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40 Principles For Taking Action And Making Ideas Happen
Ray Dalio is one of the most successful investors of all time.
Today, Bridgewater Associates, the hedge fund founded by Dalio, manages well over a hundred billion dollars in assets, making it the largest on the planet.
Yet in the aftermath of the 1982 market crash, Dalio’s financial situation wasn’t quite as rosy. He was so broke that he couldn’t even afford a plane ticket to visit a prospective client (and that was despite knowing the business he could land would far outweigh the cost of the airfare).
Before the collapse, Dalio had been making big, risky bets without a framework—essentially winging it. The crash cast him into the wilderness, functioning as a wake-up call to rethink his entire approach. Dalio came to the conclusion that he needed to transition from gut-based speculation to systematically tested principles.
He began to study the past in depth, testing his ideas against decades of market data until he arrived at a set of what he describes as “timeless principles.” Dalio found that his principles worked in virtually any economic setting and could reliably guide his decision making.
Over time, the results of his new approach were extraordinary: Dalio’s principles powered his turnaround, allowing him to outmaneuver the market at almost every turn, and ultimately produced the largest hedge fund the world has ever seen. Having seen how time-tested principles transformed his career, Dalio started advocating for what he calls “principled thinking” in all aspects of life.
Rather than handling each challenge or decision we face as a unique puzzle, Dalio urges us to notice that most situations are really just “another one of those.” Each new challenge we encounter often rhymes with a problem that others have already faced. By drawing on the proven principles they used, we’re better equipped to overcome our own hurdles.
We here at the Action Digest have found this to be especially true in the realm of creativity. Over and over, when you look at the stories of the world’s most successful artists, authors, musicians, scientists, entrepreneurs, politicians, or athletes, you see a shift away from purely reactive, “gut-based” approaches toward methods guided by timeless, universal rules.
Over the past year, we’ve scoured countless biographies, podcasts, YouTube interviews, historical documents, old magazines, Reddit AMAs, and scientific papers with a single question in mind: what principles do these breakthrough creatives share?
Our findings (so far) have led us to 40 core principles, touching every facet of creative success: from how to nurture ideas and spark breakthroughs, to staying resilient through setbacks until you finally see real results. We have compiled them all into bitesized takeaways below for your convenient reference.
Just as Dalio’s principles helped him recover from broke to billionaire, these 40 principles can demystify what it takes to achieve creative success and guide you toward building a structured, sustainable creative life—one where you consistently produce your best work.
And if you haven’t already, join thousands of likeminded creatives who have signed up for our free weekly newsletter so you can be the first to know when we add a new principle to our list.
A note on the 40 principles that follow: one name that you will see referenced more than any other in the list below is Scott Belsky. Scott co-founded Behance, recently completed a prolific run as the Chief Strategy Officer at Adobe, has authored two best-selling books: “The Messy Middle” and “Making Ideas Happen,” and is the co-founder of the Action Method (including this newsletter). Scott has built an impressive library of principles for navigating work and life over his career and they have proven an invaluable source of influence for this compilation.
Without further ado, here are the 40 principles that we’ve found the world’s greatest creatives share in common…
There was a time when Steve Jobs lived next to Larry Ellison, the billionaire cofounder of Oracle. The pair became friends and frequently exchanged feedback and ideas. One year after Jobs passed away, Ellison was asked a question about his late friend:
“Why was he so successful?”
Ellison’s response reveals the most important principle for creative success:
“There are a lot of good ideas. Translating a good idea into a great product is unbelievably hard. There are so many details. People accuse Steve of stealing the Macintosh from Xerox, you know, with the Alto computer. I was at Xerox park. I used the Alto a lot. Finishing the Alto and turning that into the Macintosh was enormously complicated and there were so many things that had to be done that Xerox had not done. There were a few good ideas in the Xerox machine but Steve would translate good ideas—not always his good ideas—but he would translate good ideas into finished products unlike anyone in our industry.”
Good ideas are essential but you need to understand that they are only 1% of the creative process. The thing that will make or break a good idea is your ability to bring it to life. This is where 99% of success takes place.
Thomas Edison doesn’t get credit for inventing the lightbulb because it was his idea. The concept of a light bulb had been around for many years prior to Edison’s breakthrough. In fact, multiple teams were working around the clock and all over the world in a race to see who could make it happen first.
Edison gets the credit simply because his lab won the race.
His lab won the race because Edison, like Jobs, was a genius at bringing ideas to life.
If you could only take one principle away with you today, let it be this one:
Creative success is not about ideas—it is about making ideas happen.
The struggle associated with making ideas happen might be why so many creatives speak about the importance of tenacity…
After 10 years in the journalism industry, Ira Glass (now an award winning journalist) felt ready to start reporting his own stories.
But, “I was not good at it,” Glass admits. “It would take me like a month to do a story that would take a normal reporter like three days. And I was a terrible performer on the air, and I was not good at interviewing people in a way that you could broadcast. Like their quotes were good, but I sounded terrible in the tape.”
Ira Glass describes this as “the taste-skill gap.”
You’re in the taste-skill gap when you can see what success looks like in your mind but you aren’t capable of achieving it yet.
You will find yourself in the gap every time you try something new, even if it’s in your area of expertise (note how Glass had 10 years of experience in his field already).
In 2014, Ed Sheeran was asked for advice in front of an audience of budding musicians and he uses the exact same word to describe himself as Ira Glass, “terrible:”
“You’re gonna write s*** songs at the beginning. You are. My songs were terrible. My raps were terrible. I listened to it the other day, it’s awful. But I got it out of me and the more and more you write, the more and more you experience, then you start flowing clean water, and songs start getting better and better.”
Don’t worry about whether you’re good enough at first.
You’re not.
The best of the best weren’t either.
That’s normal.
Just keep putting in the reps until you bridge the taste-skill gap.
Once you start developing some skill, it still usually takes a long time before you see your work pay off.
Paul Graham has guided dozens of startups from fledgling concepts to multi-billion dollar enterprises. “Great work usually entails spending what would seem to most people an unreasonable amount of time on a problem,” Graham explains. “Great work happens by focusing consistently on something you're genuinely interested in. When you pause to take stock, you're surprised how far you've come. The reason we're surprised is that we underestimate the cumulative effect of work.”
Graham explains that doing this kind of consistent, accumulative work is what leads to exponential growth—where our success suddenly snowballs to levels far beyond what we may have imagined at the start.
“But the trouble with exponential growth,” he continues, “is that the curve feels flat in the beginning. It isn't; it's still a wonderful exponential curve.”
All of the best creatives had to show up, day after day, year after year, even while the curve seemed flat and it felt like nothing was happening. They often had no proof that they were on an exponential trajectory but they kept going anyway.
But it’s worth it…
“Something that grows exponentially can become so valuable that it's worth making an extraordinary effort to get it started,” Graham concludes. “Writing a page a day doesn't sound like much, but if you do it every day you'll write a book a year. That's the key: consistency. People who do great things don't get a lot done every day. They get something done, rather than nothing.”
A huge part of creative success is showing up to work in the morning, greeting the flat curve like an old friend, and pushing forward regardless.
By the time he was just 26 years old, Jimmy Donaldson owned the most subscribed to YouTube channel in the world and had an estimated net worth of $500 million.
It looks like Donaldson took the fast track to success because he’s so young, yet he argues things moved painfully slow.
“It’s been crazy because I’ve been doing it since I was 11,” Donaldson recalls, “it was about as slow as it gets. So when I was a young teenager, I was getting no views, had no money, had no equipment. And so for the most part, it was just like, I was just trying to scrounge money so I could buy equipment because I was using my brother’s old laptop.” “Essentially, up until 18, I had been doing YouTube pretty religiously, but I was making no money.”
That’s 7 years of intense work before any tangible results appeared.
But once those results materialized, they snowballed and endured.
