Growing Gills: How to Find Creative Focus When You’re Drowning in Your Daily Life

Once you identify that No. 1 priority, you can map out your most meaningful success markers. If you’re consistently hitting your success markers, that’s a sign that you’ve been working in the right direction.

Here’s a third clue: When you’re in the forest, you’ve got to be ready to deploy the dynamite.

It’s to challenge and stretch yourself to think more thoughtfully about allocating your time, without losing sight of who you actually are as a creator, how you work best, and what you need to do already in your daily life.

But the real secret to creative success is defining “success.” For yourself.

James Clear, who writes about changing habits. His theory is that you can create tiny new habits with a small amount of activation energy, and those tiny habits can build up over time;

The first step, obviously, is that you have to value the work. It’s your right and responsibility to use your creativity. Stake your claim. You’re doing that. But then treating the work as if it’s something that should just happen because it matters to you is a recipe for failure.

But in the end, that didn’t matter: The actual process of getting back in the rhythm, a new rhythm, is long and painful, and filled with self-loathing.

It means you literally read through your current projects in your system, ideally once a week, thinking about what might be missing and what you’d like to prioritize next.

Daily practice is not about feeling good about the work. It’s not even about making something good. The practice itself is how you make space for great ideas to strike you.