The Creative Act: Rick Rubin's 12 Rules for Creativity and Being Yourself

[00:00:00]

Introduction to Creativity

Sam Tonor: Most of us think of creativity as a job for artists, painters, musicians, filmmakers. But what if I told you creativity is also a job for parents, teachers, founders, therapists, even accountants?

Imagine you want to solve a problem, but logic, expertise, discipline, can't crack it well then you need to use creativity and not the kind they teach you in school. The kind of creativity that Rick Rubin talks about, the kind that shows up when you slow down, when you listen, when you stop trying to be clever, and you start trying to be true.

Who is Rick Rubin?

Sam Tonor: What is this mystical stuff I'm talking about? And who is Rick Rubin?

Well, firstly, he is one of the most legendary music producers alive and of all time. He's worked with artists like Johnny Cash to Kanye West, Adele to Slayer, and he's won the album of the year and producer of the year, basically [00:01:00] more times than anyone.

Um, , whether that's Jay-Z's 99 Problems or basically all of the Red Hot Chili Peppers albums, he has achieved some incredible quality of work by helping artists strip away everything that isn't real about them, to find what is their true, authentic selves that makes them awesome.

And a really surprising thing about him is that he doesn't even know how to play an instrument. He can't read music when he walks into a studio. He doesn't give technical advice. He just helps the artist themselves find and release the best version of themselves.

Welcome to the Show

Sam Tonor: So hello and welcome to the show, growth Mindset, psychology, science of Self-Improvement With me, Sam Webster Harris.

As always, exploring the science and philosophy of a life well lived.

Lessons from Rick Rubin's Book

Sam Tonor: And today I'm going through my favorite lessons from Rick Rubin's book, the Creative Act, A Way of Being in It. He lays out a philosophy of inspiration that [00:02:00] less about talent, more about tuning in and taste making, and working out how to be your best self. This episode we'll explore. 12 of Rick Rubin's most powerful insights that he discusses in the book and they aren't just useful if you're a musician or a writer, which of course they will be useful if you are, but they are useful for anyone if you are a human, which I'm pretty sure you are, , because all of us are making something in life, whether that's a business or a relationship, or even just our own life, that should feel like our own.

I can't tell you how much I enjoyed this book and also digging into hours of interviews and documentaries to put this episode together for you. . I had the absolute time of my life. . Love everything he's done, and I think you are going to love it as well.

We will be back after a short break.

Sam Tonor: Okay, going straight into the lessons.

Lesson 1: You Are a Receiver, Not a Creator

Sam Tonor: The first one, you are a receiver and not a creator. This is one of Rick Rubin's [00:03:00] most famous ideas that I've also spoken about before on the show. It's the concept that artists don't invent ideas, they receive them, and that doesn't mean that ideas are just floating around in the air, like fairy dust.

What he's trying to say is that art happens when someone steps into a moment that is already asking to be expressed.

Basically, ideas have a kind of timing to them. They show up when the world is ready for them, and the artist is just the one who's available to receive and interpret them. and of course, it's not just artists. , if Jeff Bezos started Amazon today, he'd be a little bit late. If he started it 50 years ago, it would be too early.

He could have only have built Amazon at the time, and he was the right person to build it.

If you think about music, the Beatles didn't force music to change. Rock and roll doesn't exist just because of the Beatles. They showed up at a time when young people were aching for something new, something honest, something wild and joyful. And the Beatles tuned in to what the culture was [00:04:00] already humming.

They gave it shape. They filled the role that the world was creating.

So Ruben calls artists conduits, not because they are mystical, but because it's practical. If you think you have to come up with something totally original from scratch, that is actually a huge, paralyzing level of pressure. But if you think of your job as simply trying to notice what is being asked for and responding honestly,

well, that is a lot more liberating and doable. Your job isn't to just force something completely new.

Your job is to listen deeply to what the world is asking for, , and by saying this, he's not claiming that artists aren't genius or anything.

He is just saying the way we think of genius is perhaps incorrect.

