Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life

"Sometimes a flood of new ideas isn’t the problem. As a Noodler, you’re perfectly happy working on the project at hand. In your mind, you’ve uncovered a rich seam of material, and you plan to mine it. Starting isn’t your problem. It’s stopping."

"Who is a Striver? Someone with a burning ambition to be farther along than he is right now, to grow and change and perform to his full potential. Isn’t that beautiful? Once you escape the trap of “compare and despair,” once you realize that the only path to walk is the one right in front of you, your progress will catch up with that limitless ambition."

"I call it the Creative Pyramid. A goal that is not supported by the right mindset or the necessary habits is just a pipe dream—it’s never gonna happen. The Egyptians knew they couldn’t build a pyramid without a base. Whether it’s your goal to publish a best-selling novel, create the next unicorn startup, or simply develop a creative habit for the sake of enriching your life, you’ll need a clear goal, the right habits, and a creative mindset."

"We live in an age when novelists make their entire writing process public online and still go on to sell millions of copies of their book. Your ideas are valuable to you because you’re the only one who can realize them as you envision them."

"Learning is the lifeblood of creative work. The more you know how to do and the better you become at doing it, the deeper your understanding of your work and the richer and more interesting it will be. This means you must develop the meta-skill of learning itself. Simple but huge, folks: you’ve got to learn how to learn to make your best work."

"In fact, if you train in a martial art such as karate, you’ll learn that the revered black belt doesn’t indicate any sort of perfection or completion at all. Instead, it is only the first step in a whole new progression of learning. It’s just another white belt. In the martial arts, every student, no matter her rank, is reminded to approach learning with a beginner’s mind. Thinking in terms of some mystical perfect endpoint is an obstacle to growth. Learning is a continual, nurturing, fundamental life process, just like—and deeply entwined with—creativity."

"The brain evolved to prioritize the sight of a predator over the aesthetic perfection of the sunset framing that predator as it bounds toward you with supper in mind. By default, we watch for predators and miss the sunsets entirely. This hardwired instinct is a liability in the modern world. It’s literally poisonous. Negative thinking releases stress hormones, raises blood pressure, suppresses your immune system, and leads to a host of other health problems. Negative thinking impairs your cognitive ability and memory. Worst of all, negativity becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. When you expect a negative outcome, you tune your intuition to act accordingly, creating the dreaded outcome and reinforcing that negative response: “See? I told you it was going to turn out like this!” It’s a downward spiral that’s also contagious. When you take a cynical view of life, your toxic outlook infects everyone around you, at home and at work."