The Creative Act A Way of Being

The creative act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin ... it teaches you to let go, don't try to force things.

His book is entitled The Creative Act Away Of Being.

The book was given to me when I was about 14 and a half when I was released from a particularly uncomfortable, non-voluntary state of affairs.

It's a beautiful idea.

It's an invitation to think.

It's not clear exactly what the cover design is supposed to be.

The title of the book is The Creative Act, A Way of Being by Rick Rubin.

This is a book that I've now read three times from cover to cover and I'm now reading it fourth time because it is so rich with wisdom and information that I'm applying in multiple domains of my life, not just my work but my everyday life.

I cannot recommend it highly enough. Rick has an incredible ability to translate his understanding of the creative process in a way that is meaningful for anybody.

If you're in music, if you're a musician it will certainly be meaningful for you but it is not about music, it is about the creative process.

Whether or not you consider yourself somebody creative or not or whether or not you seek to be more creative, Rick's book in today's conversation sheds light on what I believe to be the fundamental features of what makes us human beings.

I remembered reading that book he put out, Creative Act, and he was like there's something about... having your antenna up.

Rick Rubin, whose name is sort of synonymous with creativity, because he wrote that amazing book, The Creative Act, is so into sky and clouds and sunsets and space, open space.

He just has a, you know, a kind of supernatural level of ability to do this. And he keeps coming back to this thing in our discussions, but also in his book and elsewhere about how the impediment, the greatest impediment to the creative process is to think about the publicity or cultural milieu that it's going to exist in. ... He basically wrote The Creative Act.

I remembered hearing about Rick Rubin's book The Creative Act a way of being

and so I went on Audible downloaded it and suddenly just doing household chores also involved me opening up my mind about the creative process and what it takes to be involved in it

there's lots of different ways to pass the time it felt very enriching that this is the way I chose to do it

He just came out with this really fascinating and usual book called The Creative Act, A Way of Being.

You frame artists and really you frame all of us as translators, as picking up signals from the world around them that many hear but ignore or maybe many never even hear.

It reads very Taoistly. It's very poetic. It's very spare. There's not a lot of I. It's very comfortable with paradox and tension and contradiction.

He's like, fuck the audience, do your thing.

And that book, like I read it after we worked together and like hearing him talk and like, I mean, he's a big, he practices what he preaches you know.

Because he does try like the way I've explained it is. And he's like, he's like ambassador of music for the human population.

His book, he read it and you're like damn, this is, it's a cool approach to just like sitting, brainstorming, letting like ideas flow, letting him take shape and like creating things.

I think that might have ever lived.

If you don't already have this book, I highly recommend it. Whether you think you're a creative or not, this is a book that's going to help you tap inward into helping you access a part of yourself that you may not even know exists or refine and deepen a part that does exist.

And then I opened it up and I was like, wait a minute, this is not what I was expecting. And I'm seeing like poetry and I'm seeing like rhymes and I'm seeing just short reflections and some really beautiful, even exercises and activities that you suggest.

And it's like, that's something I would love to help people develop because I think it's a skill, it's a habit. And you talk about habits in the book and we're only as creative as the habits we keep, you say.

This book in itself breaks the construct of what a book is.

It's been performing incredibly well. It's been on the New York Times bestseller list for months now.

Rick Rubin's book the creative act I originally didn't plan to write it I just said I'll do all the interviews for the book and you can find a writer because I don't want to you know we're friends and it's okay you need to find the right person for your book but I just want to do all the interviews because I wanted to learn from him because he's produced but everyone Kanye, Jay-Z like Beastie Boys or DMC like Johnny Cash and he's so wise and so I just wanted to learn from him and this is what I think the main thing I learned and it's in the book I'm not trying to make a book be something I'm almost listening to the work and trying to hear what it wants to be so I really learned to take the ego out of the creative process and surrender to the moment and understand there's something being called into existence that's not about me and I'm just trying to guide it there and not get in the way and it was a whole new way of thinking it wasn't an artist centered form of creation it was an art centered form of creation

That that what what is that book I'm blanking on his name. It's a great book with the circles on it. Rick Rubin. Have you read that book?

He has a book and it's all about just yeah the creative act dude I really love this book. It's the creative act a way of being. Check it out.

One is, without the spiritual component, this is from the chapter called The Unseen, without the spiritual component, the artist works with a crucial disadvantage.

The spiritual component is belief in something bigger, something different, whatever it is. It could be believing in some universal power, believing that if you walk under a ladder, you'll have bad luck.

When looking for a solution to a creative problem, pay close attention to what's happening around you.

Self-expression is not about you.

The work has five mistakes, it's not yet completed. When it has eight mistakes, it might be.

Well, who's to say what success is? You're judging success in a very particular way. Success isn't necessarily material success.

