creativity – Make Beautiful Choices

Do Or Die: rewrite the rules and become exceptional

Welcome back. This week I want to look at a theme that goes by many names, one that I’m certain you’ve discussed and read about before:

Raising your expectations for yourself, and getting better results, more frequently, in the process.

It seems reasonable enough to say that a higher standard of living is synonymous with better quality of life.

It also seems reasonable enough to say that making improvements in one’s overall quality of life is difficult for many.

The reason for this difficulty, in my view, has to do with a distinction that was touched upon in last week’s article: the exception on the one hand, and the rule on the other.

People who get swept up in new year’s resolutions, who make a sudden push in January only to find themselves right back where they started by March, have demonstrated that they see the better behaviors as exceptional, for example.

Therefore, going with this framework, a person who successfully makes changes is a person who rewrites the rules.

Today, then, I will lay out both the process and the mentality by which one rewrites their own rules for the better.

A bit of trite verbiage if you will: exceptional people are not making exceptions, but playing by the rules. They take the rules very seriously – much more seriously than those who are frustrated and underperforming. Said another way, the winners, the people we rightfully admire, have the strongest command of the fundamentals, and therefore the strongest foundations.

I want to lay out some of these fundamentals now, and I intend to do so a bit rudely. Rudely, because rudeness is necessary: people do not change unless and until they can no longer afford to remain where and as they are.

My rudeness is the rudeness in saying YOU’VE GOT TO WAKE UP as you’re sleeping through your alarm the day of the big job interview. From rudeness with love.

Rule Number One: results must be delivered

Let’s begin with an anecdote. Plutarch, famed Greek philosopher, historian, essayist, and priest (at the Temple of Apollo in Delphi, the site of the famous inscription, “know thyself”), compiled many of the famous sayings of both named and unnamed Spartans, who were notorious for their terse and acerbic wit.

For example, when asked to come and hear a singer who could perfectly mimic a nightingale, a Spartan declined by merely saying, “I’ve heard the bird.”

The particular quotation that concerns me right now, however, is attributed to Eudamidas:

When told that an old man was “a wise old man and one of those who search for virtue,” Eudamidas replied, “and when will he make use of it if he is still searching for it?”

It is easy to say one is studying something, seeking something, or working on something. These days, we hear people say that they are working on themselves, trying to learn patience, or, god help us, trying to learn humility.

Remember the piercing question of Eudamidas: when will he make use of it?

In other words, does someone who thinks of himself as a seeker also expect himself to find and utilize the thing being sought? In my experience, the answer is a resounding “no.”

To self describe as “seeking” is dangerous: it normalizes incompetence. It normalizes falling short. It’s okay to not be there yet, because you’re “working on it,” you’re “trying,” and you’re, worst of all, “doing your best.”

If searching is the rule, acquiring and utilizing is the exception. Results are the exception. This is the definition of mediocrity.

And, it is more than merely mediocre: it is ignorant. One acquires not by seeking, but by doing. Some examples, to better make this distinction:

Suppose I see someone who is remarkably strong physically. I don’t seek strength, I do things that require strength. I increase the demand for strength, by lifting weights, and the strength is supplied. I eat more, I sleep more, I drink more water, and I religiously avoid anything that diminishes the efficacy of my efforts. I don’t seek strength, I exercise the strength I have, and consume the resources necessary to produce more of it.

Suppose I listen to an interview with an author like Robert Greene, and wish I was as knowledgeable, well spoken and as well read. How would I seek those qualities? By reading more books, writing more often, and having more conversations with more people about the sorts of ideas that interested me. Where is the seeking in this? I see only the exercise of one’s capacity, and the resultant expansion of capacity.

Finally, what does being a better musician mean to me? Does it mean searching for better musical ideas and hoping to one day find and execute them? No. It means parting ways forever with this kind of mousey modesty, and being ever more assertive: writing more songs, spending more time practicing them, recording them more frequently, giving more direction in rehearsals, spending more time listening to music that exemplifies the qualities I wish to promote in my own, and applying more scrutiny to what I’m hearing, rather than merely enjoying what I’m doing.

