A companion piece to this week’s episode. The podcast is the full, unedited, and raw version; this is the organised part, edited and cleaned up with AI.
You can listen to this episode on Spotify, and Apple Podcasts for audio only.
Hey you.
Finnally I get to talk about Big Magic! That, plus a YouTube video I watched this week called How to Switch from Watching to Creating - amazing video how to get started as creator.
If you’ve spent years believing you aren’t creative, or you consume a lot and make very little, this one is for you.
The nuggets (if you only read one section, read this one)
* Start by copying your heroes. Almost nobody begins with their own voice. You find it by imitating the people you admire and failing to become them, and the place where you fail is where you start.
* Your curiosity has left a trail. Look at your YouTube history, whatever you read or watch for no reason except that you want to. Then go further back, to your childhood, which is the most reliable map there is.
* Ideas have a contract, and they leave if you break it. Gilbert describes ideas as living things looking for a human partner, patient for a long time, and then gone to somebody else if you never show up.
* Never ask your creativity to pay the rent. Your job is to take care of the idea, keep it safe and fed, which means making sure you can pay your bills some other way while you work on it.
Where do you even start?
Most people who want to make things again have spent years, sometimes decades, being told or telling themselves that they aren’t creative. The first stage is usually just confusion, where do I even begin, and underneath that sits the harder question of whether you’re creating from the mind or the heart.
Creating from the heart means making something because it’s coming through you, without asking whether other people will like it, whether it will succeed, or whether it will make money. Before you can get there, you need to find out what you’re actually curious about, and the answer is almost always already sitting in your history. The videos you watch at midnight, the books nobody assigned you, and the things you did at nine years old before anyone had an opinion about them.
Steal like an artist
You have no idea what your voice is at the beginning, unless you’ve been making things since childhood and never stopped. For most of us there are layers to peel back first.
So copy. Whatever your thing is, film, music, writing, games, software, starting a company, find the people you admire and do what they do, then work out why they do it that way. Over time you fail to become them, and that failure is the most useful thing that can happen, because it shows you what’s yours. Austin Kleon wrote a whole book on it, Steal Like an Artist, and it’s worth reading if you’re stuck on originality.
The other habit from the video that stayed with me is keeping notes on everything, ideas, things you notice, a sentence someone said, anything that catches you. That’s the practical bridge between watching and making.
Self-doubt isn’t going anywhere
When you create, you’re working inside uncertainty. You have a vague idea and a feeling and you’re in the middle of the process with no guarantee of where it ends, so self-doubt and anxiety come along as regular companions. They will not disappear. You can learn to sit with them, befriend them, accept that they’re part of the arrangement, and keep going anyway.
Start small. Babies crawl before they walk, and fall over many times before walking sticks. And if you decide to share what you make, know that most of the time the world doesn’t care, which is completely fine. Plenty of artists found their audience fifty years after they died. If the process was fun, if you learned something and grew and felt some joy along the way, you didn’t fail, whatever the numbers say.
Ideas are alive
This is the part of Big Magic I keep returning to. Gilbert means it literally when she calls creativity magic. She believes the planet is inhabited by animals and plants and bacteria, and also by ideas, which she describes as disembodied, energetic lifeforms. They have no body but they have will, and the one thing they want is to be made real, which they can only do through a partnership with a person.
So they float around and choose someone they think can bring them to life, often several people at once, which is why you have the idea in the shower and then see someone else release it six months later. None of that makes you less special. What’s yours is how you bring it into the world, because five people can make the same idea and all five versions will be different. Shakespeare used up most of the available plots centuries ago and we still keep telling hero’s journeys, because every storyteller sees the world differently.
If you recognised yourself in this piece, you are not the only one. A lot of us get very good at achieving and at solving other people’s problems, and lose track of our own voice somewhere in the middle of it.
Eleven Dunbar is a third space for people who lead with the heart. Home is for rest and work is for output, and this is where you get to be yourself with other people.
Our home is Elfen Town, a digital town that never closes, where members drop in at any hour to work side by side and to have the conversations you cannot have anywhere else. There are live gatherings, a home in nature to go deeper, a pod of three to five who actually know what you are working on, and somebody who notices when you go quiet.
We stopped choosing between play and depth, and between online and in person.
Capped at 150, the number of people you can actually know.
The contract, and the ideas that left
Gilbert writes about an idea for a book that eventually grew tired of waiting for her and left, and she admits she couldn’t blame it, because she was the one who broke the contract.
I know the feeling of an idea arriving. It’s a full body thing, rich and energetic in my chest, around the sternum, and I’ve had it enough times to recognise it. I’ve also gone back to ideas I let sit too long and felt nothing there anymore.