Morgan Freeman, whose acting career took 40 years to take off, believes that slow-moving success comes with a hidden upside:
“If it happens right away it’s gonna stop right away,” Freeman advises. “That’s a forgone conclusion. It’s just like weather. I’m a sailor and at sea we have a saying: ‘weather that’s short foretold, shall soon pass. Long foretold, long last.’ So take your time. Learn what you’re doing. Keep moving forward, just keep plugging along.”
Sometimes the longer it takes to generate results, the longer those results will stick around.
Creatives are celebrated because they do things that have never been done before.
The trouble with doing something that has never been done is that you don’t know if it’s going to work. It’s always a risk. This means some inevitable percentage of people will try talking you out of it and you have to stand up to them if you’re going to succeed!
President Theodore Roosevelt’s reputation took a massive hit when he committed to the construction of the Panama Canal.
Congress and the media said he was reckless and insisted he was throwing billions of dollars of American money down the drain.
After two years, little progress had been made and the critics seemed validated.
In a show of strength, Roosevelt visited the Canal in person, becoming the first American President to ever leave the country.
It took many more years but the Canal was eventually completed, unlocking trillions of dollars of global economic value.
If you’re going to achieve something innovative, you must learn to defend your idea against the critics, and you have to be comfortable with the critics seeming right for a long time.
Until they aren’t.
Over time, successful creatives realize that strongly divided reactions are a sign that they could be onto something promising.
This is “the paradox of creative consensus.”
A study published in Nature Journal in 2024 analyzed hundreds of audience reactions to Shark Tank business pitches and films at the Sundance Film Festival that premiered between 2015 and 2022.
They found that the most novel ideas, those with the most creative potential, were also the most polarizing.
In other words, when you voice a truly creative idea, you will probably find that some people love it and some people hate it.
Many of us abandon our ideas at this point because they feel too contentious.
Don’t make this mistake! Resist the urge to discard polarizing ideas. It is a strong signal that you could be onto something and you should respond with further curiosity rather than dismissal.
One of the publishers who rejected J.K. Rowling recommended she get a day job.
The Wright Brothers took flight for the first time just 9 days after the New York Times predicted that “man won’t fly for a million years.”
The Beatles were rejected because “guitar groups” were supposedly “on the way out.”
Don’t let yourself get spooked by the paradox of creative consensus.
Even when you’re creative idea is a winner, you probably won’t get it perfectly right from the beginning.
James Watson and Francis Crick were the first to identify the structure of DNA.
After just a few months of research, Francis and Crick thought they’d cracked the code.
They excitably showed off the model to their team who quickly pointed out why the model was dead wrong. The director of their lab was so embarrassed that he ordered Francis and Crick to stop working on DNA.
They had to continue working in secret for over a year before they finally landed on the correct structure and achieved their breakthrough.
Your idea might have the seed of genius but the first draft could be off by orders of magnitude.
Contrary to popular belief, good ideas aren't always recognizable at first glance. Sometimes they must endure the relentless forge of scrutiny, rejection, and rebirth to reveal their true value.
This means you may have to keep refining and building on your idea even as smart people around you point out where you’re wrong and insist you’re wasting your time.
When Michelle Obama told her college counselor that she was applying to Princeton University, she received some disappointing feedback. “I’m not sure,” Michelle remembers her counselor saying, “that you’re Princeton material.”
“That day I left the college counselor’s office at Whitney Young,” Obama recalls, “I was fuming, my ego bruised more than anything. My only thought, in the moment, was I’ll show you. But then I settled down and got back to work.”
Obama used the doubt from her counselor as motivation to work harder:
“I was beginning to understand that if I put in extra hours of studying, I could often close the gap. I wasn’t a straight-A student, but I was always trying, and there were semesters when I got close.”
Six months later, an offer letter from Princeton arrived in Obama’s mailbox.
“I’ve been lucky enough now in my life to meet all sorts of extraordinary and accomplished people,” Obama writes. “What I’ve learned is this: All of them have had doubters. Some continue to have roaring, stadium-sized collections of critics and naysayers who will shout I told you so at every little misstep or mistake. The noise doesn’t go away, but the most successful people I know have figured out how to live with it, to lean on the people who believe in them, and to push onward with their goals.”
Criticism is inevitable.
How you use it is up to you.
One pattern you notice when you study the best creatives is that they all find a way to take a higher than average number of shots on target during their creative process.
David Oglivy wrote one of the most famous marketing headlines of all time:
“At 60 Miles an Hour the Loudest Noise in This New Rolls-Royce Comes from the Electric Clock.”
He spent three weeks coming up with that one sentence and tried 100 different headlines before settling on the one above.
James Dyson spent five years grinding through 5126 prototypes for the bagless vacuum cleaner in his garden shed.
The best software teams in Silicon Valley have been found to test on the order of 10–20 iterations of a new product or feature per week.
When you look behind the scenes of an incredible piece of work, business, or performance, you will often find a surprising number of drafts, approaches, and experiments have been attempted in the run up to the finished version.
The best creatives test more ideas, write more drafts, take more swings, and build more prototypes.
Ask yourself: how can you give yourself the opportunity to take more shots on goal during your creative process?
Now let’s shift to exploring what the best creatives do at the beginning of their creative processes. How do they set themselves up for success from the start?
When Stephen King's son, Owen, became fascinated with saxophonist Clarence Clemons at age seven, King thought Owen might become a musical prodigy.
He gave Owen a saxophone for Christmas and arranged lessons.
However, seven months later, King suggested they cancel the lessons, because—despite his son's excellent progress—King saw that Owen was doing the minimum required, and no more:
“We never heard him taking off, surprising himself with something new, blissing himself out. As soon as his practice time was over, it was back into the case with the horn, and there it stayed until the next lesson or practice-time.”
Owen breathed a sigh of relief when he heard the news.
“When you find something at which you are talented,” King explains, “you do it (whatever it is) until your fingers bleed or your eyes are ready to fall out of your head. Even when no one is listening (or reading, or watching), every outing is a bravura performance, because you as the creator are happy. Perhaps even ecstatic.”
You rarely meet a successful creative who isn’t in love with what they do.
Their intrinsic motivation is often what allows them to be so tenacious despite all of the challenges we explored above.
This is also why, as Scott Belsky puts it: “a labor of love tends to pay off, just not how and when you expect.”
Love and curiosity are strong foundations for creative success.
In 2011, after yet another job application was rejected, Eric Barone made a vow.
He was going to learn to code in order to improve his career prospects.
Rather than go to University or join an online course, he decided to build a video game as a way of teaching himself.
“I didn’t really have any sort of deliberate plan or anything,” Eric admitted, “I just had my intuition as to what was the next important thing I should work on.” "And when it came to pixel art or other things that I had little experience in, I just dove in and did my best.”
Eric proceeded to teach himself every aspect of video game production: coding, art design, script writing, sound scoring, and more, relying on forums and blogs when obstacles arose.
“As time went on I started to get better at these things through hundreds of hours of practice.” “I just persevered and forced myself to learn. You realize the thing that you thought was good actually isn’t. You realize why and you improve on it. And that’s just an endless cycle.”
Four years later, his self-taught project had transformed into Stardew Valley, a game that sold half a million copies in two weeks and soon made over $300 million.
This is the power of project based learning.
Diving straight into whatever you’re trying to do is often the best way to learn because all of your skills are tied to real-world challenges and goals.
You learn new things at precisely the moment you need to know them and within the real-world context in which you need them.
The best creatives tend to just cut to the chase and get started on the thing they want to create.
They don’t have the necessary skills but they acquire them much faster.
the best way to get good at something is usually to just practice actually doing the thing in question.
a lot of very capable people outsmart themselves with complex plans that involve working a lot on fake prerequisites.
