Whatever you do, don’t live like a button pusher.
Computers run life. Most people sit at a desk all day and push buttons on their keyboard. They don’t know why. They just do it because digits appear in their bank account if they do it. I did this for over a decade.
I felt like a damn machine. One of those Terminator cyborgs. T3.
There’s another path that leads to unstoppable creativity.
Get the hell off auto-pilot
Machines operate on auto-pilot.
Once they know what they have to do, they can repeat the task until their metal carcass is outdated and sends them to the scrap heap.
They don’t get tired. They don’t complain. Just like an Amazon robot working in the warehouse to send your packages out on time.
Humans can become robots too. When every day starts to feel the same that’s when you know you’re in trouble. Our brain wants routines and patterns. It craves them.
If you serve up a daily routine the brain will drown out all the intricacies. You’ll go from living in 4K clarity down to 1980 8-Bit space invaders visuals.
Art is built from chaos. Creativity comes from randomness.
Why do you need creativity?
Because it’s the most valuable thing in the world.
It’s what pays people an unfair amount of money. It’s what solves the hardest problems that lead to the biggest paydays and most amount of life awards.
Without creativity you become a corporate factory worker on minimum wage that can be thrown around like a rag doll by inflation and wage stagnation.
Every child is an artist. The challenge is staying an artist when you grow up — Pablo Picasso
How to interrupt the program
If you’ve entered machine mode accidentally, like I did, there is a way out.
1. Randomness
Creative people embrace randomness. They drown out useless distractions from phones and devices to introduce novelty.
- Maybe they walk a different way to work.
- Maybe they try a different cafe.
- Maybe they read a religious book even though they’re an atheist.
The craziest thing you can do is live in another country for a while. There’s no chance it won’t completely change your daily life. Make it a country with a different language to your native one … and you’re destined for disasters.
Those disasters give you access to chaos that’s the foundation of creativity.
2. Zoom out
I’ve been reading a lot of Dan Koe’s work.
The guy is a spiritual and philosophical master. He talks a lot about zooming out. Seeing yourself as a tiny grain of sound in an infinite universe that spans galaxies.
The average person is to hyper-focused on themselves. This forces them to let their ego run their life and be selfish. Selfishness won’t help you transcend into creativity mode.
Creativity is a state that’s connected to every living thing.
You don’t need to join a hippie commune to experience it, but you do need to get good at thinking more deeply about your life.
- Why are you here?
- What’s beyond Earth?
- Are there aliens?
- Have they visited?
- What happens when you’re dead?
- Doesn’t anyone care about all the things you fuss over each morning?
You’ll find there’s a lot of BS in life when you go deep. Nothing matters that much when you start to have revelations about how important your life is.
3. Adopt a habit that clears the mind and leaves blissful beauty
The mind is like a drain pipe. It gets clogged up with sludge.
We all need a habit that helps clear the mind so it can be creative again. I use writing online as a form of meditation.
Some use hardcore weightlifting at the gym to do it. Journaling is another one. Or you could make friends with deep thinkers and enjoy conversations with them that help empty your mind.
When the mind is stressed it’s useless. Stress creates negative thoughts and that leads to some version of “poor me.”
Access to life-changing thoughts requires you to empty the cup of your mind and pour the water on the sidewalk. Then you can use the mind for creativity to create thoughts that lead to higher states of consciousness.
4. Insist on working less
Hustle p*rn tells you to work as hard as Mad Max.
Don’t. Working too hard makes you stupid. Creativity needs space. It needs time between meetings and phone calls. It needs long lunches, walks, and time to be bored.
How do you work less?
Master deep work done in a flow state. The rate of output will go up when you do, so the number of hours spent working will go down.
The less scheduled you are, the more creative you’re going to be — Naval Ravikant
Final Thought
Auto-pilot is hell.
Break all the routines and repetition to stop being a machine and start feeling alive again. Writer Zach Progob says “So much stress and confusion comes from the simple lack of creation.”
Once you start being creative again a lot of that stress will go away. You’ll stop feeling empty and like you were meant for more.
Creativity is the currency of this world, not time or money. Create.
