My Favorite Lessons from Rick Rubin to Help You Be More Creative
You’re doing creativity wrong - and here’s why.
Let’s get this clear, I don’t think there’s a “right” way to be creative. I agree with the fact that everyone has their own creative workings and ways of doing creative tasks. However, I do believe there is always a “better” way of doing things. And it wasn’t until reading this book by the producer Rick Rubin that I was able to understand what I was previously doing “wrong”, how I could do it “better”, and how you can too. Lets get started.
The Abundant Mindset
“If we live in a mindset of scarcity, we hoard great ideas.”
One of Rubin’s insights lies on the brim of abundance and scarcity. It’s often as artists we hold back our own creative work. We’re finally on the brim of creating something unique and good, but we are scared to release it because if we do, how can we ever top that? Making something we think is good makes us afraid to share it with the world or complete it because we are operating from a place of scarcity. We don’t view our own creative funnel as a place of abundance. Abundance, meaning there will ALWAYs be another good idea.
One of the things Rubin suggests is not to compare previous and past work. Since art is a subjective element both will have their strengths and their weaknesses and it’s silly to compare apples to oranges.
Learn to operate from a place of abundance and you wont be afraid to create - you’ll realize that creativity is an ever flowing well of ideas. And there will always be a new and better idea.
Clean Slate
“The ability to create as an artist and experience the work as a first-time viewer, dropping baggage from the past of what you wanted the work to be.”
One of the most important concepts that I myself try to apply in my own work is to operate from a clean slate. I do this often in photography when going out, I pretend to “forget everything I know”. And it allows me to take better pictures.
In Rubin’s eyes, we often we spend so much time with our art - too much time, that we become desensitized to it and develop a sort of blindness.
It’s often beginners have a fresh and unfiltered or untamed viewpoint on what they’re creating. But when you’re in the thick of it and you’re so engrossed in your art you can’t see blue from green. When this occurs, it’s important to step away from our work. Meditate, go on walks, do what you gotta do and often the creative struggles we have will solve themselves.
Tuning Out (undermining voices)
“To prevent external pressures from entering our inner process and interfering with the pure creative state.”
Any creative field faces a volume of judgement. Whether its your friends or family telling you to get a real job, or your own creative partners saying what will work and what wont. Sometimes the most important thing to do is to tune these undermining out - and get to work.
The idea behind this is that all of these voices are irrelevant. They are irrelevant to the art. They are irrelevant to the process. They are irrelevant to the most important things: doing and improving.
So these are things that will certainly almost always exist. You are not going to eliminate the voices around you. Instead, learning how to tune them out could be your greatest advantage.
Temporary Rules
“As artists, we get to create a new set of rules each and every time we play.”
“Innovation exists only within those rules.”
One of the ideas Rubin suggests to try in our own creative work is the concept of “temporary rules”. Rules in general exist everywhere and they guide the creative process whether we realize it or not. They are what allows creativity to exist because if rules didn’t exist, things like “breaking the rules” or “thinking outside of the box” wouldn’t exist either.
Rubin goes beyond this however and suggests to create temporary rules to even force yourself to be creative. To set up intentional confiners and limiters around your own creative process to force yourself to improve and innovate. This allows us to break our bad habits and preconceived notions about what is possible. In photography for example, you’ll see it when shooters decide to only take one body and one lens out thereby forcing a limiter on themselves, sacrificing versatility for creativity.
The Prism of Self
“We inhabit many different versions of a changing self. The suggestion to “be yourself” may be too general to be of much use.”
This concept is interesting as Rubin describes how we as people are often encouraged to “be ourselves”. But the human experience is ever flowing and ever changing. You and I are not the same person we were yesterday. And we’ll continue to be different tomorrow and the next day and the next and so on. So what Rubin suggests is to “accept our prismlike nature”.
In my own interpretation this means operating with the realization that we are multivariate beings. We change, we grow, we see, and we like different things. And what we create today may very well be different from what we create tomorrow. If we too strongly identify with what we create today, them creating something different tomorrow can result in a conflict of identity.
To get past this, I’ve learned to accept the momentary nature of art. That what I made in that moment is what I felt was right. And what I’ll make tomorrow, having learned more, will be what I think is right then. This is a more freeing mode of operation by understanding that we need not stick to one form of being. We can free ourselves of the concepts of what we think things “have to” be like.
So these were all things I’ve once struggled with. But now taking them into account, I’ve found ways to improve and better the way I go about creativity. And hopefully these concepts can help you as well.
Thank you for reading.
