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The Myth of Creative Inspiration: Great Artists Don't Wait for Motivation
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How artists work
The work of top creatives follows a consistent pattern and routine:
- Maya Angelou would rent a local hotel to write, from 6:30 AM until 2 PM. She would never sleep at the hotel.
- Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon writes five nights per week from 10 PM to 3 AM.
- Haruki Murakami wakes up at 4 AM, writes for five hours, and then goes for a run.
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The power in Scheduling
If you’re serious about creating something, stop waiting for motivation and creative inspiration to strike you and simply set a schedule for doing work on a consistent basis.
You can’t selectively choose your best moments and only work on the days when you have great ideas. The only way to unveil the great ideas inside of you is to go through a volume of work, put in your repetitions, and show up over and over again.
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Creativity
While being creative isn't easy, nearly all great ideas follow a sim...
The 5 Step Creative Process
- Gather new material directly related to your task as well as learning general material by becoming fascinated with a wide range of concepts.
- Thoroughly work over the materials in your mind. Examine what you have learned by looking at the facts from different angles and experimenting with fitting various ideas together.
- Step away from the problem. Next, you put the problem completely out of your mind and go do something else that excites you and energizes you.
- Let your idea return to you. After you have stopped thinking about it, your idea will come back to you with a flash of insight and renewed energy.
- Shape and develop your idea based on feedback. For any idea to succeed, you must release it out into the world, submit it to criticism, and adapt it as needed.
Creativity is learned
Some people are primed to be more creative than others.
However, nearly every person is born with some level of creative skill and the majority of our creative thinking abilities are trainable.
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The essence of motivation
Every choice has a price, but when we are motivated, it is easier to bear the inconvenience of action than the pain of remaining the same.
In other words, at some point, it becomes more...
Active inspiration
Motivation is often the result of action, not the cause of it. Getting started, even in very small ways, is a form of active inspiration that naturally produces momentum.
The Physics of productivity
Newton’s First Law applied to habit formation: Objects in motion tend to stay in motion.
Once a task has begun, it is easier to continue moving it forward. In other words, it is often easier to finish a task than it was to start it in the first place.
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Finding Your Creative Genius Takes Years
Most groundbreaking work takes at least a full decade or more to reveal itself.
For example, one study found that of 500 famous musical pieces, nearly all of them were ...
Give Yourself Permission to Create Junk
Successful writers do not write elegant first drafts, nor do they feel wildly enthusiastic and confident.
Creating something useful and compelling means you have to permit yourself to let the inspiration flow. You will write a lot of junk but can then sift through it to find bits and pieces of brilliance here and there.
Create on a Schedule
The act that will uncover creative genius is by forcing yourself to create regularly and on a schedule, not just create when you feel inspired.
The best thing you can do is to do a huge volume of work. Creative genius becomes visible when you work consistently to get the average ideas out of the way.