How to be more creative

Ed and Neil are in the top 0.000001% of their fields. They're among, say, 25 people in the world who repeatedly generate blockbusters.

They both share the exact same creative process The creativity faucet.

Visualize your creativity as a backed-up pipe of water. The first mile is packed with wastewater.

This wastewater must be emptied before the clear water arrives.

Because your pipe has only one faucet, there's no shortcut to achieving clarity other than first emptying the wastewater.

At the beginning of a writing session, write out every bad idea that unavoidably comes to mind. Instead of being self-critical and resisting them, recognize bad ideas as progress.

Once the bad ideas are emptied, strong ideas begin to arrive.

Once you've generated enough bad output, your mind reflexively identifies which elements caused the badness. Then it becomes good at avoiding them. You start pattern-matching interesting and novel ideas with greater intuition.

Most creators resist their bad ideas and never reach the clear water. If you've opened a blank document, scribbled a few thoughts, then walked away because you weren't struck with gold, then you too never got past it.

Mozart had 600 musical compositions and Edison had 1093 patents. Only a few are remembered today, and that's the point.