5 Essential Ingredients for Building a Lifelong Creative Practice

If there’s one thing that all of my friends who are prolific creators have in common, it’s that they approach their creative work as a practice. It’s something they do on a regular basis, regardless of whether they’re writing a blog post, trying to meet a deadline for a book, or producing something for one of their clients. Even if they don’t necessarily have an outcome in mind, they engage in their practice.

• Sarah Kathleen Peck is always writing something. If you’ve ever met her in person, you’ll notice that if you’re at a place where you can sit down, she’s scribbling something.
• George Lange, who has photographed everyone from rockstar to presidents, takes pictures every single day of his life. In a conversation on the Unmistakable Creative, he told me about photographing children getting on and off a school bus. Because he’s approached his photography as a practice, it’s allowed him to create a lifetime of unforgettable memories.

In his book, Turning Pro, Steven Pressfield says the following about a practice:

A practice implies engagement in a ritual. A practice may be defined as the dedicated, daily exercise of commitment, will and focus intention aimed, on one level at the achievement of mastery in a field, but on a loftier level, intended to produce a communion with a power greater than ourselves — call it whatever you like: God. mind, soul, Self, The Muse, the superconscious.

How do you build a lifelong creative practice?

1. A Space in Which You Create

It doesn’t really matter what or where it is, as long as it is yours. I don’t necessarily mean that it has to belong to you. Only that, for the time you’re working you have what you need. — Dani Shapiro

Nothing impacts your behavior as much as your environment. Having a space specifically for your creative practice is essential. It doesn’t have to be big. It doesn’t have to be fancy. It can be a room of your own, your cubicle, a chair at your kitchen table, or a table at your favorite coffee shop. Whether you want the equivalent of a new age gifts shop on your desk, you want to hang motivational posters on the wall, or you’re a minimalist, create a space that lights you up. What matters most is that it yours and that it inspires you. When you have a space for your creative practice, eventually the environment and your behavior get linked.

2. A Time

By having a time for your practice, you tap into the profound power of consistency and start to build momentum. It also allows you take advantage of the fact that your cumulative output matters more than any individual day or piece of work.

I don’t sweat lousy writing days or articles that don’t resonate with my readers because I know that I’ll have another shot at the same time tomorrow or with the next article I publish. Every day is a blank page.

While I do believe calendars are more effective than to do lists, I use a combination of both. As you’ll see in the image below of my Best Self Journal, I have deep work blocks set aside specifically for this purpose.

If you schedule a specific time for your creative practice, you’ll be much more likely to follow through on it.

3. An Intention

When I sit down to work, I have one intention: hit my word count for the day. I do that because it’s the one thing that’s always in my control. I never know if I’ll have a good idea, if I can articulate that idea, or if any of what I write will usable.

The idea for this post came to me while drinking my afternoon coffee. Despite writing 2000 plus words in the morning, most of it was incoherent psychobabble.

If you’re a person who dreads writing shit that you think nobody will want to read, I encourage you to consider these words of Amber Rae:

You want to accumulate pages, not judgments.

A good intention, allows you to focus on the process, not the prize and frees you up to create without judgment.

4. A Ritual

Every creative practice needs a ritual. A ritual serves multiple purposes. First, it preserves willpower and reduces decision fatigue. It’s easy to forget that every little thing we do is a decision that depletes willpower over the course of the day. Having a ritual eliminates several decisions, and helps you to preserve your willpower and cognitive bandwidths. And much like the space in which you create, when you go through a ritual consistently, the ritual and your desired behavior will get linked.

Every morning I follow the same routine. I brush my teeth, set the coffee to brew and meditate for 10–15 minutes. By setting the coffee to brew first, I know that I’ll get a reward for my meditation practice with a hot cup of coffee. After that, I read for 30 minutes to an hour and write for an hour.

There’s no “right way” for a creative ritual. If you have to drink green tea, burn sage, and pretend to worship goddesses of religions other than your own to get your creative juices flowing so be it.

It’s yours so you can make it as batshit crazy as you please. Just don’t kill anything.

5. A Lifelong Commitment

When your creative practice becomes a lifelong pursuit, you have the power to become a master of your craft. It stops being about one book, one piece of art, or one moment in time. Instead, it becomes about building a body of work and a personal legacy. We build a creative life by having an ongoing artistic practice and commitment that is lifelong. Most authors write every day long after their books are published. And most of them would probably write even if nobody was reading.

When my first book came out, somebody asked what I was going do on publication date. I said, “the same thing I’ve done every day for the last five years, write a 1000 words.”

While a space, time and intention might sound restrictive, constraints like these give you creative freedom. When you don’t have to think about these things, you can put that energy into the work itself.

If you establish an ongoing creative practice, you’ll start to realize that it energizes, revitalizes, and sustains you. Over the course of a lifetime, it transforms from an obligation to a privilege.

It ’s something that you keep doing, even if the only person who benefits from it is you, even if it’s only for an Audience of One.

Have you lost touch with your creative capacity?

I’ve put together a list of interviews with artists, authors, and entrepreneurs to help you regain your creative confidence and make your ideas happen. Just click here.