— Sam Altman (@sama)
6:49 PM • Oct 27, 2024
When elite entrepreneurs launch a new product, they tend to start with a “Minimum Viable Product.”
An MVP is a cheaper and simpler version of a product that can be made at least 10x faster than the real thing.
The benefit of MVPs is they help you test whether your idea is worth pursuing before sinking too much of your time, money and energy into a project.
Scott Belsky is all too familiar with MVPs as he has worked with dozens of software teams to launch products that are used by hundreds of millions of people.
Given that MVPs are designed to save time, teams who work with Scott are often surprised to learn that he recommends slowing down this part of the process.
Scott explains this is because “the natural tendency of every product team is to iterate around the MVP. Every MVP drops a heavy anchor in the sea of possibility and it becomes exponentially harder to explore new terrain once you start digesting data and iterating.”
It’s true that you should test your idea as quickly as possible.
But you shouldn’t rush to test any old idea.
Once you start working on an idea—it’s too easy to overlook all of other ideas that you could have otherwise pursued.
Psychologists call this “premature fixation.”
If you’re a screenwriter, you should probably explore many plot lines before finalizing the first scene. If you’re a football coach, you should probably consider multiple plays before you start practicing. If you’re a politician, you should explore your ideas with voters before writing your campaign speech.
Don’t start testing saddles until you’ve established that a horse is the best method of transportation.
We’ve seen that the best creatives sail deeply into the sea of possibility and spend a lot of time brainstorming and refining their ideas before they commit to bringing one to life.
Be quick to test your ideas but be intentional about exploring which ideas to test.
In 1962, when he was just 24 years old, Phil Knight had a “crazy idea” that Japanese athletic shoes could be a massive hit in the U.S. market.
With no experience, no plan, and no funding, Knight boarded a plane to Tokyo.
When he landed on Japanese soil, he telephoned a company called Onitsuka that sold “Tiger shoes.”
To Knight’s surprise, Onitsuka agreed to meet and he soon found himself sitting in a boardroom with the executive team.
“Mr. Knight—what company are you with?”
“Blue Ribbon,” Knight replied.
…he had just made the name up on the spot.
Then “they barraged me with questions about the United States,” Knight recalls, “about American culture and consumer trends, about different kinds of athletic shoes available in American sporting goods stores. They asked me how big I thought the American shoe market was, how big it could be, and I told them that ultimately it could be $1 billion. To this day I’m not sure where that number came from. They leaned back, gazed at each other, astonished. Now, to my astonishment, they began pitching me. ‘Would Blue Ribbon . . . be interested . . . in representing Tiger shoes? In the United States?’ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, it would.’”
Knight returned to America with a promise that Tiger shoe samples would soon follow.
His partnership with Onitsuka would last for 7 years until Blue Ribbon started manufacturing their own shoes under a new brand name, Nike.
It’s surprising how far you can get when you just call an audacious shot and then fight to live up to your goal as you on the journey.
Even if you fail, you will likely learn more and get much further than had you set your sights lower.
Aim big and then just do it.
Robert Caro has been described by some as the best biography writer in America.
It can take Caro anywhere from 8 to 12 years to pen one of his masterpieces.
In order to stay on track over such long time horizons, Caro starts every project by meticulously defining what outcome he’s trying to achieve:
“I can’t start writing a book until I’ve thought it through and can see it whole in my mind,” Caro explains, “so before I start writing, I boil the book down to three paragraphs, or two or one—that’s when it comes into view.”
Once Caro has his precious short paragraphs, he literally pins them up on his wall.
Those paragraphs then serve as a compass that keeps Caro on track for the remainder of his project:
“Getting that boiled-down paragraph or two is terribly hard, but I have to tell you that my experience is that if you get it, the whole next seven years is easier. When you have it, it’s so comforting, because you’re typing away, and you can look over there and say, ‘Is this fitting in with those three paragraphs? How is it fitting in? What you just wrote is good, but it’s not fitting in.’ So you have to throw it away or find a way to make it fit in. So it’s very comforting to have that.”
The benefits of working backward are not just limited to book writing.
Leaders at Amazon use the exact same working backward approach to develop new products and studies have found that students who work backward while studying enjoy superior academic performance.
Start by putting careful thought into the outcome you are trying to achieve and then keep it locked in your sights as you work to achieve it.
Many of the most influential people throughout history started with little to no resources at their disposal.
Instead, they learned to use what limited resources they had to maximum effect.
Jewel Kilcher has sold over 30 million records worldwide and had multiple singles on the Billboard Top 100 for months at a time.
But in 1992, she was homeless—living out of her car in San Diego, shoplifting to survive, and struggling to deal with frequent panic attacks.
That’s when she spotted an opportunity…
“When I was living in my car, there was a little tree that was a flowering tree and I liked to park next to it. So like that was my home. And I noticed there was this coffee shop right there that was going out of business and it was really off the beaten path.
And so I went in there and I talked to the lady who owned it. Her name was Nancy. And I was like, do you think you could stay open for two more months? And she’s like, why? I’m like, if I bring people in, can I keep the door money? You can keep all the coffee and food, and like, we’ll try to make it together? And she said yes.
And so I started going down on the beachfront in San Diego and I’d sing, like street sing. And I’d tell people I’m singing at the interchange coffee shop on Thursday night at six o’clock. And two people came.”
“It was amazing. I made $10.”
“And the next night, I would go sing all throughout town. On the street corner, I’d say, ‘hey, Thursday night’—they knew where to see me. And it just grew. It went from two people, to four people, to eight people, to 40, to 80, to capacity, to people standing outside watching me singing through the windows.”
Then, one Thursday in the summer of 1993, a talent manager named Inga Vainshtein made the drive to Jewel’s coffee shop after receiving a call about a surfer girl who sang there every week. Inga introduced Jewel to the head of Atlantic Records who would eventually sign Jewel’s first record deal.
Jewel used limited resources to maximum effect.
In a similar vein, studies have found that entrepreneurs high in “bricolage,” or bricoleurs, tend to be more successful.
“Bricolage is a concept widely used in the area of entrepreneurship,” one research team writes, “it means “making do” with what is “at hand” by reusing and recombining resources in the face of new problems or opportunities.”
Bricoleurs innovate at faster speeds, leverage their networks in more creative ways, make more money, and outpace their competitors.
Never forget that resourcefulness > resources
Two years before The Hunger Games, Jennifer Lawrence auditioned for a role in an indie film called Winter’s Bone in Los Angeles.
“Well, they turned me down,” Lawrence recalls, “and said I didn’t look right for the part.”
The character needed to look rough and the casting team said Lawrence was too pretty.
But she didn’t take no for an answer:
“They moved casting to New York. And I put myself on a redeye [flight] to just show up to casting the next day in New York. So that always helps - redeye, not showering, no makeup.”
Lawrence even walked around 13 blocks in the snow before heading into the casting room to look closer to the part.
“I was exhausted - it did the trick,” Lawrence laughs, “eventually, they went, oh, she's right. She's not cute.”
Not only did Lawrence get the role, she was nominated for an Academy Award for best actress which put her squarely on the map in time for The Hunger Games.
The doors of opportunity rarely swing open of their own accord, we must have the initiative to knock multiple times to pass through (or perhaps even find a window to climb through when no one answers the door!).
When gold was first discovered in California in 1848—Samuel Brannan had the good fortune of owning the only general store in the area.
At the peak of the gold rush, Brannan was making almost $200,000 a day (in today’s dollars) selling picks and shovels to gold miners, ultimately becoming California’s first ever millionaire.
While Brannan had some incredible luck, he also had the impetus to move to California—the literal frontier of the United States at the time—and set up a business. Gold was discovered just a couple of years after the first American settlers arrived in California.
President John F Kennedy relied on the same kind of luck to make it to the White House.