Many of the great works of art that we look at now as great works of art were in their day not considered that.

And we take crazy risks but they're all in the pursuit of making the best thing we can over a long period of time over and over again. And if you don't like this one, it's okay.

The times when there what I've seen is the opposite of the artist thinking, okay now we're successful. Now we have this obligation. What do they want from us? We're the thing that we made that was successful. We made purely out of passion.

Rick Rubin has just put out a book called The Creative Act, and it's about much more than creativity narrowly defined. It's actually about how to be alive.

You're not thinking of creativity as something that's restricted to that thin band of society that would call itself artists. Your argument is that everybody is a creator.

The book is called The Creative Act, a Way of Being.

I gotta tell you a book that I think you'll read I was gonna tell Jason about this. I've been talking about this Rick Rubin's book the creator that it is so good. It blew me away like there every now and then I'll read a book I write that down that like you're talking about atomic habits where you're like Oh, this changes a little bit of my perception of things the creative act a way of being

Rick Rubin talks about it in his book quite a bit, The Creative Act.

It's a way of being in the world, a way of paying attention.

It started with the idea of...I've worked with a lot of artists over the time that I've been doing this.

It's not about music. It's a way of being.

So by never mentioning the artists, the reader is the artist in all of the stories in the book.

It's to know how would I do? How could I do this? How could I look at this problem?

I think, yeah, Rick Rubin, have you read his book on the creative act? No, but I've heard him speak about it.

Rick Rubin, the legendary music producer, wrote a book called The Creative Act, A Way of Being. He talks so much about how creativity will flow through us if we just give ourselves space to observe without having to pay attention to a specific thing.

This is my first book.

It was a long journey for me to get to understand what's in the book, because I can't say that it's things that I know. It's things that I notice.

And the things that we notice are fleeting. So it'll come up and I'll make notes on the things that I'm noticing and they'll work their way into the book.

And that's, I'll say, that's similar to what happens in the recording studios. We tend to record everything because often it happens when you don't know what's happening.

Yes, that's how it happened for me. And I was shocked. It remains shocking, but I'm excited that it's there and now I can use it as a reference tool.

Just like you might say that you're not a good stoic, people might say or worse believe that they're not creative.

You're either engaging in the practice or you're not, Rubin says.

It makes no sense to say that you're not good at it.

It's like saying, I'm not good at being a monk.

You're either living as a monk or you're not.

his great book on creativity is just absolutely amazing. And I highly recommend it.

He sent me an early copy of the book and asked for some marketing advice which I gave. And then it's been awesome to see this book be just a monster seller which it deserves to be.

I loved the book. Carried at the painted porch.

I think it says something also about Rick and his willingness to get insights and ideas from any source.

I'm hoping that when you're reading it you get a feeling of like I want to stop reading so I want to go make something that was the the hope for the book

this is um Rick Rubin's book the Creative Act and he's he's he's basically the greatest record producer of all time right and you know the Red Hot Chili Peppers and uh you know uh Neil Diamond Johnny Cash his point is like he's not he's like I'm not some like amazing guru that knows how to just tell people what to do his point is that creativity is a product of environment and systems and uh vibe you might say uh to use the current word his point is that it's something that ensues from having done the right thing right and I think so often as leaders as parents um we expect certain things from people and we assume that our job as leaders is to hold them accountable for not doing those things or rewarding them for doing the things and then we think less about uh you know what's more in our control which is what is the environment what is the system what is the structure that we are setting up that allows those things to naturally flourish right and so I'm not just talking about being an example I'm just saying that um how do we think about creating an environment in which the traits the virtues or the outcomes we want to see is is likely to ensue from that so that that's just a sort of a quick point I wanted to make um but I think for the Stokes the idea that look we're all part of this large system that we all have an individual job to do in this system uh and that when we focus on that this is where teams really come together

I really enjoyed the book; we do a deep dive into that and to philosophy in this wonderful episode of the podcast that was supposed to go an hour and instead it went two hours.

Rick could have very easily written like a celebrity tell all a sort of a music memoir and instead he wrote a book about something I think is much more timeless.

I felt like the embodiment of this book or your creative approach you've read um zen in the art of archery I'm sure right

I'm trying to get the the the one and sometimes the one um even I would say even in those days though I would listen back we'd work on a song we'd work on um the arrangement we play it many times and then maybe we'd have a revision let's change this part in this part and then we would change the two parts and then we would keep playing keep playing keep playing and let's change now later in the day let's change this part in this part we change those parts and and it keeps getting refined as we work over the course of the day and sometimes we would listen back to one of those earlier takes before it had those refinements and say it's just better it's just better even though it doesn't have those details we liked that came later.

Beware of the assumption that the way you work is the best way simply because it's the way you've done it before.