creativity

Almost all of the people I look up to and try to steal from today, regardless of their profession, have built sharing into their routine. These people aren't schmoozing at cocktail parties; they're too busy for that. They're cranking away in their studios, their laboratories, or their offices, but instead of maintaining absolute secrecy and hoarding their work, they're open about what they're working on, and they're consistently posting bits and pieces of their work, their ideas, and what they're learning online.

Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance. Have you ever brought home a treadmill and let it gather dust in the attic? Ever quit a diet, a course of yoga, a meditation practice? Have you ever bailed out on a call to embark upon a spiritual practice, dedicate yourself to a humanitarian calling, commit your life to the service of others? Have you ever wanted to be a mother, a doctor, an advocate for the weak and helpless; to run for office, crusade for the planet,...

Our bodies are garbage heaps: we collect experience, and from the decomposition of the thrown-out eggshells, spinach leaves, coffee grinds, and old steak bones of our minds come nitrogen, heat, and very fertile soil. Out of this fertile soil bloom our poems and stories. But this does not come all at once. It takes time. Continue to turn over and over the organic details of your life until some of them fall through the garbage of discursive thoughts to the solid ground of black soil.

On the field of the Self stand a knight and a dragon. You are the knight. Resistance is the dragon. The battle must be fought anew every day. The dragon must be slain again and again. The dragon is stronger than you. That's why he wins. The professional understands that Resistance is fertile and ingenious. It will throw stuff at him that he has never seen before. The professional prepares mentally to absorb blows and to deliver them. His aim is to take what the day gives him.

Nothing is original. The writer Jonathan Lethem has said that when people call something 'original,' nine out of ten times they just don't know the references or the original sources involved. What a good artist understands is that nothing comes from nowhere. All creative work builds on what came before. Every new idea is just a mashup or a remix of one or more previous ideas. You are, in fact, a mashup of what you choose to let into your life. You are the sum of your influences.