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The Creative Act, by Rick Rubin
“The ability to look deeply is the root of creativity. To see past the ordinary and the mundane and get to what might otherwise be invisible."
Matt Karamazov
September 04, 2023 • Estimated Reading Time: 23 minutes
📚 Hey, good evening!
One of the (many) reasons I’m so optimistic about the future is that we’re about to enter into a golden age of creativity, self-expression, and art.
As more people all over the world get lifted out of poverty, connected to the internet (and to each other) and brought online, and escape wage slavery, we’re going to see more people become artists.
Or, rather, we’re going to see more people discover for themselves that they are already artists.
You are already an artist, and as legendary music producer Rick Rubin talks about in his new book, it might be impossible to discover who you are without first expressing who you are.
For literally the entire history of humanity, most people had no freedom whatsoever to gain self-knowledge through creative expression.
But now, because we’re living in the goddamn future, everybody is going to have this freedom.
Just wait and see!
While we’re waiting (and yes, we still have a tremendous amount of work to do to make this golden age a reality the world over), I’d like to humbly recommend that you check out Rubin’s book, The Creative Act.
I thought so highly of this book that I wrote a complete breakdown of The Creative Act for the Stairway to Wisdom, highlights of which I’ll share with you here in this email.
The breakdown itself is about 12,100 words, covering all the Key Ideas, Book Notes, Action Steps, and more.
It’s also free, by the way.
It’ll only take you about 46 minutes to read the whole thing, and in it, you’ll learn how to experience the world with the same quality of attention you’d bring to landing a plane, discover how no two single gusts of wind are ever the same, learn how to create sustainable systems that will enable you to do your best work, and much more besides.
You can read the full breakdown here, but I’ll give you a little preview in this email so you can decide whether to check out the full one later.
Again, totally free.
I should actually say “free for right NOW,” because it’s going back behind the paywall very shortly.
Then it’s just for members only at the Stairway to Wisdom.
Alright now, let’s engage in…
This Book is For:
*Artists and creatives of all kinds, working within whatever medium, who want to be led deeper into the heart of creativity by a legendary music producer who's traveled there innumerable times before.
*Anyone who is stuck artistically, or who has run up against creative roadblocks preventing them from producing and releasing their greatest work, and who wants advice from one of the greats about how to become a finisher.
*Everyone who feels as though there is more to life and creation than what's readily apparent on the surface, and who wants to increase their sensitivity and receptivity to what the wider universe is trying to show us.
*Normal, everyday people who haven't yet begun to express themselves artistically but who nevertheless suspect that they might actually have something meaningful inside themselves to contribute.
Summary:
“To see what no human has seen before, to know what no human has known before, to create as no human has created before, it may be necessary to see as if through eyes that have never seen, know through a mind that has never thought, create with hands that have never been trained."
Legendary music producer Rick Rubin has probably guided more of your favorite songs into existence than you realize, no matter whether you listen to country, rock, rap, metal, or anything in between.
Ever since co-founding Def Jam Recordings from his college dormitory in the 1980s, he's produced albums for Slayer, Adele, Jay-Z, Neil Young, Johnnie Cash, and a huge number of other artists that have very little in common other than the fact that they all record songs.
As Rubin says in the book, "However you frame yourself as an artist, the frame is too small,” which idea he definitely exemplifies in his own life and creative work. Even The Creative Act itself expanded beyond its frame, because, as he said about his own writing process:
“I set out to write a book about what to do to make a great work of art. Instead, it revealed itself to be a book on how to be.”
The above statement is a big key to understanding the book, to Rubin's creative process in general, and to the nature of life and art itself, because he reveals that living and being are inseparable from the work you end up creating. There is no "work-life balance" for the true artist, and everyone is an artist if only they would learn to see.
Being an artist isn't so much about what kind of art you make, or some particular volume of output, but rather it's about your relationship to the world and how much of it you can pick up through your senses. And how much of what you see you're able to pass on to your audience to help us see it too.
The Creative Act contains 78 philosophical "musings" on the nature of art and the laws of creativity, although most of those "laws" are more or less made to be broken. Really, the only law that Rubin says is "less breakable" than the others is the need for patience.
Tactically, inside you'll find a wealth of insights about finding - and being receptive to - ideas, settling on sustainable rituals that will help you achieve longevity in your career, advice about setting limits, advice about exceeding limits, how to discover your own unique voice, and even what it means to express oneself creatively.
In the Key Ideas section, we'll be discussing what it might be like to pay attention as though you were landing a plane, how to expand the universe, how to anger the audience and incite strong reactions to your work, and more.
Rick Rubin will help us understand why we must become finishers, how we can take our work to its extreme conclusion, and why expressing ourselves is the best - and perhaps only - way to discover who we really are.
