Hello Dear Friend,
Welcome to Things I Wish I Knew Earlier (TIWIKE), Sunday!
Here are three ideas on increasing creative output for you to ponder in the coming week.
TIWIKE #1: Creative Output Requires Creative Energy
I quietly hit one of the most important milestones of my career as an entrepreneur this week.
Eighteen months of researching, trying, failing, and trying again led to this Wednesday when I completed the build out of the Big Bad Plan Challenge, a 28-day guided challenge to draft a comprehensive, custom business and life plan alongside friends, with structured prompts and workflows to guide your efforts. I’m proud to say 20 of you are beta testing this program starting on October 7th. The reason this is such a substantial milestone is because it is the first non-real-estate-related project I have ever taken from conception to completion.
I’m too embarrassed to tell you about the numerous books, podcasts, YouTube channels, and other projects I have started and not finished through the years.
But the milestone didn’t feel the way I expected.
I envisioned a jubilee, to be overwhelmed with happiness and inspiration. But what I got was a strange malaise of mild depression. I didn’t know what to do next and didn’t feel particularly interested in doing anything at all. What the hell, ya know?
I should be shouting from the rooftops!
I should be bouncing off the walls!
But no. All I found was uninspired dullness.
This is when I remembered a lesson from one of my all-time favorite books I first read more than a decade go. Julia Cameron’s masterwork The Artist’s Way is a 13-week lesson plan for increasing creative output. And boy does it work.
The insider secret that surfaced from the deep recesses of my mind was the fact that creative output requires creative energy, which is what we call a “finite resource,” meaning there is only so much of it.
It’s kinda like a gas tank in your mind that contains all your creative juices.
When you do creative stuff, you use creative juice just like you use gas when you drive somewhere. And when you run out, the car no longer runs. This is precisely what I experienced this week.
And Cameron is the doctor who knows just what prescription to order.
Creative output requires creative energy.
TIWIKE #2: Artist Dates Refill Your Creative Tank
She calls the solution an “Artist Date.”
An artist date is exactly what it sounds like, a date that an artist makes with him or herself. The rule is that you have to do something you earnestly find fascinating for the sole reason of doing that thing. It can’t be productive. It can’t be with other people. It can’t be distracted.
It is just you spending time with you doing something you want to do just for fun.
They work for at least two reasons.
First, they interrupt your daily pattern. Your habit system is essential to create cool stuff because you need periods of time with your head down working. But that only works when you have creative energy in your tank to fuel the activity.
Once the tank is depleted, you can work all you want, but you can forget being productive.
Second, they expose you to all kinds of new variables. Creativity emerges spontaneously out of our unconscious mind. The creative process is deeply mysterious. When you are locked into routine, you’re only working with those ideas rolling around your unconscious mind already. But when you interrupt your patterns with an artist date, you inject lots of new ideas into your unconscious mind that collide with the ideas already living there.
This is precisely the process that produces new ideas, which is a good definition of creative output.
Artist dates refill your creative tank by interrupting your patterns and injecting new ideas into your unconscious mind.
In that way, artist dates refill your creative tank.
TIWIKE #3: Creative Output = Deep Work + Creative Energy
Now you have a working equation that increases creative output.
The first element is made of artist dates to rejuvenate your creative juices. The second is made of periods of deep work, which is a concept popularized by the fantastic author Cal Newport in his aptly named book Deep Work. And it is exactly what you’d think, long periods of time focused on a singular task.
When your tank is full, you don’t need artist dates.
You need to get your ass to work. Your mind is primed and ready to be used. In my experience, these periods can last anywhere from 6-10 weeks, depending on how hard you are hitting it during that time.
This is when you make big leaps forward.
Then the time inevitably comes where you find your tank on E.
An artist date is in order.
If you build your working life around these two periods, then your creative output will skyrocket.
That is my wish for you with this edition of TIWIKE.
Creative output = deep work + creative energy.