In short, it means demanding results and delivering them, without exception. Let go of the notion of searching and hoping, and take up the way of having and using. Whatever it is you have right here and now, resolve to extract the maximum use from it on a daily basis: you will inevitably discover that this is the means by which you find whatever you were previously seeking.

Rule Number Two: have only the highest regard for yourself

I here exhort you to redraw your entire cosmology: you do not possess original sin, and you are not awaiting salvation. What you possess, rather, is tremendous potential that must be realized at any and all costs. Think of yourself less as someone trying to find his or her way in a vast world and more like a child of royalty placed prematurely on a throne: the role for you is the role before you now, and you must only grow into it.

Again, there is nothing for you to seek: you are here now, and there is a life for you to live right here and right now. Seeking negates having!

Redraw your cosmology: the sun, the sky, the steady passing of time that exposes the consequences of all actions, the people who brought you into this world and the others who educated and mentored and befriended and challenged you – all of this is an endorsement of your existence, confirmation that you are here, that you belong here, that space is made for you wherever you go. Even and especially when others disagree, resist, or reject my ideas, this only proves I am a force that must be contended with, must be answered and countered in some way by others.

Until you are prepared to grant this much, and to take it to be the normal state of affairs, you will always be wondering about and seeking to establish or convince yourself of what is actually nothing but the backdrop of all life, the simple fact of your existence.

Grant yourself some importance, some respect! Not in an egotistical sense, but in the sense that there is important work that awaits its completion by your hands, and it will not settle for another’s.

In the words of the Tao Te Ching, “why should the Lord of Ten Thousand Chariots act lightly in public?” You do so little, try so feebly, adhere so inconsistently, because you believe it doesn’t matter anyway. You matter to the extent that you treat yourself like something that matters.

As for me, I wrenched my life from the jaws of self defeating ideas and decided to claim as much meaning as I possibly could from the time that remains, and I will continue until some insurmountable force appears before me to say: this is it, there is no more knowledge, no more insight, or accomplishment, or improvement, or understanding, or maturity, or contribution, or love and companionship and friendship and cooperation and collaboration for you to partake of. There is a ceiling, and this is it.

Are you where you are because some such force has appeared before you, like Christ at the Mount of Olives, or are you simply not even trying?

The wise seeker knows,
That the fruit of my endeavor
Shall be commensurate
With the intensity
Of my own self effort,
AND NO FATE NOR GOD
SHALL ORDAIN IT OTHERWISE.
Vasistha’s Yoga, trans. Swami Venkatesananda

Rule Number Three: embrace hatred.

We return again to my beloved Spartans, conveyed to me by the pen of Plutarch.

Before I reprint and expound on a series of pungent quotations, however, I should back up and justify what appears to be an unjustifiable, even irresponsible use of words: embrace hatred.

It’s not what you have, but how you understand and utilize it that matters. To the determined, resourceful person, anything and everything can be and is employed toward the end of perfection: of oneself, one’s life, and one’s every undertaking.

If you were short, should I tell you, “don’t bother, shorties can’t win?” Should I tell you the same if you’re a woman, an ethnic minority, or someone attracted to the same sex? Should I say that something about you disqualifies you from the contest altogether? No. I should say, learn to play by the rules, as skillfully as you possibly can, built in handicaps notwithstanding, and you’ll receive whatever marks you earn fair and square.

This extends to attributes of the psyche as well. If you are loving and kind, you can win. If you are cunning and competitive, you can win. And, I dare to say it, if you are hateful, you can win.

To reiterate: what disqualifies you is a violation of the rules, or what you do. Not who you are or how you feel.

I believe this is clear enough.