JFK had the good fortune of running for President at a time when TV was taking off in popularity. It is well established that the televised debate between Nixon and Kennedy swung a lot of votes in Kennedy’s favor. Kennedy looked cool and calm while Nixon looked off color and flustered.
But Kennedy also had the impetus to get familiar with the new broadcasting technology while its potential was still underrated.
Despite protests from his advisors, JFK had already built up a lot of practice with TV by showing up for multiple televised interviews in the years prior. He was exploring the technological frontier.
Again, creativity is an exercise in newness.
Newness, by its very nature, happens at the frontier of what’s currently possible.
The best creatives always seem “lucky” and “in the right place at the right time” but the truth is that luck finds them because they often work at the frontier of what’s possible—whether that’s geographical, technological, or cultural.
It’s much easier for opportunity to find you when you set up your camp right next to it.
Once you’ve set the stage for creative success, the day to day work of building your vision begins. So let’s now take a look at how the pros tackle the creative process…
A seasoned marketing executive at Southwest Airlines once pitched a television campaign that would take place over 9 months.
“Don, I hate to tell you, but we’re talking about next Wednesday,” Herb Kelleher, the founder and CEO, famously responded.
“The sense of urgency that Valentine learned is endemic at Southwest Airlines,” write Kevin and Jackie Freiberg in their book Nuts!: Southwest Airlines’ Crazy Recipe for Business and Personal Success. “Employees are not timid about springing into action and doing whatever it takes to help the company accomplish an objective in record time.”
For example, when Southwest announced they had plans to run a flight between Little Rock and Dallas, one of their competitors tried to undercut them by announcing their own plans to offer that same route.
So Southwest employees sprang into action:
“Within ten days, Southwest had put together a schedule, laid cable and installed computer equipment, acquired airlines, and decorated ticket counters. When the competing airline showed up in Little Rock, it was shocked to find that the gates had already been secured by Southwest.”
Fast forward another five days and Southwest had already captured 25% of the Little Rock-Dallas market.
When Taylor Swift had the idea for the hit song Lover late one night in her Nashville home, she boarded a plane the next morning, flew to the recording studio, and had the song finished by the end of the day.
Sylvester Stallone wrote the screenplay for Rocky in three days.
It can take a long time for your hard work to pay off but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t still be working with a sense of agility and urgency.
Creative success is an ultramarathon of sprints.
Maya Angelou has penned some of the most quoted prose in history.
For example:
“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
Angelou was once asked how she tackles a day’s work as a writer.
“Nathaniel Hawthorne says, ‘Easy reading is damn hard writing,’” Angelou muses, “I try to pull the language in to such a sharpness that it jumps off the page. It must look easy, but it takes me forever to get it to look so easy. Of course, there are those critics—New York critics as a rule—who say, well, Maya Angelou has a new book out and of course it’s good… but then she’s a natural writer. Those are the ones I want to grab by the throat and wrestle to the floor because it takes me forever to get it to sing. I work at the language.”
Angelou’s struggle reveals the nature of excellence: it is the war you wage upon your work until every trace of the struggle disappears.
The Hollywood director Stanley Kubrick (The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, 2001: A Space Odyssey) would sometimes shoot over 100 takes of a single shot until he was satisfied with it.
Airbnb’s CEO Brian Chesky pushes teams to imagine what a 5-star experience would look like, and then a 6-star experience, and then a 7-star experience, and then an 8-star experience, and so on, until they’re striving toward an exceptional standard of excellence.
Always strive for one level of excellence higher than you think you’re capable of achieving.
In 1929, Walt Disney was desperately trying to convince Ben Sharpsteen to join his fledgling animation studio.
Sharpsteen was the most talented animator in the business—but he had one major reservation about Disney’s studio:
“Walt Disney had to be the best,” Neal Gabler writes (one of Walt’s biographers), “Walt insisted upon excellence, and Sharpsteen admitted that he soon had some misgivings about joining the studio when he came to realize how high Walt’s standards were.”
Disney assured Sharpsteen that this was the secret to the studio’s success:
“Walt had passionately expressed his long standing conviction that his salvation was in making a product that so excelled, that the public would recognize it and enjoy it as the best entertainment, and that they would more or less demand to see Disney pictures.”
Sharpsteen ultimately overcame his reservation and joined Disney, but he wasn’t the only one with concerns about Disney’s strategy:
“His pursuit of excellence eventually ran up against an intractable reality that always seemed to bedevil him: money. Quality was expensive, and there never seemed to be enough money to support it.”
In the early years, Disney’s standards kept Disney on the permanent edge of bankruptcy. At one point, when the studio was weeks away from financial collapse, Disney’s own lawyer penned a letter regarding the existential threat:
“It is a beautiful idea to build up an ideal organization like Walt desires and make a product par excellence for future distribution hopes; but there is such a thing as running it into the ground… it is absolutely essential that you cheapen your product for the present.”
Disney called his attorney into his office and explained that he would not compromise on quality. He would not rush production. He would not cut salaries. They would find another way. Disney was unwavering in his belief that “quality was his only real advantage.”
Amidst all the drama of busywork and politics and constraints, we often forget that the most important thing we can do is strive to produce our absolute best work.
When Bill Buxton isn’t leading research at Microsoft, he teaches master’s students how to design products that people love.
Buxton’s students are often shocked by the warning that he gives them at the start of their course.
“The first thing I say when I come into a class,” Buxton explains, “is I say ‘I take marks off for good work.’ And the students are all trying to say… ‘What? What are you talking about?’ ‘No, no,’ I said, ‘really.’ ‘If you bring me really good work, I'm gonna fail you. And I don't care how good it is. The better it is, the more I'm gonna fail you.”
And Buxton isn’t kidding.
He believes that aiming for high quality at the beginning of the design process is a creative deathtrap.
“The whole point of the early phases of design,” Buxton continues, “is to make sure that when you start off with a blank piece of paper, that you not only get the design right, but you get the right design. And if you have not just explored every possibility at every step on every decision along the way—you are probably going to have the best product that's a failure. Beautifully engineered. Gorgeous to look at. And it's a failure. And by the time you're halfway down the process you find out it's too late. You can't go backwards and refactor and start again. You're done. The most important part is that early phase of the project. That's when you have the lowest burn rate for your clients. That's when you have the time to experiment and take these chances.”
For this reason, Buxton insists that the early design process should start with lots of sketching. Not fancy or beautiful sketching—just lots of rough and quick doodles to explore the full range of possibilities and ideas.
“And so what you can do by sketching is you can get way further down the process without [actually] going down that process because you're working at such a low level of fidelity that all you can see are the essential concepts.”
The best creatives start working at a low level of fidelity and gradually increase.
Taylor Swift says her songs start as “clouds:” a simple melody on the piano, a single lyric, or an emotion. She doesn’t delve into complex vocal arrangements or detailed lyric polishing until later in the process.
Elite Silicon Valley teams don’t tend to start coding until they’ve had conversations with users about their problems, debated ideas on a whiteboard, designed several rounds of mockups, etc.
When your early explorations are rough and messy then you can explore many more possibilities much faster. If you dive into the details too soon then you will often become fixated on a path that leads you to a dead end.
When you start working on a new creation, make sure you spend enough time working at the lowest level of fidelity. You increase your odds of not only getting the design right, but designing the right thing.
While it might be true that “a good craftsman never blames his tools,” a great creative almost always obsesses over them.
This is because they understand that the tools we choose shape the work we create.
A 2018 study found that students who used a Virtual Reality app to design a new wearable device (e.g. WHOOP) came up with more innovative product designs and experienced more flow than participants who designed using pencil and paper.
However, a 2021 study found that participants came up with more original ideas for fashion designs using a whiteboard compared to participants who designed using VR, because the imprecision of VR made it too difficult to generate intricate designs.
