Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life

That’s the thing about creativity: You don’t need to see the whole path. You just have to take the next step. And the next. The path of every creator takes many unforeseen twists and turns. That’s its nature. The only way to “fail” at creativity is to stop walking the path altogether.

I still felt like a newcomer, an outsider, a fake.

Most of us have a gap in our lives between where we find ourselves and the life we actually want to be living. It’s time for you to look at that gap, acknowledge it, and then use your innate creative capacity to close it. Stop acting out someone else’s script and write your own: What do you want to make? More important, who do you want to be?

Who is a Striver? Someone with a burning ambition to be farther along than he is right now, to grow and change and perform to his full potential. Isn’t that beautiful? Once you escape the trap of “compare and despair,” once you realize that the only path to walk is the one right in front of you, your progress will catch up with that limitless ambit

With love and empathy for yourself, gently summon the courage to make a change.

For each image, I’d ask myself: What are the elements that make this good? Why did someone choose this image over the hundreds that must have been available? Technique was critical, that was obvious, but at this level, technique was a given. What elevated an image?

The solution here is to remember why you started creating in the first place.

Over time, action by action, the volume of the negative voices goes down. These might sound like the voices of unsupportive parents, critical teachers, cruel peers, and other frustrated creators you’ve encountered. But those people are not in this room with you right now. What you’re really hearing is fear doing a table read. Your brain is just reh

everything about your creative practice looks good on paper, but you still feel unmotivated, even apathetic, about continuing. This happens. It’s happened to me.