New episode on The Creative Genius of Rick Rubin This episode contains a nonstop stream of ideas directly from Rick about how to make great work over a long period of time: (01:00) Just one habit, at the top of any field, can be enough to give an edge over the competition. Wooden considered every aspect of the game where an issue might arise, and trained his players for each one. Repeatedly. Until they became habits. The goal was immaculate performance. Wooden often said the only person you’re ever competing against is yourself. The rest is out of your control. This way of thinking applies to the creative life just as well. For both the artist and the athlete, the details matter, whether the players recognize their importance or not. Good habits create good art. The way we do anything is the way we do everything. Treat each choice you make, each action you take, each word you speak with skillful care. The goal is to live your life in the service of art. (08:41) Faith allows you to trust the direction without needing to understand it. (10:16) If you make the choice of reading classic literature every day for a year, rather than reading the news, by the end of that time period you’ll have a more honed sensitivity for recognizing greatness from the books than from the media. This applies to every choice we make. Not just with art, but with the friends we choose, the conversations we have, even the thoughts we reflect on. All of these aspects affect our ability to distinguish good from very good, very good from great. They help us determine what’s worthy of our time and attention. Because there’s an endless amount of data available to us and we have a limited bandwidth to conserve, we might consider carefully curating the quality of what we allow in. The objective is not to learn to mimic greatness, but to calibrate our internal meter for greatness. So we can better make the thousands of choices that might ultimately lead to our own great work. (14:25) We’re affected by our surroundings, and finding the best environment to create a clear channel is personal and to be tested. (27:57) Rules direct us to average behaviors. If we’re aiming to create works that are exceptional, most rules don’t apply. Average is nothing to aspire to. The goal is not to fit in. Communicate your singular perspective. (28:30) It’s a healthy practice to approach our work with as few accepted rules, starting points, and limitations as possible. Often the standards in our chosen medium are so ubiquitous, we take them for granted. They are invisible and unquestioned. (29:00) The world isn’t waiting for more of the same. The most innovative ideas come from those who master the rules to such a degree that they can see past them or from those who never learned them at all. (38:50) Fear of criticism. Attachment to a commercial result. Competing with past work. Time and resource constraints. The aspiration of wanting to change the world. And any story beyond “I want to make the best thing I can make, whatever it is” are all undermining forces in the quest for greatness. (42:32) To hone your craft is to honor creation. By practicing to improve, you are fulfilling your ultimate purpose on this planet. A lot more ideas in this episode including: The importance of developing a practice of paying attention, why impatience is an argument with reality, why you need to create space in your schedule to tap into ideas in from your subconscious, why you'll find what you're searching for by looking deeper, the reason it is important to carefully curate the quality of what we allow in: people, ideas, content, why rereading the same books again and again can help you find new ideas, how to find the environment that allows you to produce your best work —and how other artists have done so, several examples of the people that are the best in the world at what they do being full of self-doubt —and yet they do it anyways, why adversity is unavoidable, if you want to make great work for a long time you can’t self-sabotage, why the goal is to keep playing (Rubin has been playing for 40+ years), how you can overcome insecurities by naming them, how you can doubt your way to excellence, why distraction is not procrastination and why distraction can be a strategy in service of the work, why if you're aiming to create works that are exceptional most rules don’t apply, the importance of communicating your singular perspective, and why if there is one rule on creativity that’s unbreakable it’s that the need for patience is ever-present.