Rick Rubin: Protocols to Access Creative Energy and Process

Many people feel it’s impossible to reach their creative potential—often because they struggle to find inspiration or experience creative blocks. Luckily, Julia Cameron says that overcoming these obstacles and maximizing your creative potential is possible. She elaborates that creativity is a spiritual force that flows through everyone—you just need to learn to access it. The Artist’s Way is Cameron’s 12-week program that teaches you how to access this creative force and use it to maximize your creativity and achieve your artistic destiny.

In this guide, we’ve organized Cameron’s program into two parts. First, we’ll discuss how to access the creative force by forming an intimate connection with yourself. Next, we’ll explain how to foster a positive mindset conducive to creating art and resisting forms of negativity that block your creativity. In our commentary, we’ll provide updated methods from Cameron’s follow-up book, Seeking Wisdom, and supplement her advice with recommendations from other experts like Elizabeth Gilbert (Big Magic) and Austin Kleon (Steal Like an Artist).

There's a myth that creativity stems from spontaneous bursts of inspiration or innate genius, but according to numerous creative professionals and productivity experts, creativity is actually the result of consistent, disciplined work habits.

Manage Your Day-to-Day is a collection of essays by some of today’s best-known creative minds, including Cal Newport (Deep Work), Steven Pressfield (The War of Art), and Gretchen Rubin (The Happiness Project and The Four Tendencies). Published by 99U, a resource platform and conference series that empowers creative professionals, the book offers strategies to optimize your productivity, focus, and creativity in today's fast-paced world, as well as practical tools to enhance your daily routine, overcome distractions, and unlock your creative potential.

Whether you're a creative professional, an entrepreneur, or anyone seeking to reclaim their creativity, Manage Your Day-to-Day is a resource to help inspire and guide you toward reaching your full creative potential.

If you’ve ever felt a creative tug or impulse, writer Elizabeth Gilbert can help you act on it. According to Gilbert, the author of the best-selling memoir Eat Pray Love, creativity is not just the domain of a few brilliant professional artists, but rather an enriching way of life that anyone can adopt at any time. If you embrace creativity, you’ll experience “Big Magic”: a mystical or spiritual force of creativity that brings joy and purpose.

In this guide, you’ll learn how, according to Gilbert, you can commune with the forces of creativity and establish an enjoyable, rewarding creative practice that can last a lifetime. You’ll also find commentary that provides actionables to help you implement Gilbert’s ideas around creativity, gives context around Gilbert’s writing on spirituality and art, and explores scientific explanations for the creative phenomena Gilbert attributes to magic.

We’ve all felt trapped at some point in our lives, when our motivation falters and all our hard work grinds to a halt. In Anatomy of a Breakthrough, Adam Alter argues that everybody hits roadblocks in life, and because we hide our frustration, we’re unaware that everyone else goes through the same thing. However, there’s hope even when you feel trapped, and Alter proposes a range of solutions that might help you find your way out of the woods.

In this guide, we’ll explain what it means to be “stuck,” the barriers that often cause this, and how reacting poorly to a perceived lack of progress can only dig you in deeper. We’ll then describe Alter’s remedy—slowing down, exploring new perspectives, and making your own luck through persistence. We’ll also connect Alter’s ideas with those of other motivation experts, what other writers say about perseverance, and how exploring uncharted terrain can turn failures into opportunities.

How can you stay creative despite feeling stressed, burnt out, or inadequate? In Keep Going, poet and visual artist Austin Kleon provides methods for overcoming emotional obstacles to creativity. He suggests an approach to creativity that finds joy in the process of making art, rather than the external rewards it might bring you. In addition, Kleon provides a number of work and lifestyle tips for not only making creative work but also feeling good about the work you make.

In this guide, we’ll explore Kleon’s three main principles for overcoming emotional obstacles to creativity and the methods he suggests for following each principle. We also provide the psychological research behind Kleon’s suggestions and alternative perspectives on creativity from other authors and artists.

Explore the journey of cultivating resilience with Mel Robbins in "The Mel Robbins Podcast," as she delves into the quintessence of navigating life's challenges with hope and strength. Through personal anecdotes and shared vulnerabilities, Robbins invites us to confront our own emotional states with honesty and solidarity. In this episode, the self-help guru undrapes the significance of spiritual practices and the serene embrace of nature to maintain optimism in the face of stress and anxiety. Through her poignant reflections and practical advice, Mel Robbins stands as a compassionate guide to finding peace in our inner tumult.

Mel extends her insights on human connection, regaling us with stories such as her encounter with Ernest, a cheerful minister with a mission to spark joy. She introduces the "10-5 rule" to combat isolation and foster community, underscoring the nurturing power of simple acts of kindness. Spanning emotional support that crosses borders to the importance of balancing media consumption for mental well-being, Robbins encourages listeners to become beacons of hope, akin to the reassuring lighthouse in her memories. Sign off with the empowering affirmation from Robbins, knowing her wisdom is designed to educate and entertain, while encouraging each listener to make a positive impact in their corner of the world.