Every tool comes with unique features and constraints that will make it better suited for some tasks over others. But the key point is that each and every tools, both physical and digital, exerts a not-so-subtle influence upon how we think and what we create.
The best creatives always pay close attention to this influence and it helps to explain why there are so many stories of acclaimed creatives obsessing over their tools:
John Steinbeck (Nobel prize winning novelist) started each morning by sharpening 24 black pencils (the color yellow was too distracting).
Hollywood director J.J. Abrams once shared that working on his Apple laptop makes him feel as though he’s putting on a tie and inspires him to write higher quality work.
NVIDIA founder Jensen Huang travels with a specific brand of whiteboard marker only made in Taiwan.
It also helps to explain why famous creatives tend to invent new tools and technologies in order to push the boundaries of their work:
Walt Disney made Snow White possible through the invention of a specialized multiplane camera.
Amazon developed AWS to handle its own massive infrastructure needs and created a billion-dollar product in the process.
Hollywood director Stanley Kubrick modified a film camera to work with low light lenses built by NASA in order to film scenes using only candlelight.
A surprising amount of groundbreaking work began with a creator who had the ingenuity to invent the tooling that made it possible.
Be intentional about the tools you use and be open to opportunities to push the technological frontier in your industry.
Ken Segall led the creative team responsible for Apple's “Think Different” campaign.
He’s also the reason for the “i” in “iMac” that led to decades of products having the i-prefix in their name.
In his book, Insanely Simple, Segall recounts a story that illustrates how Steve Jobs maintained a standard of simplicity at Apple:
“Apple’s package-design team had just returned from their presentation to Steve Jobs,” Segall writes, “and their faces told the story. There were no visible signs of carnage. They just had that ‘things didn’t go exactly as we planned’ look. I felt bad for them, because I knew they’d been pouring their hearts into a project for several weeks, trying to solve a thorny packaging issue.” “While the team was decompressing after their Steve meeting, I crossed paths with the project leader in the creative group’s kitchen. ‘The suspense is killing me,’ I said. ‘How’d it go this morning?’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘Steve hit us with the Simple Stick.’ Translation: Steve had rejected their work—not because it was bad but because in some way it failed to distill the idea to its essence. It took a turn when it should have traveled a straight line. In this case it hadn’t even been the creative effort that bothered Steve—it was the project itself. The person leading the project had directed the team to create packaging for two versions of the same product. Steve had decided this was brain-dead. ‘Just combine them,’ he said. ‘One product, one box.’ There was no need to explore the idea of a second package. He was right. It was simpler, quicker, better. The conversation was over in minutes, and it left one very smart and talented group of people wondering why they hadn’t thought of that before.”
This story highlights the paradox of simplicity, as Segall explains:
“As those who have worked with Apple will attest, the simpler way isn’t always the easiest. Often it requires more time, more money, and more energy. It might require you to step on a few toes. But more times than not, it will lead to measurably better results.”
It can seem counterintuitive that simplicity tends to be much more difficult to achieve than complexity. But the best creatives understand this paradox and strive for simplicity with a religious dedication.
As three time Oscar winning actor Daniel Day Lewis once put it:
“There is nothing more beautiful in all the arts than something that appears simple. And if you try to do any goddamn thing in your life, you know how impossible it is to achieve that effortless simplicity.”
In 1910, Coco Chanel believed that female fashion was out of control.
She saw that “complicated patterns, an excess of lace, of embroidery, of gauze, of flunks and over-layers had transformed what women wore into a monument of belated and flamboyant art.”
After a trip to the opera, she recalls being appalled by “those reds, those greens, and those electric blues” that she witnessed.
Chanel observed that, “women think of every colour, except the absence of colours.”
Making good use of her seamstress skills, she designed a dress that was short, sleek, and stripped of color.
It looked nothing like the elaborate fashion of the time—French socialites couldn’t believe their eyes when they first saw it!
But when Chanels’ style was picked up by American Vogue, it transformed female fashion seemingly overnight and gave rise to a look that remains iconic to this day:

Chanel eventually compressed her principle into a single maxim:
“Before you leave the house, look in the mirror, and take one thing off.”
The problem is that this is much harder than it looks.
A 2021 study celebrated on the front cover of Nature Journal found that we humans have a bias for addition.
When faced with a problem or the need to improve something—we default to adding more stuff. More features, more plot lines, more colors, more meetings, more regulation.
We struggle to notice opportunities for subtraction—strategies that “remove to improve”—even when it is the optimal approach.
But the world’s greatest creatives are masters of subtraction:
Apple removed the physical keyboard from the smartphone.
The Eiffel Tower removed metal to create gaps that added wind resistance.
Stephen King says that cutting out news, television and radio, was the secret to having so much time to read and write.
Stay alert to the bias of addition and remind yourself to consider subtraction as a potential strategy for refinement.
Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing, The Newsroom, The Social Network) is one of the most successful screenwriters in the world.
But in 1989, he was bartending at a Broadway theater.
Fortunately, ‘Broadway bartender’ turned out to be the perfect occupation for a struggling writer.
After the pre-show rush of drink orders, there was a whole hour before the intermission when there was nothing to do.
“And during that hour at the Palace Theatre,” Sorkin reveals, “I was writing A Few Good Men on cocktail napkins of the bar. It was dialogue; I was writing the play.”
Months went by like this where Sorkin would return home with “pockets stuffed with cocktail napkins.”
It was a snatch of dialogue here, an idea for a scene there. Each napkin, by itself, seemed insignificant. But each one was like a small puzzle piece that eventually assembled into the full length stage version of A Few Good Men.
Sorkin’s humble napkin scribbles were a major hit on Broadway and ultimately led to the famous movie adaptation starring Tom Cruise.
Great ideas don't wait for the perfect moment; they emerge in the midst of life's chaos, demanding to be captured in whatever medium is at hand.
The best creators never fail to capture their ideas the moment they have them.
Taylor Swift immediately records a voice note on her iPhone when she gets an idea for a song
The late actor Robin Williams carried a yellow legal pad wherever he went to record observations and conversations he overheard
Amazon employees close to Jeff Bezos report that he was known for constantly pulling out notebooks to jot down ideas
And many of them expect others to do the same. As Richard Branson once admitted, “One of my greatest frustrations is having meetings with people who don’t take any notes. How do they expect to remember what was said, and act upon it?"
Whether it’s making a payment, sending an email, or streaming a movie—we now rely on dozens of software products over the course of a single day.
This means the talented teams of people who build and maintain each of our apps, sites, and systems have to deal with a lot of pressure.
They frequently wrestle with decisions that will impact millions of users and stakeholders across the globe.
When your team meets to discuss these high-stakes decisions, how do you ensure that everyone walks away with the right answers?
As a leader and investor working with software giants such as Adobe, Behance, and Uber, Scott Belsky has been in the room for thousands of these decisions. Scott has found that one way of dramatically improving the odds of success is showing rather than telling.
“When I help our team drive decisions,” Scott explains, “I’ve learned to use design to show, rather than tell. Oftentimes, even as recently as last night in an airport on the phone with our leadership team, I was saying—can we please wait to form an opinion until we see the prototypes for this? We’re talking around each other, we’re making a decision, we’ve got to see the prototypes to understand what we’re really doing.”
“A prototype is worth a hundred meetings,” Scott emphasizes. “Almost all product meetings that aren’t grounded with a prototype are a waste of time (or worse).” “You’ll start imagining different things and become untethered. A prototype immediately surfaces gaps in logic or business concerns. It is the fastest way to drive alignment. It is hard to argue with an amazing experience, but all too easy to critique ideas and mince words.”
When you’re ready to start creating or sharing an idea—regardless of whether it’s a plot in a movie, a new food recipe, or the results of a scientific experiment—default to showing it rather than telling it.
Making your idea presentable is a valuable exercise even if you never show anyone. By going through the process of showing, you will expose flaws in your thinking and force yourself to confront realities.