Another concept we are going to need: the yin and yang symbol as a model for a binary system. A world of black and white opposites, but not so rigorously segregated as “black and white” implies. A little bit of black in the white half, a little bit of white in the black half, creating balance within each half, rather than balance existing “on the whole.” The Yin and Yang Binary represents the appropriate integration of opposing energies at the local level, not merely at the level of abstraction.

This matters, because nobody actually lives in the average household, with the average family and income and budget and back problems: we only occupy the particular, which merely contributes to a sense of what is average. “Average” as a data point does not truly exist.

Why say all this? Because hate has a place in your life at the local level. It isn’t simply the case that all the perfect woke coastal snow angels of love and empathy have to balance out the hateful idiots in fly over states – YOU have to strike the appropriate balance between love and hate within yourself.

This is impossible if you cannot admit to being in possession of hatred.

Back, then, to the Spartans.

“When asked how one should remain a free man, [Agis, song of Archidamus] said, “by despising death.”

“Questioned as to how he gained his great reputation, [Agesilaus] said, ‘by having despised death.’”

“Certainly when somebody asked what gains the laws of Lycurgus had brought Sparta, [Agesilaus] said: ‘contempt for pleasures.’”

When someone was asking [Cleomenes son of Anaxandridas] why the Spartans do not dedicate the spoils from their enemies to the gods, he said: ‘because they come from cowards.’”

“As some Athenian was reading a funeral eulogy in praise of men killed by Spartans, [Ariston] said: ‘what, then, do you think was the quality of our men who defeated them?’”

A picture has surely emerged, by now, of the sort of hatred I am referring to, so that we might finally understand what it means to “embrace hatred.”

A love of life that is given an intimidating ferocity by the attending hatred of death. A love of strength and vitality that is inseparable from a hatred of weakness. A love of victory that is tempered by a disdain for the evident inferiority of the defeated. A deep sense that some people are simply better than others, that superiority can be proven by contest, and that better people are entitled to more, and entitled to rule.

Said another way, Aristotle wrote in The Nicomachean Ethics that “an honorable man is a disdainful man.” I believe the meaning of this statement has been made clear enough by now.

It is not enough to like the idea of one day achieving something:

You must hate the thought of failure
Hate the thought of being right where you are now in another ten years,
Hate the thought of your parents or spouse or children making excuses for you,
Hate the thought of breaking the promises you’ve made to yourself and others,
Hate the idea of squandering your potential for the sake of episodic pleasantries,
Hate the idea of wasting your life.

When I start to falter on my path, an icy, humorless auditor within me rises up to scowl and cast a rigid index finger down like a punishing lightning bolt as if to say, get back up, get to work, and get it done.

I wish to close with a poetic representation of precisely this kind of wrathful contempt, embodied perfectly by Wallace Stevens in his poem Puella Parvula (Latin for “quiet little girl”). I can only say this so well, but Stevens says it perfectly:

Puella Parvula

Every thread of summer is at last unwoven.
By one caterpillar is great Africa devoured
And Gibraltar is dissolved like spit in the wind.

But over the wind, over the legends of its roaring,
The elephant on the roof and its elephantine blaring,
The bloody lion in the yard at night ready to spring

From the clouds in the midst of trembling trees
Making a great gnashing, over the water wallows
Of a vacant sea declaiming with wide throat,

Over all these the mighty imagination triumphs
Like a trumpet and says, in this season of memory,
When the leaves fall like things mournful of the past,

Keep quiet in the heart, O wild bitch, O mind
Gone wild, be what he tells you to be: Puella.
Write pax across the window pane. And then

Be still. The summarium in excelsis begins…
Flame, sound, fury composed… Hear what he says,
The dauntless master, as he starts the human tale.

In summary,

Part with excuses and demand results. Come to view results as normal, and lack of results as abnormal.

Hold yourself in the highest regard, and then ceaselessly demand that your behavior rise to meet your own standards.