When Natalie Mains from the Dixie Chicks spoke about Rick Rubin, she said that he has the ability and the patience to let music be discovered rather than manufactured. And so when he's talking about receiving ideas, it's not like a mystical lightning strike. It's just the reward for showing up over and over.

Being open to ideas until you find something that just [00:05:00] feels true and useful when it arrives.

Lesson 2: Inspiration is Everywhere

Sam Tonor: And that leads us to the next point, which is that inspiration is everywhere if you are present to notice it.

Inspiration isn't a rare thing, , it's just that we don't always look for it. And he gives some interesting examples. , maybe the shape of a shadow, , the sound of a match, lighting a phrase, overheard or misheard on the subway.

These aren't cliches. They are specific. They're tactile observations that remind us that the raw material for creativity is everywhere, but most of us are numb to it. We're distracted, rushing, scanning headlines or emails.

When Graham Nash wrote the song, our House, he'd been shopping with Joni Mitchell. They got home and he was like, oh, . I'll light the fire. Can you go pick some flowers for the vase that we bought today. And after he said it, he was like, Hmm, that's pretty.

and that became the first line of his most famous song ever. because he was open to inspiration from anything that was happening.

So Rick's advice here is really practical. Train yourself to be [00:06:00] amazed. Again, practice noticing. If a shadow catches your eye, why is it the shape of it, the contrast? Could that become a visual metaphor for a project that you're stuck on? If you hear a fragment of a stranger's conversation? Pause, write it down.

What do you think's going on in their lives? That line might unlock a character's voice. It might reveal your own voice. Now the point here isn't to be weird. The point is to wake up. 'cause great art doesn't start with genius. It starts with simply paying attention.

Another really cool story here when it comes to finding inspiration anywhere is that Rick might ask an artist to just pick a random book on a bookshelf in front of them and to open a random page and just put their finger on any line .

And it can work surprisingly well. When System were writing the song Chop Suey, which is an epic song. , they knew they had a killer song already. , they'd written the riff. they got the main song chorus in the bag. but they knew they needed to take it somewhere else for like the [00:07:00] breakdown.

And they didn't know what to do because it was so epic already. They didn't know how to like take it to that next level. And so he literally told them to just pick up a book. , so that's what Serge the singer did. and they got a random book and they opened to it.

and he pointed to a random line, which was,

Sam: Father, into your hands. I commend my spirit. Why have you forsaken me?

Sam Tonor: and so that is the line that kicks off one of the most awesome breakdowns in musical history And it's just crazy that inspiration can be all around you if you look for it.

. Okay. Lesson three.

Lesson 3: Vary Your Inputs

Sam Tonor: Vary your inputs. So carrying on the theme, he has some more challenges on inspiration. Try watching a movie with the sound off, or perhaps read only the first word of every sentence in a book or put a strange song that you heard on loop for an hour, and these aren't gimmicks. Reuben recommends them because your brain craves patterns same sort of inputs every day. The same music, the same conversations, the same media.

It'll [00:08:00] start serving you up the same thoughts. So if you break your input habits, you start scrambling the system and it knocks you out of autopilot, this creates some slight discomfort.

Your brain doesn't know what to do exactly, and you start creating space. For new connections and so Rick uses these techniques all the time to get artists unstuck. He doesn't just give them answers, but he changes their environment or their inputs until something surprising shows up.

Creativity, he says, comes from the edges of your awareness and not the center. So go to the edge. a fun story here that has nothing to do with Rick Rubin, but another legendary producer of a different medium. Quentin Tarantino, before he ever picked up a camera, he was working the counter at a video rental store in Los Angeles.

