Notes from Rick Rubin’s ‘The Creative Act’
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These highlights are paraphrased ideas and in some cases direct quotes from the book.
✸ We are all living as artists. We perceive, filter, and collect data, then curate an experience based on this information. Your entire life is a form of self-expression.
✸ We are all translators for messages the universe is broadcasting.
✸ Being an artist means to be continually asking, “How can it be better?” whatever it is. It may be your art, and it may be your life.
✸ Art is a reverberation of an impermanent life. We come and go quickly, and we get to make works that stand as monuments of our time here.
✸ Living life as an artist is a practice. You are either engaging in the practice or you’re not.
✸ However you frame yourself as an artist, the frame is too small.
✸ When you label an aspect of Source, you’re no longer noticing, you’re studying. The more raw data we can take in, and the less we shape it, the closer we get to nature.
✸ The rhythms are not set by us. We are participating in a larger creative act we are not conducting. We can create the space to allow it.
✸ We cannot control the fish, only the presence of our line.
✸ The work reveals itself as you go.
✸ If you know what you want to do and you do it, that’s the work of a craftsman. If you begin with a question and use it to guide an adventure of discovery, that’s the work of an artist.
✸ Who we are is what gives each piece its magnetism. The work represents you. It holds an energetic charge.
✸ Without the spiritual component, the artist works with a crucial disadvantage.
✸ If a piece or an element in nature allows us to access something bigger, that is its spiritual component made manifest. It awards us a glimpse of the unseen.
✸ There is no direct conversion from abstract thought to the material world. The work is always an interpretation.
✸ The purpose of the work is to awaken something in you first, and then allow something to be awakened in others.
✸ The person who makes something today isn’t the same person who returns to the work tomorrow.
✸ A completed project = our intention + experiments around it.
✸ Each experiment gives us useful information for the next experiment.
✸ Our intention is the grand gesture of the work. It’s a truth that lives inside you, and through living it, that truth becomes embedded in the work.
✸ When we are a clear channel, our intention reflects the intention of the cosmos.
✸ The project is bigger than you.
✸ Most creators think of themselves as the conductor of an orchestra. We function more as an instrumentalist in a much larger symphony the universe is orchestrating.
✸ Wait until a work is complete to discover what it’s saying, rather than trying to assign meaning to it prior.
✸ Art goes deeper than thought and stories. It breaks through inner walls and accesses what’s behind.
✸ Artists allow us to see what we are unable to see but somehow already know.
✸ We are on a continual quest to get closer to the universe by getting closer to self.
✸ Art creates a profound connection between the artist and the audience. Through that connection, both can heal.
✸ Art is a circulation of ideas. What makes them appear new is that they’re combining differently each time they come back. If we share what we create, our work can recirculate and become source material for others.
✸ When you contribute your point of view, others see it. It’s then refracted through their filter and redistributed. This process is continuous and ongoing. Taken all together, it creates what we experience as reality.
✸ Art is a universal way to send messages between each other and through time.
PS On an unrelated (?) note, I’m leaving for the road again next week—up through Arizona with stops in New Mexico and Denver before heading for South Dakota. And I’m continually astounded by how everything ties together and makes sense—in retrospect and in the unseen future—in an almost magical way. Life’s design is genius. We ought to put more faith into it.
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