Perhaps the greatest impediment to human creativity is the natural decay that sets in over time in any kind of medium or profession. In the sciences or in business, a certain way of thinking or acting that once had success quickly becomes a paradigm, an established procedure. As the years go by, people forget the initial reason for this paradigm and simply follow a lifeless set of techniques. In the arts, someone establishes a style that is new and vibrant, speaking to the particular spirit of the times. It has an edge because it is so different. Soon imitators pop up everywhere. It becomes a fashion, something to conform to, even if the conformity appears to be rebellious and edgy. This can drag on for ten, twenty years; it eventually becomes a cliché, pure style without any real emotion or need. Nothing in culture escapes this deadening dynamic. This problem, however, sets up a tremendous opportunity for creative types. The process goes as follows: You begin by looking inward.
You have something you want to express that is unique to yourself and related to your inclinations. You must be sure it is not something that is sparked by some trend or fashion, but that it comes from you and is real.
Perhaps it is a sound you are not hearing in music, a type of story not being told, a type of book that does not fit into the usual tidy categories. Let the idea, the sound, the image take root in you. Sensing the possibility of a new language or way of doing things, you must make the conscious decision to play against the very conventions that you find dead and want to get rid of.
Daily Law: People are dying for the new, for what expresses the spirit of the time in an original way. By creating something new you will create your own audience and attain the ultimate position of power in culture.
Mastery, V: Awaken the Dimensional Mind—The Creative-Active
In moving toward mastery, you are bringing your mind closer to reality and to life itself. Anything that is alive is in a continual state of change and movement. The moment that you rest, thinking that you have attained the level you desire, a part of your mind enters a phase of decay. You lose your hard-earned creativity and others begin to sense it. This is a power and intelligence that must be continually renewed or it will die. Your whole life, therefore, must be treated as a kind of apprenticeship to which you continually apply your learning skills. The month of March will teach you how to activate your skills and internalize the knowledge necessary for a life of mastery.
When I began writing my fifth book, Mastery, several years ago, something very strange and exciting occurred. This was a particularly difficult and complicated book to write. First of all, I had done my usual research: reading several hundred books, taking thousands of note cards on them, structuring them into various chapters, etc. But in addition, I had read a lot of books on science, which I had never done before—books examining the nature of the human brain—to give Mastery more of a scientific foundation. And that added yet another layer of difficulty to the writing. Furthermore, I had also interviewed six or seven contemporary masters to give the book a more upto- date feel. Incorporating the science and the interviews into Mastery made it a particularly challenging project. And so, when I began the actual writing process, it was very slow going with the first couple of chapters; it took longer than usual to get into a flow.
And then chapter by chapter, week by week, month by month, I started to gain a little bit of momentum. And then by the fifth chapter, something unexpected happened. The fifth chapter is about the creative process itself.
And the idea is that once you do enough work on a project, enough preparation, and you’ve had all of these months of experience delving into the subject, you often reach a state of creativity where ideas come to you out of nowhere. And suddenly this was happening to me. After all my research and all the preparation, by the time I had reached chapter five, ideas for that chapter were coming to me while I was taking a shower, while I was taking a walk. I was even dreaming about the book and ideas were coming to me in my sleep, confirming what I was writing about.
And this made me very surprised and very inspired. And then I came to chapter six, which is about mastery itself—the final chapter. The idea is that even further along in the process, you start to have a very intuitive feel for the subject. It’s almost as if the book or the project is living inside of you. You can compare it to a chess master where the chessboard feels like it is inside his brain, inside his body, and he can feel what comes next. I felt that the book was living inside of me and that I had what I call a fingertip feel for what I should be writing. There was this sort of fast-paced, intuitive series of ideas that would come to me out of nowhere. And this was an incredible experience, an incredible feeling—a feeling of great power.
I’m not claiming that I’m special, that I’m some sort of genius, or particularly gifted or talented. In fact, the whole point of the book is to demythologize our concept of genius and creativity. We tend to think that it is something you were born with, something in your DNA, some special way that you’re wired. And I wanted to prove that it was actually a product of hard work and discipline, that when you practice something for so many months or years, you can reach this high level of creativity and mastery. And the writing of the book literally confirmed my idea. And because it is a function of relentless dedication, boring into a problem, it is an exhilarating experience that almost anyone can have, if they follow the pattern I have laid out.
It doesn’t mean that if you spend years studying something, creative powers will inevitably come to you. You must have a certain intensity to your focus, as well as a love for the work itself that animates the final product.
And it also depends on years of prior labor in the Apprenticeship Phase, which I had gone through in writing four other books.
There are no shortcuts to the creative process; drugs and alcohol are more of a hindrance. The very impatience that drives you to desire shortcuts makes you unsuited for mastery. But if you trust the process and take it as far as you can, you will be amazed at the results.