But this was more than just a job for him. It was his education. He watched everything in the store. kung fu flick b-movie horror, French noir, seventies grindhouse slapstick comedy. He didn't care about [00:09:00] prestige or taste. He just consumed anything that caught his eye and he paid attention to what was making it tick.

and the different sorts of beats and rhythms in different movies. when he finally started making his own films, 'cause he was clearly obsessed about films. he didn't try to just copy Scorsese or Spielberg like other junior producers would do,

He completely remixed and basically made his own genre. He took the pacing of Asian cinema, The punchy dialogue of black p flotation, the structure of a spaghetti western. and he made a style of movie that no one had seen before, I mean, technically he did it all by copying, but he varied his input so much , that you can create something that doesn't fit a normal category at all. 'cause your brain isn't operating on a single track. It's drawing from a library. No one else thought to build. and when I first heard this story, I found it so inspiring. and I really resonated with it for myself as a creative ' because I naturally love getting interested in so many different things.

Lesson 4: Make Something Without Judging It

Sam Tonor: Next point, number four, make something without judging [00:10:00] it. So Rick believes that we kill most of our creative work in the first five minutes by judging it before it's even taken shape. . He says, you should just make something and think. Don't worry if it's good that can come later.

Judgment is a completely separate mode from creativity, and if you mix them up too early, you can smother the work before it has a chance to grow and think about how many ideas you've abandoned mid-sentence even because. They didn't sound impressive enough or maybe you've had a ton of drafts for ideas that you never finished because they weren't perfect yet, but the point of a draft is to not be perfect. Some of the most iconic songs in history started as some mumbles into a tape recorder.

Reuben has plenty of stories of artists recording a voice memo on the phone that turned into a Grammy winning chorus eventually. But the difference is that they didn't delete it and they came back to it and they kept going. And when you're creating, don't try to edit it. Don't try to make too much sense straight away.

Just make a mess. Let it be bad. You can [00:11:00] shape it all later.

Lesson 5: Discomfort is a Creative Compass

Sam Tonor: Which leads us to number five, discomfort is a creative compass.

There's a myth in creativity, a bit like the Disneyfication of a perfect Romance.

But there's this idea that when you are inflow. Everything always feels great. And Reuben says that sometimes flow can feel like fear or exposure or even embarrassment. and why do you think that is? Because real creativity means going past your filters, past your ego, and finding what is uncomfortable.

If something feels scary or vulnerable, you are probably onto something that's actually true.

If it feels easy or like something you should be saying, or it's probably conforming to what people expect, which means you may be being performative as opposed to expressive.

So in the studio, Rick will often keep on asking artists to try one more take, not because they need to have a perfect performance as such, but because fatigue often makes people more honest, it can strip away their control. And what [00:12:00] it leaves them with is something more raw and real.

And often that's the version that makes the final cut.

I think this is really cool. So if you're working on something that makes you cringe a little, lean in and explore, it might actually be the heart of the whole thing you're looking for. Discomfort is a compass, as you should know if you listen to the growth mindset because it shows you where the real stuff is.

Like the obstacle is the way, et cetera. A nice story here from Rick working with the Red Hot Chili Peppers back when they were young, wild, cool kids So Rick had invited them to record in his mansion that was supposedly haunted without any outside influence to get away from everything, and they were working on their next album, which was to be blood sugar, sex Magic.

So Anthony KeyersHad written a kind of vulnerable poem

in an odd moment of discomfort, and Rick found it in his notebook and he asked him to share these vulnerable ideas with the band and it hit a bit of a note. Guitarist joined Sante quickly, just had some chord ideas and it [00:13:00] became possibly one of their most famous songs under the bridge. You may have heard of it. And the song wasn't exactly planned, it wasn't engineered. It arrived, and all they had to do was say yes.

So remember, discomfort is good. , stop pushing to meet expectations and start receiving what feels right to you. As I was saying at the start. Finding what feels true.

the most personal things feel like ours, but they're actually given to us and we have to be open to them rather than ignoring them. And this leads us directly to the next point. Number six.

Lesson 6: The Work Reflects the State of the Maker

Sam Tonor: That is the work reflects the state of the maker.

, so Rick isn't just interested in how an artist performs. He cares about how they feel. 'cause the emotional state of an artist will seep into their work and you can really hear the difference between a song that's trying to impress and a song that just is, because that's what it should be. . And you can definitely feel whether something was made in desperation or in peace.

