Unlock Your Creativity with Rick Rubin

When it goes from the thing you love to the thing you do for work, it's an issue. And to get back to that, I do this because I love this more than anything. I do this not because I got a good review, not because I sold a lot of copies. I do this because this is what I do. It's what I've always wanted to do, and I'm going to continue doing it with the same head that I went into it in the first place, that allowed me to be successful in the first place. So it's helpful to remember gets you there. And usually what gets you there is the first thing that gets snuffed out in success. When you're in the writing stage, there can be no other concerns other than what's the most interesting thing to me here now. That's all. And then when it's done and there are no more creative decisions to be made and the book is written and you have, it may not be the final, final, final version of the book, but where you know exactly what the book is. You've said what you want to say and you feel good about it. That would be the first time to think about, okay, what could a cover look like? What could the marketing look like? Who's the audience for this? If you start thinking who the audience is before you start writing, it's going to really muddy the water. But anytime you get attached to a method for a romantic reason, you know, it works. And I'm not suggesting using another method because it's easier or saves you time, but maybe by experimenting with the other method, you learn something new about your process that you didn't know. And that's always good. One of the things I recommend in the book is like creating the equivalent of creating office hours, having a schedule to work where you say, I'm going to sit down for this. Could be 20 minutes, could be three hours up to you. What, what that window is, how you want to do it, but make a commitment show up every day. And then there's no excuse, regardless of whether anything gets made during that window, you're not waiting for the right moment to start. You're starting and you're doing it every day and you're doing it at the same time every day. And you're building the habit of, I'm going to sit here every day, even if it's just to sit here and be bored, something eventually, something good will eventually come from that practice, whatever it is. Yeah. I love music that is outside of time and it can, and one of the things about using organic instruments is a piano sounds like a piano a hundred years ago. And it sounds like a piano today. And it'll sound like a piano in a hundred years. If you use the latest sounds, the newest sounds, the sounds of today, then tomorrow they'll sound like the sounds of yesterday. So it's a, it's a very delicate line to work with the newest of sounds because it, and it can end up sounding very dated. If you listen to music from the eighties, invariably, it sounds like that's the music of the eighties because of it just has a dated sound. And that really is more because of technology than anything else. The best music has this, um, it's rooted in something timeless. And the, the, what, when it's really exciting is when it sounds like it's timeless and it sounds like you've never heard anything like it before. That's radical. It doesn't sound like a copy of something from the past. It sounds like this has the, the roots and lineage of something from the past, but it's made into something radically new. You know, if you, if you're inspired by an idea from 200 years ago, that's not on top, that's not on everyone's top of mind today. So it has a freshness that's different. Whereas if you, if you make a song that sounds like the song that just played on the radio, yes, that's the current sound, but it's also, well, that was just on the radio. Why bother making one that sounds like that? That's one's already, already out, but we want to try every idea. We want to see where it leads. Cause you never know. You really never know what's going to work and what's not going to work. If someone says, I have an idea, I want to do this. And you hear the idea and it sounds bad. Like, like when I imagine what what's being said sounds bad and like, okay, let's hear it. And then they demonstrate it and it's great. And that's an example of where the language of explaining things doesn't do it justice. One of the things I talk about in the book is always, you know, make a model, always don't talk about it, show what it is that you're doing. Don't say the kind of article you want to write, write the article, show me the article. And what's great about that also is it takes it out of the personal, you know, if you have an idea, it's your idea. And then we could argue about your idea and that's personal. Whereas once it's on paper, it's outside of you. And it's this thing that we're collaborating on together to make it be the best it could be. It's not, we're not talking about your idea. We're talking about, is this sentence the best sentence that could be? That's not a slight against you. That's we're working together to make this sentence the best it could be. Sometimes it's not about the story. It's just about the, um, the way the words make you feel. I remember asking Neil Young about, um, you know, if he knows what his songs mean. He said, he has no idea. Yeah. I don't think that there's a right way to do anything. And I would never dictate to anyone else how to do anything. If, if someone asks, I would say, maybe this is how I would try it, but I would never assume that that's, what's going to be best for them. Cause you can't know there's a lot of talk about AI art now. And that when, if all of the inputs into the AI are the same, which they will be from all the competing AIs, they'll all have the same database. That eventually as they get better and better and you put in the parameters of what you're looking for, they'll all spit out the same answer now. And that's the technically the right answer. Now, if you were going to engage with a subject and another writer was going to engage with a subject and you were both right about it, the chances of those articles being similar books being similar, it won't, I mean, the subject will be the same, but the perspective is completely different.