The fundamental idea behind much of his advice is that we are all artists, and each of us has something meaningful to contribute to the world, whether we're actively working to make it real or not. That's part of the magic that he often brought to the studio, and that's part of the magic he put into this book.
Key Ideas:
#1: The Root of Creativity
“The ability to look deeply is the root of creativity. To see past the ordinary and the mundane and get to what might otherwise be invisible."
Everyone looks, but not everyone sees. When he was just eight years old, the 18th-century visionary poet William Blake was walking by himself to Peckham Rye where he would have the first of many mystical experiences. On subsequent occasions, his mother would wonder why he was walking with his eyes turned upward when she couldn't see anything special there herself.
Blake told her later that it was because she couldn't see the angels in the trees. He would later go on to write the most gorgeous poems, like this one, proof of his exceptional power of seeing, regardless of whether or not you believe in angels:
“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.”
William Blake may be one of those "special cases" of people perhaps genetically predisposed to seeing further (and deeper) than the rest of us, but it's fair to say that none of us, regardless of our genetics ever comes close to tapping our full talent or learning to see perfectly. It isn't something that just "happens" to most of us; it's a skill to be developed, like reading or writing.
Looked at in the proper way, nothing is boring.
In fact, there's a memorable little book by A.J. Jacobs called Thanks a Thousand, where he goes through the process of personally thanking every single person involved in bringing him his morning cup of coffee. As the title implies, he literally lists more than a thousand people by name, from the farmers who grow the beans to the truck drivers who deliver them to the warehouse, the supervisors at the warehouse who keep track of all the shipments, and on and on.
Actually, Michael Pollan wrote an extremely fascinating history of coffee's "takeover" of the entire world, its vast history, and its impact. Coffee! Most people drink thousands of cups of coffee during their lives and never give it another thought. However, as I've come to realize, and as Rick Rubin repeatedly stresses in this book, nothing is boring.
What's more, the ability to see what other people barely notice is the root of all creativity. And it begins even before we first pick up a brush or commit that first word to paper.
We can all "see the angels in the trees," so to speak, if we only develop our own capacity to look. This capacity isn't inborn in most of us, but if you pay attention, you'll see that the seeds of this capacity were there the whole time.
#2: How to Expand the Universe
“We can quiet our inside so we can perceive more on the outside, or quiet the outside so we can notice more of what's happening inside. We can zoom in on something so closely it loses the features that make it what it appears to be, or zoom so far out it seems like something entirely new.
The universe is only as large as our perception of it. When we cultivate our awareness, we are expanding the universe. This expands the scope, not just of the material at our disposal to create from, but of the life we get to live."
When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. In a very real way, because of a feature of the human brain called the reticular activating system, or RAS, we literally see what we're looking for.
The most common example people use to describe how this works is when immediately after checking out a new type of car to buy, you generally start seeing that same type of car everywhere. Suddenly, everyone drives a Mustang or a Prius because you've been primed to look for that type of car due to recent events in your life - i.e., looking at buying that particular brand of car.
The limits of our vision are the limits of the universe, and so when we expand our vision we also expand the limits of the universe. At least, the limits of our universe as it appears to us, which is really the only way you'll ever experience the universe. You'll literally never experience anything outside of your own subjectivity.
So, again, in a very real way, the universe has expanded, because it has expanded for you.
We're usually blind to this because we're so used to seeing the world through our original perspective. We're used to ourselves, so we never see ourselves clearly. As they say, there are three great mysteries in the universe: air to the bird, water to the fish, and man to himself.
However, we can disrupt and challenge our own perceptions at will, thereby changing the way we look at things, which results in us having more material available with which to create art.
Importantly, though, this changed perception is always the result of a conscious, concerted effort to see things differently. Awareness is always intentional, and so, as an artist, you have to go out of your way sometimes to change your perspective and change the things you're looking at.
The "real world" will always exist externally to you, but you don't have to simply accept it for what it is. You stand at the controls, always able to zoom in or out, to get underneath the words, between the notes, and beside the work. The real, unchanging world will always exist, but you don't have to live there.
#3: Land the Plane
“The artist actively works to experience life slowly, and then to re-experience the same thing anew. To read slowly, and to read and read again.
I might read a paragraph that inspires a thought, and while my eyes continue moving across the page in the physical act of reading, my mind may still be lost in the previous idea. I'm not taking in information anymore.
When I realize this, I return to the last paragraph I can recall and start reading from there again. Sometimes it's three or four pages back. Re-reading even a well-understood paragraph or page can be revelatory. New meanings, deeper understandings, inspirations, and nuances arise and come into focus.
Reading, in addition to listening, eating, and most physical activities, can be experienced like driving: we can participate either on autopilot or with focused intention.
So often we sleepwalk through our lives. Consider how different your experience of the world might be if you engaged in every activity with the attention you might give to landing a plane."