And from a place of curiosity and interest, like I am definitely excited to be talking [00:14:00] about this episode today because it gave me so many ideas and aha moments. So hopefully it's coming across and I sound as excited as I am. Who knows? Uh, but anyway, this concept is why Rick will spend.

More time helping artists settle themselves than actually telling them what to play. when Johnny Cash came to Rick Rubin in the nineties, no major label wanted to work with Johnny Cash. His career was seen as over some guy from like the sixties.

, .

Sam Tonor: But Ruben definitely thought there was a chance to kickstart his career, but he didn't just throw him in the studio with a team of songwriters. He invited Johnny Cash to his living room,

and they tried recording ideas in a plain space with nothing but a chair, a guitar, and a microphone. No band, no producers, no polish. The result ended up being the album American Recordings, which is one of the rawest albums of the 20th century. It's just Johnny Cash stripped bare. Every breath tremble in his voice, tells a story [00:15:00] deeper than lyrics, and Reuben didn't try to add anything to it.

He was clearing the space so that real Johnny Cash could walk back into the room.

It sounds simple, but you don't get work like that by layering on more effects or hiding behind perfection. And this kind of resonance only happens when the artist is honest enough and quiet enough to let the work reflect who they really are. And that leads us to the next point.

Lesson 7: Reduce Until Only the Truth Remains

Sam Tonor: Number seven, reduce until only the truth remains. So when most people think about creativity, they think about adding things, maybe more instruments, adding effects, adding layers, adding more lyrics. more perspectives, et cetera. And Rick Rubin can't preach enough that it's actually about subtraction.

He is a master of reduction by stripping away everything unnecessary until only the core emotion remains.

And what happens when you remove all this clutter Is you end up with the truth, not just in sound, but in [00:16:00] all forms of expression and whatever you're doing in life. When you create something, your job is to basically uncover the essence. So what does that all mean?

What does the emotional heartbeat? Well, basically, when in doubt, cut stuff, keep removing until it hurts. That is usually where the soul of a thing lives.

And it is definitely something I've had to learn time and time again as someone who writes and just has more ideas of what else I could write about And it took a few years of just doing that the wrong way to finally start learning that. Only saying the things that were most important and most needed, made it 10 times better than adding as many things as I could think of.

and to supplement this with another cool story, I know I'm ignoring his own rule here, but I am excited and I guess I'm making something true to myself because here's a story about Kanye West in 2010. You may have heard his album, my Beautiful, dark, twisted Fantasy.

Well, that was packed with layers, loads of collaborators, orchestras, maximalist arrangements. [00:17:00] But when it came to his next album, Yeezus, He created a three and a half hour rough cut with all the different things going on. And when Rick Rubin came in to help him work, finishing it up, they really changed things.

They worked for 16 days straight, 15 hours a day. Mostly just cutting things back to unveil a really edgy, minimal hard sound that Kanye was looking for. He wanted to do something different that the industry hadn't heard. the final album, Yeezus had 10 songs on it,

And it was just over 40 minutes long. So 20% of the original stuff that the Kanye had done, and when it was released, it debuted at number one on the billboard, hot 100. It went platinum, became one of the most acclaimed albums of 2013. later when Kanye West

spoke about producing the album. he said this. Well, I didn't reduce it. Rick Rubin reduced it. He's a reducer, not a producer. And I think that quote perfectly sums up this point. [00:18:00] and now we are just over halfway through our 12 principles for creativity and life.

So far we've covered tuning into culture's, timing, noticing your environment, scrambling, inputs, et cetera, letting go of judgment, embracing discomfort, and coming up we will be talking about letting go about what others think, why nothing is ever truly finished, and that's okay. And the art of being yourself.

We'll be back after a short break.

Sam Tonor:

Lesson 8: The Audience Comes Last

Sam Tonor: Number eight, the audience comes last, and this is a hard one to hear. when we make anything, we're usually trying to please or impress someone. And of course that means we think about them first. But Ruben says that you should stop thinking about the audience entirely.

