How to Create The Creativity Habit

Book summary of “The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life” by Twyla Tharp

TL;DR:

Five big takeaways from this book are:

• Turn any parts that don’t involve the actual creative work into habits so that your mind can focus on practicing and creating.
• Making creativity a habit by starting every practice session with the same rituals and working in the same environment.
• Take the time to understand your creative DNA, the natural habits in your creative work.
• Using a consistent system to store and retrieve your project materials (e.g. boxes) so that disorganization doesn’t get in the way of creativity.
• Consistently developing skills, including the ones you aren’t comfortable with. Be willing to try new things and fail more often in your private practice.

1. Why creativity needs habits

It sounds paradoxical that creativity should be a habit: we think of creativity as creating something fresh and new, while habit implies repetition. Here’s why making creativity a habit important:

• It takes skills to do creative work. Good work habits help you build those skills.
• Everything happens in your day is raw materials that can feed into your creativity, but you will miss the opportunity if you’re not prepared. Good habit is being prepared.
• Once creativity has become a habit, you will never be afraid of a blank page or an empty canvas or a white room again.

2. Have preparation rituals

“It’s vital to establish some rituals — automatic but decisive patterns of behavior — at the beginning of the creative process, when you are most at peril of turning back, chickening out, giving up, or going the wrong way” — Twyla Tharp

Rituals create commitment. Turing something into a ritual eliminates the question “why am I doing this” or “do I like it”.

A preparation ritual could be as simple as lighting a candle before beginning a yoga session, or in the case of the author, calling a cab every morning to get to the gym. The most important thing is making it easy on yourself.

Know what might hold you back from getting started, such as fear, distraction, or a lack of tools.

• Fear: Prepare a pep talk for each of your big fears so that you can combat them instead of running away from them.
• Distraction: Identify your distractions and practice going through a week without having it. E.g. Not looking at the clock for a week so that you can engage fully with the tasks
• Tool: Always bring with you the one tool you need to create (e.g. notebook)

3. Understand your creative inclination

“We all have strands of creative code hard-wired into our imagination… they govern our creative impulses. They determine the forms we work in, the stories we tell, and how we tell them” — Twyla Tharp

Understand your creative DNA — the natural habits in your creativity, will help you see the strengths and weaknesses in your work.

The author tells a wonderful tale of her inclination towards “zoe”. Your art might reflect the beauty of life without any specific meaning, or it might seek to tell a story or express a personality. Zoe refers to “life in general, without characterization”. Bios characterizes a specific life. For the author, this concept represents her inner creative battle. When she realized she is more of zoe than of bios, she began to see why her work is the way it is, her creative strengths and weaknesses, and her perception of the world.

4. Harness the power of memory

• Muscle memory: Skills get imprinted through the action. Practice by copying the ones you admire
• Virtual memory: Develop a memory of what success feels and sounds like to get confidence when you face the same challenge
• Sensual memory: Keep artifacts that can trigger your imagination with images from the past — e.g. past projects, contacts
• Ancient memory: Look at images and artifacts from the ancients. There’s a deep-embedding memory about them in you, and this act might trigger those memories.

5. Organize projects with boxes

“The box makes me feel organized, that I have my act together even when I don’t know where I’m going yet. It also represents a commitment. The simple act of writing a project name on the box means I’ve started work” —Twyla Tharp

Boxes are useful for organizing and archiving projects. You can use a different organizational system; the key is to have a safe place to store all the raw materials and ideas of every projects so that you never lose them.

Pro-tip: Start each box with your project goal.

6. Let go of the plan

“In order to be habitually creative, you have to know how to prepare to be creative, but good planning alone won’t make your efforts successful; it’s only after you let go of your plans that you can breathe life into your efforts” — Twyla Tharp

Plan ahead but not too far ahead so that you can recognize opportunities. In creative endeavors, luck is a skill. You have to show up and be prepared to be lucky.

There are problems that can derail your plans, such as other people, perfectionism at the start, wrong structure, wrong materials, and, my favorite, a sense of obligation to finish even when things go wrong.

In addition to being prepared, you can invite luck by being generous and working with the best people.

Pro-tip: Shake up your routines every once in a while to create inner tension, which will fuel your creativity.

7. Develop skills

“You’re only kidding yourself if you put creativity before craft. Craft is where our best efforts begin. You should never worry that rote exercises aimed at developing skills will suffocate creativity” —Twyla Tharp

Don’t “fake it till you make it”. Your true confidence comes when you have excellent practice habits, and people will see that confidence in you.

Never take fundamentals for granted. No task is too small to be worthy of attention. Shelve the perfected skills for a while and concentrate on weaknesses. Constantly retain the “inexperience” in you by trying new techniques and challenging yourself.

8. Get an “A” in failure

There are different types of failures:

• Failure of skill: You have an idea but not the skills to pull it off. The only solution to this is practice and develop the skills you need.
• Failure of concept: You have a weak idea. Don’t try to mask the error, get out of it.
• Failure of judgement: You leave something in the piece that should have been discarded. Remember at all times that you will be judged by the final product — not that other person who gives you advice or any situation.
• Failure of nerve: You have everything going for you, except the guts to support your idea and explore the concept fully. With experience, you will realize looking foolish is actually good for you.
• Failure of repetition: You cling to past successes instead of trying something bold and new.
• Failure of denial: You refuse to deal with problems or convince yourself that you can get away with it.

No creative can succeed without having failed multiple times. The best place to fail is in private practice where nobody is watching you.

This article is one of a series of book summary on the creativity topic. Check out the rest of the series if you want to learn more about developing creativity:

• Science-backed ways to boost creativity (synthesis of all the book summaries)
• “A Technique for Getting Ideas” Summary (a five-step process to generate ideas, written by a marketing expert)
• “Daily Rituals: How artists work” Summary (a glimpse into what an average day of many famous artists look like)
• “Cracking Creativity: The secrets of creative genius” Summary (chock full of techniques for creative problem solving)
• “The Medici Effect: what elephants and epidemics can teach us about innovation” Summary (the importance of working at the intersections of various fields and how to do so)
• “The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life” Summary (this one, how to build creativity habits that nurture your craft)