Book Notes:
“We’re not playing win, we're playing to play. And ultimately, playing is fun. Perfectionism gets in the way of fun. A more skillful goal might be to find comfort in the process. To make and put out successive works with ease."
“There is never a shortage of awe and inspiration to be found outdoors. If we dedicated our lives solely to noticing changes in natural light and shadow as the hours pass, we would constantly discover something new."
“The closer we can get to the natural world, the sooner we start to realize we are not separate. And that when we create, we are not just expressing our unique individuality, but our seamless connection to an infinite oneness."
“No two gusts of wind feel quite the same. The tone and quality of sunlight changes from minute to minute and day to day.”
“For every rule followed, examine the possibility that the opposite might be similarly interesting. Not necessarily better, just different. In the same way, you can try the opposite or the extreme of what's suggested in these pages and it will likely be just as fruitful."
Action Steps:
So you've finished reading. What do you do now?
Reading for pleasure is great, and I wholeheartedly support it. However, I am intensely practical when I'm reading for a particular purpose. I want a result. I want to take what I've learned and apply it to my one and only life to make it better!
Because that's really what the Great Books all say. They all say: "You must change your life!" So here, below, are some suggestions for how you can apply the wisdom found in this breakdown to improve your actual life.
Please commit to taking massive action on this immediately! Acting on what you've learned here today will also help you solidify it in your long-term memory. So there's a double benefit! Let's begin...
#1: Try 100 Things That Don't Work
In order to have just one good idea, it's often necessary to come up with a hundred bad ideas. Famously, it took Thomas Edison more than 1,000 iterations to finally come up with a design for a lightbulb that would actually work, but what he said was that he hadn't failed, he had simply found 1,000 ways it wouldn't work.
In the experimentation phase of any creative project, it's important not to judge your ideas as being either good or bad, but rather to collect as many of them as you can, observe how they smash into each other, and see what results.
You can gather inputs from everywhere: overheard conversations, different genres of music than the ones you normally listen to, and alternate routes to work other than the one you usually take. Read a book by an author you've never heard of. Walk out your front door with no plan in mind other than walking (but make sure you stop halfway and come back!)
Notice what others don't see, and try to make art out of what you find. Try 100 different variations, and make peace with the fact that 99 of them may yield nothing and that the 100th might be exactly what you were heading towards the entire time.
#2: Put Everything Into One Thing
You'll never know how good you can be unless you give every single thing you have within you in order to be the best possible version of yourself, whether that's as an artist, an athlete, or a person.
If you haven't done that, then you simply do not know.
So don't say that you can't write, because you've never put your entire being into writing your book!
Don't say that you can't paint, because you've never poured your very soul into any of your paintings!
Don't say that you can't act, because you've never even tried! Not fully.
Give it everything you have. Put forth your total effort to become as great as you want to be. There is no other way to find out how great you can be.
#3: Ship
Artists ship. They release their work, and you have to actually release what you've made if you want to be an artist. For better or for worse. For fame and widespread recognition or silence and apathy. Whatever the reaction or reception.
Get in the habit of finishing, even if what you've made isn't perfect. Once you ship once, it becomes easier to do it again, and it really is a habit just like anything else.
If it makes you feel any better, you should see some of the oldest breakdowns here at the Stairway to Wisdom!
At the time of writing, I'm working on updating/improving them, but they are...not perfect. Not by a long shot. But they've gotten better over time as I've released each new one, and I had to ship those earlier ones if you were eventually going to read this one.
"The path to success is to take massive, determined action."
-Tony Robbins
About the Author:
Rick Rubin is a nine-time Grammy-winning producer, named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time and the most successful producer in any genre by Rolling Stone. He has collaborated with artists from Tom Petty to Adele, Johnny Cash to the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Beastie Boys to Slayer, Kanye West to the Strokes, and System of a Down to Jay-Z.
Additional Resources:
This Book on Amazon:
If You Liked This Book:
Ok, that’s it for now…
More excellent book recommendations coming your way soon!
Again, the rest of the above breakdown is absolutely free (for now!), and you can find it right here.
What you see in this email is less than half of what you get at the Stairway to Wisdom. I left out most of the Book Notes, all the Questions to Stimulate Your Thinking, several of the Key Ideas, etc.
So there’s a lot more for you left to read if you enjoyed what you read in this email!
You can also apply to work with me directly on this page right here. I help clients gain wisdom and strength by using the knowledge found in the best books to assist people like you to get in peak physical shape, master your mind, make more money, and live a life you won’t regret.
I hope you enjoyed this edition of The Reading Life, and enjoy the rest of your week!
All the best,
Matt Karamazov
P.S. Whenever you're ready, here are three more ways I can help you apply the wisdom found in the greatest books ever written to your life:
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Simply head to this page if this is something you're interested in working with me on, and I'll let you know more about it, answer all your questions, etc. Click here to apply!
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