Not because they don't matter, but because making something for them usually leads you away from honesty of being yourself And what makes you best? If you are creating something with a specific reaction in mind, [00:19:00] whether that's applause, likes praise, you start bending your own voice, you start second guessing things, you smooth over the rough edges.

but having worked with some of the biggest names in the world, he's always found that the work that resonates most usually comes from them going back to the truth of themself, from making the thing that they specifically needed to make

and the result of it. If it connects with others, that's great, but it's not actually the point. The point is to make something that feels necessary to you.

Lesson 9: Nothing is Ever Finished

Sam Tonor: All right, number nine, nothing is ever finished.

So here's a really cool idea that is a bit liberating. Art is never finished. It is only abandoned. And that isn't a Rick Rubin quote that comes from Da Vinci, it's one that both Da Vinci and Rick Rubin live by. When you make anything in life, it will never feel like it's done.

You could always make one more edit. One more change, one more tweak. But Rick Rubin says there comes a point when you have to let it go. Perfection is a moving target [00:20:00] and chasing it will kill your momentum.

And it's the same with a business idea or a relationship

if you keep on waiting for it to be perfect, you're never gonna build the momentum of living in a relationship and making that your life's work a business out into the world and improving it and making it happen.

When it comes to making albums, Rick tells so many stories about making last minute decisions, pulling a song, reordering an album, even cutting something from it. That was beloved. Just to honor what feels right in the moment for the album as a whole,

And that fits right in with the wider point that letting go, abandoning your work is part of the creative process. Releasing it out in the wild to let it live in the world and do its thing and you simply have to move on. As a creative myself, this is so hard, but letting things out, and cutting back what you've worked on to make it cleaner, a truer thing to then release it is, is hard.

But it's what you have to do. and so good luck with that. but if you do struggle with this, like me, don't worry. You are not [00:21:00] alone. Here is a crazy story about perfection and not finishing things from Leonardo da Vinci himself

who did the direct opposite of his own quote about art being never finished and only abandoned when you think of the Mona Lisa as a finished masterpiece? Well, Leonardo da Vinci, he never finished it. He never stopped working on it. He took it with him from his home in Florence to Milan and then to France.

He kept painting layers that no one could ever even see. He tweaked shadows, soften edges sometimes for months, just for like a single fold of fabric on her clothes.

Ultimately, he worked on it for over 16 years, and when he died, it was still in his studio, unfinished.

Which is crazy, but luckily he did spend most of his life shipping things and putting them into the world. so people did know that they should look through his stuff after he died and could find it, but most of us aren't da Vinci and we haven't got a crazy amount of work that

is out in the world. Many of us don't abandon any of our [00:22:00] art and let it out into the world, and we instead get stuck perfecting things we can obsess over the first good idea we have. instead of making it as good as we can in the moment and then moving on to the next thing.

It just becomes a block for us that we just never move past because,

'we can't let go of this idea of perfect.

So we have to remember that perfect is never going to happen, and that leads us onto the next point.

Lesson 10: Be a Beginner Always

Sam Tonor: Number 10, be a beginner always. Now Rick is a great example of this. As I already said, he never trains as a musician, doesn't play instruments, can't read music. But he has produced some of the most important albums in history because he listens with fresh ears, He approaches every project from

Slayer to Adele with what Zen teachers call beginner's mind. He's just curious, open and unburdened by expertise. If you already know how things should be, you stop asking better questions.

Before LL Cool J was a hip hop legend. He was just a [00:23:00] teenager with a boombox and a dream. He recorded some rough demos, mailed them to a stranger, which happened to be a college kid named Rick Rubin, who had just started a tiny label from his New York dorm room, and it was called Def Jam.

When he heard the recording, it was raw. There was no producers, no mixing engineers. but ll Cool J's voice in the drum machine. But Rick Rubin heard a spark and he called the kid back, signed LL Cool J, which became Def Jam's first major artist. and the reason he thinks it took off was because neither of them knew how the industry worked.

