James Clear: The Habit of Creativity and How to Schedule the Muse

James Clear. Where the hell do you begin with a guy like this? He’s an entrepreneur, weightlifter, travel photographer, author and regular writer at JamesClear.com.

It was my honor to talk to him for an hour. I loved his perceptive on following one’s “passion” and what it really means to do creative work.

According to James, the Muse can be scheduled. I tend to believe him and I think you will too after listen to this episode.

We even geeked out about camera gear for few minutes toward the end.

In his own words, “I’m just a country boy trying to make a difference.”

Here are some of my favorite bits from the show:

On Writing and Inspiration

“The truth is that most of the articles I write get written that day. I don’t write every day. I tried to do that and totally burned. The important thing is to have a schedule you can stick to.”

“This is the difference between professionals and amateurs. Professionals to do things on a schedule. Amateurs do things when it’s easy for them or when they feel motivated or inspired to do it.”

“Having a pace you can sustain is huge.”

“I’ve realized I’m a terrible judge of my work. If you show up enough times to get the average ideas out of the way, genius will reveal itself.”

“The default for me is hitting publish and feeling like the post is lacking. The rare thing feeling good.”

“It is true that sometimes you just have that great moment and it just flows out of you and the creative muse strikes and it just feels right. What I find, tough, is that that moment can often be trigged by doing the work for a little while, rather than sitting around passively and letting it hit you just at random.”

“The only way to increase your odds of creating something that [is] compelling and useful and important in your field is to do more. To produce on a consistent basis.”

“There is some kind of quality bar, but after that, it comes down to consistency.”

On The Importance of Telling Great Stories

“I looked back on the first 18 months of articles that I had created and I found out that pretty much 90 percent of the most popular articles all started with a story.”

“It’s not just entertaining people. The other thing I think is really important about it, is that it provides a mental model for the idea in practice. And that is very useful when it comes to behavior change or helping to improve their lives in some way.”

“It can be really easy to talk about theory or share some type of scientific research and not do the hard work of showing people how to bridge the gap between that and practical every day life. And stories help do that in really great way.”

On Finding Your “Passion”

“It’s more about doing great work than figure out all the things you don’t know.”

“You can start with the thing you really like, but I think the conversation should probably be adjusted. The conversation most people have is something around, is this what I’m passionate about, do I really care bout this, does this project light me on fire, all that type of stuff. And those things are great, but I think what the conversation should be is, what skills do I need to succeed and what am I doing to develop that skill set.”

“No matter what project you’re working on, there’s some skill associated with it and you need to figure out what that skill is and how you can build it.”

“The conversation should be about how do I develop skills, how do I move toward mastery, rather than how d