Some ideas are too big for the moment they arrive. In my twenties there was building a completely new kind of school, which stayed with me for years and which I couldn’t possibly do at twenty-five. This year there was a phone, AI-native, no app store, where the AI lives locally and builds whatever you need on the fly. And a dark chocolate factory, obviously. With some of them the right move is to say thank you for choosing me, I’m not the right person, go find someone else. With others, like the school, I think they’re patient and will still be there in my fifties or sixties, when I might build something inspired by Hive Helsinki, where there are no teachers and everyone learns from the person next to them.
Pick a helpful delusion
We can’t prove ideas come through us rather than from us, and science can’t disprove it either. Gilbert’s answer is that we all live by delusions of one kind or another, so we might as well choose one that helps. Hers is that the work wants to be made, and it wants to be made through you.
I’ve fully signed up for that one. Maybe I’m completely delulu. But even strict science carries some delusion in it, since so many things we were certain of have been overturned, and there’s a part of creativity that no brain scan will ever catch, which is the moment an idea arrives.
The martyr and the trickster
Gilbert describes two archetypes. The martyr believes the system is rigged against everything good and sacred, and that truth only arrives through torment. The trickster believes there is no system, everything is fine, and nobody came here to suffer. The martyr, as she puts it, usually ends up dead in a heap of broken glory, while the trickster wanders off to enjoy another day.
I’ve always had a hard time with the suffering artist, which I think mostly comes from German romanticism, the idea that you have to starve and struggle before anything true comes out. Some artists did go through real agony, though rarely by choice. My best work has always come from lightness, joy, love, wonder, curiosity, and collaboration, with harder stretches that were the exception rather than the engine.
The trickster maps neatly onto the Elf. The Dwarf is mind-heavy, achievement-driven, full of expectation and struggle. The Elf listens, dances, improvises, and trusts that everything is all right. You kick the ball back to the universe and it returns at some point, as an elephant, a banana or a donut, and you play with whatever arrives.
Never ask your art to pay the rent
Gilbert says she would never ask writing to take care of her financially, though she would always take care of writing. That one kept me thinking, because two of my earlier startups were essentially art projects, and I’d have loved to see where they could have gone.
I’m not a parent, so parents please forgive the comparison, but an idea is like a child you’re raising. You keep it safe and fed, and you don’t ask it to feed itself. That means making sure you can pay your rent and eat and sleep somewhere, so you can keep your side of the contract.
If you’re in a transition at thirty or forty or fifty, you don’t need to quit the job that pays your bills. Set aside thirty minutes a day or a few hours a week, and keep the idea protected from the financial pressure. Money is the worst possible measure of a creative idea anyway.
Eleven Dunbar is the first thing I’ve built that has made money from the start. Lumi, the previous company, had investment and no revenue, which was hard to justify. With 11D, neither Justin nor I can live on it yet, we both still subsidise it, and I’m living at my dad’s place so I don’t pay rent. So I have shelter, food and peace, and I can take care of the idea, which is a beautiful position to be in after three years of this.
What are you passionate enough about?
Another line from the book: the question isn’t what you’re passionate about, it’s what you’re passionate enough about that you can tolerate the worst parts of the work. Follow your passion is good advice with an enormous asterisk on it, because everything has the part you’d rather skip, and some days you won’t feel inspired and will need to show up anyway.
My heroes
Steve Jobs, especially in my mid-twenties, though my view of him changed a great deal once I read more than one book. He wasn’t a born leader. He learned a lot of it, including charisma he picked up from someone else in his twenties.
Jonathan Courtney, of Unscheduled CEO and CEO of AJ&Smart in Berlin, whose podcast I listen to a lot for the honesty and humour and how openly he talks about being a founder and a father. And Pixar and Patagonia, which I keep coming back to as proof that a company can be a creative act too.
Who cares how many people listen
I’ve been making this podcast for three years. The best episode peaked at around seven hundred listeners, most land between one and two hundred, and some weeks thirty people press play.
Who cares. I enjoy this so much, and I want to keep it free of goals and analytics. If it’s one person, I’m happy. If it’s only my mum, perfect, a one-person audience.
The invitation
Consume with intention. Watch and read the things you’re curious about, steal from your heroes on purpose, and use all of it as a way back to your own voice.
And remember there are more ways to make things than music, writing and painting. For me it’s pixel art, drawing with a mouse because I’m a tech nerd, and this year hopefully a synthesiser, because knobs and electronics are my jam. Whatever yours is, you don’t need to take the traditional route.
Gerhard
P.S. The podcast has a new, shorter home: unreasonable.fm. Same show, new cover, and if you listen on Spotify, hitting follow helps more than you’d think.
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