reading: the creative act: a way of being (rick rubin)

notes

this has been in the reading queue for a while now. a trip to zenith books provided the irresistible impetus to grab a copy. this was not the book i was expecting. for its page count heft it’s a remarkably sparse book in terms of text. there’s a lot of white space in here.

it’s less a treatise on the creative process and … living up to its subtitle, more of a discussion on a way of living/being. i found myself strangely pulled through the book. though i do not consider myself to be a “creative” person, i do enjoy the act/process of making things immensely. this provides a feeling of satisfaction that is difficult to find in a “knowledge worker” profession.

for me, this was a glimpse into a world where there are people pulled along through life with some sort of creative drive. i’ll set aside the rick rubin v. beastie boys beef for a moment and roll with the fact that rubin’s had a lot of experience working with a lot of artists on seminal works. the dude’s got stuff to say about fostering creativity. or, more accurately a creative life, in service to the art.

this book is a lot more “spiritual” than i expected. it doesn’t follow a cohesive/cogent narrative where the discussion early in the book leads into a structured understanding of things later in the book. instead, it seems to present itself as a collection of “creative life” vignettes that one can digest in any order.

even for non-creatives there are useful reminders aplenty.

living a life open to experience gives you the greatest exposure and range of inputs to solving problems or collecting “creative seeds”
finished is better than perfect and enables you to move onto the next thing in the creative pipeline.
altering ones perspective and getting space from a problem - physically, at times can help unblock.
providing constraints or “rules” can help to generate more creative solutions or help to surmount an impasse.

there was interesting discussion on openess to the subconscious inputs/responses that we exhibit that can be used to elicit a hidden preference.

the quote that i kept coming back to within this book …

living in discovery is at all times preferable to living through assumption.
– p275

i’m not much for the woo, but perhaps i should be more open to the discovery that woo affords, more consciously, if necessary.

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