They didn't know what a hitch should sound like . And that's what they needed. If you wanted to make something new and original. as he says. The rules that you haven't learned yet can't trap you, so Rick Rubin never goes around trying to impress people with how much he knows.

He's just trying to find the thread that feels the most alive to pull on it. So don't be afraid to not know what to do next. Don't be afraid to look stupid. Stay naive. Ask questions that sound dumb. Try things that you've never done before because that's [00:24:00] where the energy is and the novelty .

And where the growth keeps on coming from.

Lesson 11: Create Your Environment with Intention

Sam Tonor: Number 11, create your environment with intention. So.

Rick advises people to be really obsessive about their environment, which is something I need to improve because it's not my strong point.

now the point here isn't that it needs to be luxurious or anything, it just needs to be honest. His studio in Malibu, called Shangrila is legendary, not 'cause it's glamorous at all. The opposite, it's quiet, earthy, full of odd textures, soft corners.

The vibe in it is more sacred than slick, and this is because Ruben really believes that space will affect your state, and your state affects your output. So the room matters, the lighting matters, the object on your desk matter.

And he's definitely a fan of Fang Shei, which you can certainly read into if you want to address this more. I've also done some episodes about how different spaces affect your psychology, but the point is you should create a space that helps you drop in, that invites stillness that makes you feel like you are [00:25:00] allowed to go deep.

Having a place in your house that you can read, or even going to a library or a park sometimes.

Perhaps you should add some candles and silence or maybe chaos and color. The point is to set up your space to support the state of mind that you need at the time. And so this really goes beyond decorating or making a space look like what other people celebrate.

it's about designing with purpose for what you're trying to achieve.

And of course it's very different for different people. When Rick Rubin senses that an artist is stuck, he often won't push 'em to work harder. He'll literally reset the space they're in. he might move couches around, change the lighting, take down posters, even we paint walls and he'll treat the room itself like a musical instrument and this isn't vanity, it's creativity by design to change the space and create the head space that you are looking for.

Lesson 12: The Artist's Job is to Be Open

Sam Tonor: And on the subject of Headspace, the last point, number 12, the artist's job is to be open. Now, if there's one idea that ties all of Ruben's philosophy [00:26:00] together, it is this, your job is to be open. Open to what the work wants you to become open to what you didn't expect. Open to just doing less or doing it differently.

so a big part of this is putting aside your ego, your plans, your cleverness, your fear of judgment, and just letting the work and the thing that you do speak first. So it's not even about skill, it's about presence. And presence is something that you can practice by slowing down, by listening, by staying available to what's unfolding.

not to what you think should happen, but to just simply what is happening, what is ruminating through your mind? What have you been talking about lately? Because creativity isn't just a craft, it's a way of being, and I think this is one of the reasons why people say that you should journal so much or meditate , and it's why at the end of every episode.

I tell people to try and have some silence for a bit before you just go straight into another podcast and listen to someone else's thoughts, because you need to spend some time in a day listening to your own [00:27:00] thoughts without cramming more opinions on top of you.

In fact, one of Ruben's most famous habits in the studio is doing nothing. He'll lie on the couch, eyes closed, not giving feedback, not asking questions. Simply listening and people might say like, is he, has he fallen asleep? Why? Why have we hired this guy? What's he doing? But he isn't asleep. He's waiting because he knows you don't make good work.

By filling the silence, you make it by letting the silence speak.

Like Ruben once said that you can't force inspiration, but you can create the conditions and the space where inspiration will want to visit. And that comes from stillness. That can come from boredom. That comes from the willingness to sit with the unknown, to resist an urge, to control everything, to be on top of what's happening and to just let the powers that be bring the inspiration to you.

And that is completely how breakthroughs happen in art work and life

this [00:28:00] also resonates highly with things that I talk about on the show a lot like the urge to control things, whether that's in your relationships or your work. And so often we find that the most powerful thing you can do is literally nothing at all.

