When I’m not busy coaching or teaching yoga classes, I’m leading content design teams. For those who don’t know, content design is the practice of writing all of the text that appears in digital user-experiences. These are words you never really pay attention to, but are vital to you being able to use a digital product. 

Content design is, well, design—it’s a creative function. And as with any creative job, content designers can fall into ruts sometimes. They get the dreaded “writer’s block” and then beat themselves up in their heads as they try to “break” through it, only to no avail. The result is a lot of frustration, doubt, and struggle. 

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My advice to the folks I manage who get stuck here has always been something flippant like, “go take a long walk” or “go touch grass for a bit.” 

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That usually gets me a lot of raised eyebrows, but I promise there’s a method behind my madness! 

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And it has to do with what real, true, creativity is—and is not. 

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You’ve never had a truly original thought in your life

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I’ve written about this before, but for my advice on creativity to make sense, we have to really understand how the mind and thought work. When I say you have never had an original thought in your life, I do truly mean that. 

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But don’t take my word for it—let’s play with an example. 

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I want you to imagine what a beach vacation somewhere you’ve never been before looks like. Ready? Go!

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…

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Hopefully you created a mental image of a beach in your head. Now, I want you to really, really scrutinize that image. Is it something you’ve actually never seen before? Something really, truly creative? 

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No. If you look closely enough, you will see that what you produced was actually a patchwork of images from your past experiences of beach vacations. Maybe you took a beach you saw on a trip to Italy and superimposed it on a Tahitian background from a magazine, and thereby made something “new.” But it’s not really, truly original, right? It’s just an amalgamation of the past remixed into something different. 

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An exercise like this exposes the limitations of our thinking, conceptual minds. The mind can only really ever know and reference the past. It can’t reference the future or totally new experiences because it hasn’t lived through them yet. Because knowledge will always be limited to what we already know, any “creativity” that can come from said knowledge is, by definition, sort of dusty and stale. 

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This is why trying to put your mind into overdrive in order to create will never really work. You’ll keep getting the same stale Frankenstein ideas from your past. 

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This is also why, for all my people who struggle with anxiety out there, anxiety is never actually about the future—it’s about the past repeating. If you have a panic attack because you’re afraid you’re going to stop breathing, for example, you have to realize you don’t actually know what it feels like to stop breathing—you’ve never had that experience before. You’re just imagining what it would feel like based on a “new” patchwork of past images you’ve stitched together. 

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And, just to keep the implication train rolling, this is also why AI can never actually be “creative.”  The whole reason it is called “generative” AI and not “creative” AI is that it can only “generate” stuff from its existing knowledge base—e.g. the past. That’s the reason all the art and writing it seems to generate have that same cringe, canned feeling to it—it’s just a remixed regurgitation of something that’s been done (which can still be useful as a starting point!) that an actual human (you!) needs to massage into something better to fit the needs of this particular, specific moment in time. 

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The “particular and specific moment” point is very relevant here ;)

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Ok then—so how do we become creative?

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To answer that, I want to share something from the world of coaching. When you go through coach training, you are taught that there are different levels of listening. 

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There’s basic Level 1 listening, in which I hear the words you’re saying, but already have a canned script in my mind about how I’m going to respond next. This is the kind of listening in which the coach wants to control the conversation or make it go to a certain place—and it tends to lead to very meh coaching sessions. 

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Then there’s what we call the Level 3, which is what we strive towards when we coach. In Level 3, the coach aims to have an entirely empty mind—no planning what happens next, no narrative thinking of their own. When you stay in Level 3, as a coach, you notice something really cool—you almost always intuitively know what to say and where to go next and it is a lot more genuine. 

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Why is that? Because in Level 3 listening, we are not using the thinking mind’s attachment to the past—we’re flowing with the present moment as it unfolds. And because the next moment of life is always new and original, we deliver the most original, creative, and heartfelt responses because they are tailored to that specific moment in time, with all of its unique context and content.   

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So if you want to be creative, you don’t do it with more thinking. You do it by living fully and presently in the moment and just rolling with what emerges from the silence of a clear mind. 

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That’s why I tell people to go take walks and go do stuff away from their computers. Because when they merge back into living instead of thinking, they’re paying more attention to what this specific moment needs, which increases the chances of something truly new and original emerging from the void. Ever wonder why you get really interesting ideas in the shower or at the 3AM rave? It’s because your thinking brain isn’t on and you’re using your non-conceptual, experiential intelligence instead. And not to get too woo-hoo here, but when you live from this place instead of constant thinking, life tends to speak back to you and drop some really good truth bombs.

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And if you’re a creative person worried that AI is going to take your job; don’t worry, it won’t. People in power might think that it can—but until someone makes an AI that is fully conscious and able to experience life, we’re never going to get a truly creative robot. We’re only going to get increasingly good DJs who can rapidly remix stuff we’ve already seen. 

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And I don’t want to fully knock that either. If you ever read Rebecca Yaros’s Fourth Wing, for example, you might have said something like “Oh it’s literally Harry Potter + Aragon + a romance novel,” cool. Was it still an enjoyable read? Yeah, of course! But was it truly, mind-shatteringly, something we have never seen before? Absolutely not. 

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It’s the same way a DJ literally uses existing music to create and compose a set. A boring, kind of meh set feels like it follows a formula--the DJ is thinking about a gig they did in the past and regurgitating. A really good, mind blowing set, is grounded in the specific context of the actual event taking place—it only really makes full “sense” for that moment in time. 

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So the takeaway here isn’t that conceptualization is “bad” for creativity—it’s definitely still a factor. But it can’t be ruminative conceptualization—it needs to be spontaneous and present-aware to feel fresh, new, and really creative. 

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If you consider yourself a creative worker, let me know if this resonates! I’d love to hear from you. 

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