Once you are ready to share, you will engage people’s senses and emotions—leading to faster alignment and more productive feedback.
When people come to the world’s most subscribed to YouTuber, Jimmy Donaldson, for advice, he insists the secret to success is simple.
“Like all you need to do,” Donaldson advises, “this applies to people who have not uploaded videos but have dreams of being a YouTuber, is: make 100 videos… and improve something every time. [The second video] put more effort into the script. The third one, try to learn a new editing trick. The fourth one, try to figure out a way that you can have better inflections in your voice. The fifth one, try to study a new thumbnail tip and implement it. The sixth one, try to figure out a new title. There’s infinite ways. That’s the beauty of content creation online. There’s literally infinite ways, from the coloring, to the frame rate, to the editing, to the filming, to the production, to the jokes, to the pacing, to every little thing can be improved. And they can never not be improved. There’s literally no such thing as a perfect video.”
It is possible to have thousands of hours of experience at something yet still lack competence.
The bridge between repetition and mastery is the continual striving to make each rep better than the last.
Every great creative has a unique process but the thing they all share in common is that they never stop refining it.
Beyond exhibiting the same patterns of behavior, we’ve found that the best creatives also tend to adopt the same patterns of psychology. Here are some principles for cultivating the type of mindset that’s necessary for creative success…
In his book, How To Make A Few Billion Dollars, Brad Jacobs reveals the principles he’s relied on to create an astonishing seven different billion-dollar companies.
One of the most crucial principles came early in his career when he met with a trusted mentor for lunch named “Mr. Jesselson.”.
“I arrived burdened with problems that I began to unload on him,” Jacobs remembers. “Mr. Jesselson listened carefully—he was good at that—and waited until I had run out my string. Then he put down his fork, turned to me, and in his thick German accent said, ‘Look, Brad, if you want to make money in the business world, you need to get used to problems, because that’s what business is. It’s actually about finding problems, embracing and even enjoying them—because each problem is an opportunity to remove an obstacle and get closer to success.’”
Click. Brad felt his mindset shift. A new way of navigating the world had just been unlocked.
“In that moment,” Brad continues, “I learned something invaluable: Problems are an asset—not something to avoid but something to run toward. Big ambitions often beget even bigger problems. If your initial reaction to a major setback is overwhelming frustration, that’s understandable, but it’s also counterproductive. Once you’re over that moment, pivot toward success: ‘Great! This is an opportunity for me to create a lot of value. If I can just figure out how to solve this problem, I’ll be much closer to my goal.’”
“Life can be uncomfortable,” Brad concludes, “but you can accomplish a lot if you can figure out how to reframe the uncomfortable things in ways that allow you to utilize them.”
The fact that the mechanical shark kept breaking while filming Jaws forced Steven Spielberg to find more subtle ways to convey the shark’s presence. Spielberg believes this problem turned out to be an incredible gift: "it's a much better movie that the shark kept breaking down because I had to be resourceful and figuring out how to create suspense and terror without seeing the shark itself.”
Practice this mindset until it becomes habitual: each obstacle, problem, and setback you encounter is an opportunity to get smarter, stronger, and more creative.
Taylor Sheridan broke numerous television viewing records with his hit Western drama, Yellowstone.
At one point during Yellowstone’s run, Sheridan disclosed that he was writing and running over 10 additional unique shows at the same time.
What secret technique could account for so much creative output pouring from one individual?
The real secret is that Sheridan didn’t have a choice.
See, in 2020, the famous “Four Sixes” ranch went up for sale in Texas for $350 million.
Sheridan became obsessed with the idea of owning the iconic estate for himself but the problem was that his bank balance was about $330 million shy of the asking price.
So Sheridan signed a $200 million deal with Paramount.
In exchange for his 200 million, Sheridan put himself on the hook for at least five cycles of production each year until 2028.
From there, investors were willing to give Sheridan the remaining $130m to secure the ranch.
One reason that Sheridan is a hit drama making machine is because he is contractually obligated to be one.
Sheridan’s Paramount deal is an extreme example of what psychologists call a “precommitment device:” a promise that locks your future self into taking a desirable course of action.
The pressure of working under a precommitment divide can be stressful but it can also bring out the best in us.
You don’t need to bet everything you have on a project but having the courage to put yourself on the hook can be a powerful psychological fuel source.
What is the number one factor that “makes people happy, motivated, productive, and creative at work?”
Harvard’s Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer found themselves fascinated by that question in the late 2000s.
After analyzing 12,000 diary entries provided by 238 employees in 7 companies, they had a resounding answer:
Progress.
“Of all the workday events that can boost a person’s emotions and intrinsic drive to do a great job, the single most important is making progress in meaningful work,” the pair concluded.
“It’s the number one differentiator for your best versus worst days.”
Something that Teresa and Steven were not expecting is just how small progress can be to have a strong effect: “one of our most surprising findings is that even making small incremental steps forward can make people feel great.”
John Wooden, winner of ten national championships as UCLA’s basketball coach, prized this principle above all others, encouraging his team to “make each day your masterpiece” by focusing on small, daily improvements.
Benjamin Franklin maintained an evening journaling habit of writing down all of the good he had done each day.
If even the smallest of steps can boost our performance, then our greatest opportunity isn’t in making bigger leaps, but in acknowledging the small steps we’re already taking.
With over 50 million members worldwide, Behance is the largest creative network and portfolio platform on the planet.
But there were several years in the early days of Behance where the site was so small that Google would assume you meant “enhance” or even “Beyonce” should you try to search for it.
During this period where the company’s success was uncertain, Scott Belsky (who was the CEO at the time) discovered a crucial principle for helping his team stay motivated.
He came to believe that the process of working on a creative mission is like going on a roadtrip with blacked out windows:
“As a leader going through any period of volatility, you are, in some ways, akin to driving a car across the country with the windows blacked out in the back seat,” Scott explains. “And all of your team is sitting back there. And if they don’t feel like they’re making progress, they will lose their motivation and they will fail to make progress. And your responsibility is to narrate this journey, to merchandise the progress that is being made to your team. Progress begets progress. The more you feel you’re making progress, the more progress you’re likely to make.”
For this reason, Scott believes one of the most important jobs of creatives and leaders is to recognize small instances of progress and then call them out for everyone to see.
Doug Conant, the former CEO of Campbell soup, found a great way to do this.
During the course of his 10-year tenure at Campbell, Doug sent 30,000 handwritten notes to his 20,000 employees (almost 10 notes per day!).
Doug’s notes were short and celebrated a specific accomplishment or contribution.
Under Conant’s progress-oriented leadership, Campbell Soup’s employee engagement score increased by 900% and the company went from declining sales to outperforming the S&P500.
If a feeling of progress is one of the most powerful sources of motivation available then you must go out of your way to make it visible, both to yourself and to others.
The mathematician, Srinivasa Ramanujan, died in 1920 at the young age of 32.
Despite passing away so young and so long ago, Ramanujan’s notes are still contributing to his field. Quanta Magazine asserts that modern mathematicians are “still catching up to his mysterious genius to this day.”
A notable English mathematician who worked with Ramanujan was once asked what made Ramanujan so special.
One of the reasons the mathematician revealed was that “Ramanujan had a remarkable capacity for coming up with hypotheses very quickly, but that he was also very quick to revise his hypotheses. He was nimble: If something didn’t work, he was able to pivot and revise his way of thinking. Mathematicians don’t always appreciate the power of that.”
One of the defining traits of creatives is that they are much more open minded on average. Their openness is a big advantage because it grants them the ability to recognize when they are wrong and then change course fast.
Sometimes that means going back to the drawing board, like when Pixar scrapped two years of work on Toy Story 2, rewrote the entire plot in a single weekend, and started over with the voice over and animation from scratch.