Summary of 12 Lessons

Sam Tonor: That was 12. Next level ideas on creativity and life from Rick Rubin's book, the Creative Act, a overriding through line I found in the book is that it is about the art of being yourself. At one point he says. People are so different. It's almost like you need to go through the process every time to discover and unlock what it is that makes that band, that band. And a lot of times they don't even know it.

We try to go on a journey and let the artist discover who they are and in the process. Best art comes from them. It's like getting to be their true selves and trying to take away all of the things that get in the way.

Final Thoughts on Creativity

Sam Tonor: Um, one last tip on the topic of being yourself is something he says is, I'll spend time with an artist and [00:29:00] listen very carefully to what they want to tell me. I'll get 'em to talk about their true goals, their highest, highest goals, and we'll go back to the heart of why they started doing what they're doing in the first place.

This is important because it's easy to be in such a rush to prove something or achieve something that we lose sight of why we're even doing it. So if you're thinking about where you're going, I would recommend that you contemplate what you want deep in your core outside of expectations, and then start trying some of the different ideas I shared in this episode.

You know, vary your inputs. Pick a random book and stick your finger on a line.

Spend time in silence. try engaging in things that you do, consume in a completely different manner

Or read or watch something that you would never think to pick up before.

Introduce some randomness, chaos, and beginner's mind into your life and embrace the discomfort and the weird ways that it pushes you.

Um, so many lessons in this episode. it was such a good book, and it was funny going through them to see how much of [00:30:00] this has been guiding my own creative journey lately. and as I mature and go through just my life and try to find out , what's worth doing, one naturally tries to move towards things that are more an extension of yourself. The way I've changed this show over the years, and now again with my new show, how to Change the World, I feel like both of them are becoming more comfortable places where I am really just following my natural

and building something that overlaps with what is being called for in the world by just noticing what is being called for by me rather than purely thinking of the audience first or anything. and it's really nice to be building on something without trying to force it out based on just what the audience expects or needing to create a version of myself that I think I should be.

So, yeah. Fantastic book. I loved it. it's called The Creative Act. And if you like this episode, I can totally recommend it.

it's not too long, but it's stuffed full of brilliant ideas. I only spoke about 12 of them here.

Supplementary Stories and Recommendations

Sam Tonor: One thing I should say is that he doesn't give that many [00:31:00] stories about when he was working with an artist or not. And most of the stories in this episode came from me watching a ton of fun documentaries about Rick on YouTube, because I'm obsessed , and the book is very much like just a manual for being an artist.

But it is fantastic, and if you want to supplement it with a bunch of documentaries on YouTube. I can also recommend them as well.

So what a legend. I hope this gave you a few ideas on how to channel your own creativity and be more yourself.

Wrapping Up and Challenge for the Week

Sam Tonor: Okay, so to summarize, we have had 12 ideas, not rules as such, as invitations. Invitations to slow down, to listen better, to trust your discomfort, remove the clutter, and most of all, stop trying too hard to be brilliant , and more importantly, start trying to be honest.

Rick Rubin really reminds us that art doesn't begin with talent, it begins with attention. So my challenge for you this week is to pick an idea, maybe just one, and approach it differently. Maybe vary your [00:32:00] inputs, maybe stop judging your early drafts. maybe change your environment just slightly, to change how you feel and it might make

your work or idea is more alive

And I don't think I can say it enough, that this isn't just about being a writer or a musician. If this is your relationship, maybe go for a picnic somewhere where you've never been before, changing your environment.

maybe ask chat GBT for 20 crazy conversation starters that you'd never normally talk about. maybe try watching movies that neither of you would ever think to suggest.

all of these lessons can be applied anywhere in your life. Whatever it is, try it. Don't try to impress anyone. and just tune in to being a little bit more yourself. Take it easy and catch you next week.

Thank you so much for listening. Go you. Your consistency to reach the end of an episode is legendary, my hero. If you have any ideas or feedback for the show, I'm always interested to hear from you. You're the best studies show. We need time for information to sink in, so I'm going to give you a five second pause, [00:33:00] silence to reflect on one idea from the show before you jump back into your busy life.

Ready and go.