The Practice

Creativity is not an innate gift or a talent you're born with. Rather, creativity is a skill and a choice — it can be learned and expanded.

The key to becoming more creative is to get into the habit of shipping or sharing your creative output all the time.

When you ship or share what you create — whether you get paid for it or not — you establish a "Practice" which will help your creative skills to grow and expand even more in the future.

This kind of practice is self-driven, and is not outcome-based. The more you ship, the faster your creative skills will grow and expand, and the better your art will become, whatever form it may take.

The magic of the creative process is that there is no magic.

You were born ready to make art. Art is the generous act of making things better by doing something that might not work.

But you've been told that you can't trust yourself enough to do so. You've been told you don't have enough talent (but that's okay, because you can learn the skill instead). And you've been told that if you can't win, you shouldn't even try (but now you see the journey is the entire point).

The key to building a creative practice for yourself is to be consistent in generating and shipping your art — whatever form it may take. Certainly, good processes help you generate professional-quality outputs, but consistency really is the key to moving forward. Generating art is something that you do, not merely something that you speak about.

The second set of five key principles which underpin this idea are:

• Make bold assertions.
• Earn your skills by consistently producing.
• Welcome and harness your constraints.
• Watch for creative ideas.
• Be unquenchable.

• Establish a "Practice" to ship whatever you create to a schedule. The discipline of doing that will cause you to be even more creative in the future.
• Write every day. Blog, and record your thoughts. It will establish your identity, and help you arrange your thoughts. That's the foundation for your creative output of the future.

The real breakthrough is doing work that is worth doing, even though you know it's not going to work.

The Western mindset is "tell me if it's going to work and then I'll do it." This mentality of only doing what's needed if it gets me an A on the test holds back creators.

The colloquial understanding of magic is someone who does a coin trick. The coin disappears from one hand and is gone for just a moment. At that moment we feel the tension. How is that possible?

Once we know how the trick is done the magic evaporates. This magic can be found in the things we create. Creators can make magic happen for the people they seek to help.

The way we act determines how we feel way more often than the way we feel determines how we act. The way you behave will inform your identity.

If your practice is to go running every day, the more this practice is done consistently you will have a runners identity. We are what we do.