Other times it means switching to something new entirely, like when Stewart Butterfield decided to shut down his company’s failing game, Glitch, and pivot his remaining resources toward building Slack, the popular chat app that’s now worth billions of dollars.
Professor Paul Saffo of Stanford’s Engineering school once famously described this mentality as “Strong opinions weakly held,” and advised that you should come to “the best conclusion possible, but then really look for information that proves the conclusion wrong.”
Stay open to where you’re wrong—the willingness to change your mind is essential in creative domains.
When future First Lady, Jackie Kennedy, met future President of the United States, John F. Kennedy, she asked him what he believed his best trait to be.
She expected him to say something like “courage”—given that Kennedy was a war hero.
But he answered instead: “Curiosity.”
Kennedy’s answer, curiosity, is consistently found to be one of the defining traits of the most successful creatives.
Hollywood producer, Brian Grazer (A Beautiful Mind, Apollo 13, Arrested Development, 24, Empire), has a theory that curiosity is the ultimate competitive advantage.
Whenever Grazer is asked how he has he managed to sustain his success across such an extensive range of genres—he credits his decades-old habit of engaging in “curiosity conversations.”
Every two weeks, Grazer schedules a conversation with someone “from other industries, “science, medicine, politics, religion, every art form, [and] of course—technology,” and uses the meeting as an opportunity to learn everything he can about the person and their process.
“The beauty of curiosity,” Grazer explains, “and being present, is that it allows you to turn the constellation of dots in your mind into paths you can access, and that’s a competitive advantage over other people. It was a competitive advantage for me, competing against powerful producers who often had far greater resources than me. I realized that being exhaustively curious was my main competitive advantage, because it led to information, knowledge and resourcefulness that others might not have had.”
Creativity is all about connecting dots that have never been connected before.
Curiosity improves your ability to connect dots because it is the instinct that drives you to seek out more dots and add them to your constellation of knowledge.
More dots means more potential for unexpected connections.
Listen carefully to where your curiosity leads you and trust that the dots you collect will someday spark a surprising connection.
“What did you learn about running your own business that you wished you had thought of sooner, or thought of first, by watching the other guy?”
That was a question posed in 2007 to Bill Gates and Steve Jobs in the only interview the two frenemies ever held together. After shifting in his chair and reflecting for a moment, Gates went first: “Oh, I’d give a lot to have Steve’s taste.”
The audience burst into laughter as Jobs just stared intensely at the floor in his classic black turtleneck.
“Not a joke at all,” Gates insists, “we sat in Mac product reviews where there were questions about software choices, how things would be done, that I viewed as an engineering question, and I’d see Steve make the decision based on a sense of people and product that, you know, is even hard for me to explain. The way he does things, it’s just different, and I think it’s magical.”
Jobs’s magical taste was mystifying to Gates, but Jobs explained it transparently in a “lost interview” 13 years prior:
“It comes down to taste,” Jobs begins. “It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done, and then try to bring those things into what you're doing. I mean, Picasso had a saying, he said, ‘Good artists copy, great artists steal.’ And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.”
And Jobs wasn’t exaggerating.
In Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs, there are countless examples of Jobs referencing great artists throughout the process of building Apple products:
Jobs says the Eichler home he grew up in inspired his passion for making well designed products for the mass market.
He credited the Bauhaus movement for inspiring Apple’s white, minimal, aesthetic.
He told his team they needed to add curves to the Macintosh in the same way that Mercedes and Porsche added curves to their cars.
He brought a housing appliance from Macy’s into Apple HQ one day to inspire the Mac’s lines and bevels.
He dragged his team outside to show them how many rounded corners you observe in the outside world when trying to convince them that Apple’s software needed to have rounded corners.
He said he wanted his products to elicit the same feelings that Japanese Zen gardens elicited in him when he visited Kyoto.
He drew upon calligraphy lessons when designing the fonts for the Mac.
He named products after the best cities and natural wonders.
And so on and so on
Creatives with taste are shaped by a lifelong dedication to studying the pinnacle of greatness across diverse fields.
They nurture a deep appreciation for excellence in all forms and then try to incorporate that into their own work.
To become influential, we must first be influenced.
Our outputs: what we create and release into the world—is only bounded by our inputs: everything we’ve cared to learn, experience, and obsess over.
Sometime after Taylor Sheridan signed his $200 million deal with Paramount, one interviewer asked him:
“In trying to make so many shows so fast, didn’t you take on too much?”
“I’ll tell you what,” Sheridan replied. “It sure looked that way.”
Sheridan says his initial plan was to “write, cast and direct the pilots, and then we would bring in someone as a showrunner to run a writers room and I could check in and guide them.”
But “that plan failed,” Sheridan admits. “My stories have a very simple plot that is driven by the characters as opposed to characters driven by a plot—the antithesis of the way television is normally modeled.” “I’m really interested in the dirty of the relationships in literally every scene. But when you hire a room that may not be motivated by those same qualities—and a writer always wants to take ownership of something they’re writing—and I give this directive and they’re not feeling it, then they’re going to come up with their own qualities. So for me, writers rooms, they haven’t worked.”
The interviewer points out that Sheridan could have just allowed the writers to go in their own direction and compromise.
“I spent the first 37 years of my life compromising,” Sheridan rebuffs. “When I quit acting, I decided that I am going to tell my stories my way, period. If you don’t want me to tell them, fine. Give them back and I’ll find someone who does—or I won’t, and then I’ll read them in some freaking dinner theater. But I won’t compromise. There is no compromising.”
The lesson here isn’t to reject compromise.
It’s the value of knowing which compromises to reject.
Sheridan intuitively understands that audiences respond to creative work that feels authentic. Therefore, any compromise that betrays his core authenticity is one that ends up on the rejection pile. This isn’t always the right decision, but it is more often than it isn’t.
Great creators are able to recognize the values and elements that are responsible for the authenticity of their work—and they are unflinching in their defense of those essential ingredients.
Have the courage to be rigid with your core values and the flexibility to be open-minded with everything else.
In 1929, a reporter arrived at the home of Albert Einstein.
As they sat down in Einstein's study—the reporter looked around and was shocked by what he saw: the great physicist owned far fewer books than he was expecting.
The reporter asked why and Einstein gifted him a counterintuitive life lesson:
“Reading after a certain age—diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking, just as the man who spends too much time in the theater is tempted to be content with living vicariously instead of living his own life.”
Legendary investor Warren Buffet agrees with Einstein, arguing that the ability to think for yourself is worth at least 30 IQ points.
A young investor once asked Buffett in front of a live audience whether intelligence or discipline is more important for investors.
“The good news I can tell you,” Buffett responded, “is that to be a great investor you don’t have to have a terrific IQ. If you’ve got 160 IQ, sell 30 points to somebody else because you won’t need it in investing. What you do need is the right temperament. You need to be able to detach yourself from the views of others or the opinions of others. You need to be able to look at the facts about a business, about an industry, and evaluate a business unaffected by what other people think. And that is very difficult for most people. Most people have, sometimes, a herd mentality which can, under certain circumstances, develop into delusional behavior. You saw that in the Internet craze and so on. I’m sure everybody in this room has the intelligence to do extremely well in investments.”
“The ones that have the edge,” he continues, “are the ones who really have the temperament to sit, look at a business, look at an industry and not care what the person next to them thinks about it, not care what they read about it in the newspaper, not care what they hear about it on the television, not listen to people who say, ‘This is going to happen,’ or, ‘That’s going to happen.’ You have to come to your own conclusions, and you have to do it based on facts that are available. If you don’t have enough facts to reach a conclusion, you forget it. You go on to the next one.”
Make up your own mind before you consult the herd.
Creative ideas do not follow the consensus. They break it.
And finally, the remaining principles explore the last major theme we observed over the past year of research… respite.
Kevin Kelly is the founding executive editor of Wired magazine and has been described by some as “the most interesting man in the world.”
