confers. Your job is to learn how to see it that way, how to value yourself and your experiences in a way that allows you to put it all together and manifest that in the world. Trust yourself. Follow your curiosity. Pay attention to your obsessions. And don’t ignore your wasted time and useless pastimes. All of it is you, and therefore all of it has value.