Part of what makes Kelly so interesting is that he’s known for imparting counterintuitive life advice—like when his son came to him after finishing college to discuss his next move.
“Don’t go into a career,” Kelly instructed his son, “don’t get a job, goof off. You haven’t goofed off in your entire life. Your entire life you’ve been striving and trying to get good grades, and you need to spend some time goofing off, doing nothing.”
Taking his Dad’s advice to heart, Kelly’s son embarked on an unconventional project: for one year, he made art daily, wrote a thesis, and self-published it, effectively awarding himself a Master of Fine Arts.
“I am a huge believer in sabbaticals, sabbaths, vacations, goofing off—as instrumental and essential for later productivity,” Kelly explains, “obviously for themselves they have value but they also happen to be one of the most productive things you can do.”
Freeman Dyson, an award winning physicist who conceptualized the Dyson Sphere and advanced quantum science, agrees with Kelly.
In the late 1940s, Dyson spent six months studying large stacks of papers and calculations under Richard Feynman.
“At the end of six months, I went off on a vacation,” Dyson recalls, “I took a Greyhound bus to California and spent a couple of weeks just bumming around. This was soon after I had arrived from England, so I had never been to the West before. After two weeks in California, where I wasn’t doing any work, I was just sight-seeing, I got on the bus to come back to Princeton, and suddenly in the middle of the night when we were going through Kansas, the whole sort of suddenly became crystal clear, and so that was sort of the big revelation for me, it was the Eureka experience or whatever you call it. Suddenly the whole picture became clear, and Schwinger fit into it beautifully and Feynman fit into it beautifully and the result was a theory that actually was useful. That was the big creative moment of my life. Then I had to spend another six months working out the details and writing it all up and so forth.”
The greatest creative moment of Dyson’s life came to him at the end of a two week vacation.
One of the most magical aspects of the creative brain is that it continues to work subconsciously even while you’re consciously resting.
Moreover, there’s a case to be made that the creative brain can only engage in the deep subconscious processing necessary for breakthroughs if you give yourself enough time off.
In addition to periods of rest, the best creatives understand that they need to carve out time to think.
After professor Andrew Huberman interviewed the hit music producer Rick Rubin on his podcast, the pair decided to hang out in person. But “it was,” as the professor describes it, “the weirdest visit ever.”
They treaded water in the morning, listened to a podcast together, “and then we would just like… sit around,” Huberman reveals. “And I'm like, ‘what are you gonna do?’ He's like, ‘well, let's just like sit.’ And we would just sit with our eyes closed. And I was like… ‘alright.’ Then we have lunch, and then he was like, ‘well, let's just sit.’ And then at one point, I'm like, ‘Rick, what are we doing?’ And he's like, ‘well, when you keep your body still, and your mind is really active, amazing ideas come forward.’ And that's when I was like, ‘oh my goodness,’ because my first guest on my podcast was a guy named Carl Deisseroth. He's the world's best bioengineer. He's a psychiatrist. He raised five kids. He's a phenom. He'll probably win a Nobel Prize. And he told me his practice of coming up with ideas is, after his kids are asleep at night, [he] sits down and he keeps his body completely still, and he forces himself to think in complete sentences, keep his mind super active. And I was like, wow. And it turns out that if you look historically, a number of scientists have talked about this, a number of creatives have talked about this.”
Huberman is correct but it’s not just scientists:
Bill Gates is widely known for dedicating entire weeks to just think—a tradition he calls “think weeks.”
Charles Darwin had a thinking path near his country home that he would traverse several times a day.
Moments of quiet, boredom, and stillness were common for most of human history.
Today, we have an infinite stream of stimulation, whether it be podcasts, visual media, or news feeds, that have quietly usurped every period of idleness.
But we pay an invisible cost for this constant input—an erosion of the mental space necessary for creativity and deep thinking.
The best creatives of any era are those who have the discipline to sit with their own thoughts for extended periods of time.
Despite the importance of taking time off, it tends to be quite difficult to pry high-performing creatives away from their work.
That’s because the vast majority of them derive enormous satisfaction from their jobs.
The great comedian Jerry Seinfeld rejects the idea that hours spent working are a regrettable use of time:
“You know how they always say, ‘Nobody ever looks back on their life and wishes they spent more time at the office?’ Well, why? Why don’t they? Guess what? Depends on the job. If you took a stupid job that you find out you hate and you don’t leave, that’s your fault. Don’t blame work; work is wonderful. I definitely will not be looking back on my life wishing I worked less. If that’s not how you feel at work, quit. On your lunch break, disappear. Make people go, ‘What happened to that guy?’ ‘I don’t know. Said he was getting something to eat and never came back.’”
Even during grueling periods of work, high performers find a way to have fun regardless.
When Simone Biles—American multi olympic gold medal winning gymnast—was introduced to Márta Károlyi, the coordinator for USA Gymnastics, they clashed.
Károlyi warned Biles to show zero emotion: no cheering for other gymnasts during competitions. No frowning during training. No laughter or anything that implied Biles was enjoying herself.
But Biles pushed back, “I started to realize that whenever I was having fun, I was performing better—so why stand there with a blank face?”
After dropping out of Tokyo in 2020 and being subjected to ferocious criticism, Biles went through a dark period. It was unclear whether she would compete again.
But in 2022, she was using fun as a gateway to get back into the game again. “I owe that to my teammates,” Biles revealed back in January of last year, “I didn’t think I’d be having fun like this at my age in the gym, but they keep it fun. They’ve been bigger rocks to me than they know.”
Biles used that word, “fun,” eight times in the victory press conference after she helped the U.S. gymnastics team secure their recent Parisian Gold Medal.
Don’t fall for the misconception that seriousness goes hand in hand with high-pressure situations. Not only can fun survive in pressurized environments, it can help you thrive amidst them.
Fun is not a life raft, it’s a speedboat.
Finally, after all of your preparation and hard work, you must have the ability to let it all go and improvise.
When Matthew McConaughey was asked about the iconic chest pounding hum/chant that he performs in Wolf Of Wall Street, he revealed that it was “something I’d do before scenes to relax myself, get my voice to drop.”
“We do 5 takes,” McConaughey continues, “I’m happy. Martin’s happy. We’re about to move on, and before we moved on Leonardo raises his hand and he goes… hang on a second, what’s that thing you’re doing before the scene? And I told him. And he goes… what if you put that in the scene? And I was like… yeah, great. So the next scene I started it off and gave him my spiel and didn’t know if it was going to come back—and then it hit me in my head—get him on the same rhythm. Because now he understands, pass the torch, awh huh huh, and then he started it off.”
So many of the most iconic moments that we remember, whether they’re in art, sport, politics, or beyond, were unplanned.
Don’t just execute the plan, leave the door open for all of the small and authentic surprises along the way.
Creativity and surprise are one and the same.
Each of the above principles has the power to aid you on your journey toward greater creative success.
But you will find that their magic multiplies as you master more and more of them.
The great investor Charlie Munger described this as the “Lollapalooza effect.”
As he explains, “Lollapalooza effects occur when there are multiple forces or factors moving in the same direction. The key is that when forces combine, they don’t just add up; each force builds off of and strengthens the other, creating an explosive effect with huge results.”
The power of these principles grows exponentially as you add more of them to your repertoire. But this is not something you can do overnight. It is a journey of constant refinement that lasts a lifetime.
For this reason, we urge you to save these principles somewhere that makes it easy for you to revisit them in future.
And if you want to be the first to read about new principles that we add to this list then make sure you’re subscribed to our free weekly newsletter.
Finally…
No creatives left behind—pass this list along to anyone you know who’s cooking up big ideas! :-)
This edition was written by: Lewis Kallow || (follow) ![]() | With input and inspiration from: Scott Belsky || (follow) ![]() |