Finally, you must have contempt for whatever is beneath you, that threatens you, that brings you down, that would seek to poison you and strip you of your sense of purpose, that would tell you you are unworthy of your aspirations and potential. Let that contempt become that which fuels you, like the mighty imagination that triumphs like a trumpet over the blaring elephant on the roof.

Thank you for reading. Talk to you soon.

-Jas

Technique, Creativity, Artistry: how to become remarkable

If you listen to the title track of the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s debut album, “Are You Experienced?”, you’ll hear him ask “have you ever been experienced?” And then the answer: “well, I have.”

You and me both, Jimi.

The tree of experience bears many fruits, and among them is discernment. The ability to make distinctions. When you have experience with something, you can differentiate between the many forms of that something. The many contexts in which one engages with it, and therefore, the range of responses that might be offered.

Discernment is critical to success in any endeavor, because it’s an example of a foundational virtue.

I like to discuss foundational elements, because everything on top of the foundation is up to you. It’s your life, and you should direct the course of it based on an internal locus of self worth, an inner sense of self and purpose. I try not to provide input there – it has to come from you.

What makes for a strong or weak foundation, however, is not up to you. These are the non-negotiables nobody can get around. My working definition of a failure is someone who pays attention to everything but the fundamentals, thinking they understand them already, or barely thinking about them at all, and always having a rationalization for why this time is exceptional and exemptive.

You might say I’m being pedantic here. I would say that conceptual groundwork is better verified than presumed.

See, like Hendrix, I also ask and answer questions to myself.

I would like, then, to better distinguish between three things that people often confuse, and unlock the potential growth that might spring from better understanding each of them.

Specifically, I’m going to spend some time defining each of them, and then provide some guidance about how to cultivate them.
These three are:

Technique
Creativity
Artistry

I see people conveying deep confusion about all three, so often, and in ways that clearly represent self-limiting beliefs, that I would like to spend some time delineating each of them.

Becoming the best you you can possibly be does indeed require all of these virtues. I spend a lot of time on all three, and, wow does it pay off.

A quick overview

Technique, skill, and productive capacity are all, in this context, synonymous: your ability to do something. The difference between walking down a sidewalk and climbing up a mountainside is one of technique.

Charisma, the ability to make eye contact, smile, intone one’s voice, and carry oneself in a way that elicits attention, consideration, admiration and deference from others, is a technique.

The ability to sew, type, play guitar, or use an Eisenhower Matrix – all techniques. All craft, all skill.

The word technique comes from the Greek tekne, “to know how to do.”

Creativity is related to, but distinct from, technique. Creativity is defined by Oxford Languages as “the use of imagination or original ideas, especially in the production of an artistic work.”

I have little to add to this definition, except to draw attention to the word “especially,” and point out that it does not mean “exclusively.” I’ll come back to this.

Artistry is defined, also by Oxford Languages, as “creative skill or ability.” While in no way inaccurate, I find it quite insufficient, especially in this context. The difference between being creative and being artistic is something which, again, I’ll spend some time outlining.

First, what is technique?

Exactly what was said moments ago: tekne, or how-how.

Let’s expand on this by introducing a new idea: signal-to-noise ratio, henceforth “SNR.” “Signal” equates to what is intended, “noise” to whatever substance accompanies the signal, but is unintended and perhaps undesired. In speech, the various parts of the sentence are the signal, while the ums, ahs, likes and y’knows, are all, like, totally just noise, ya know?

Technique is the ability to deliver as much signal with as little noise as possible.

Some more examples:

If someone makes valid points, but does so in a rude manner that ultimately eclipses the argument being put forth, noise has drowned out the signal, and this is bad technique.

If I buy a meal that contains ideal amounts of protein, fat, and carbohydrates, but is heavily processed, gives me indigestion, has little bioavailability, and gives me constipation, this, too is an example of signal (the macronutrients that my body needs) getting drowned out by noise (all the negative effects of mass production on the quality of the food). The manufacturer is technically bad at feeding me.

If I sit down to write my newsletter, the amount of time I spend typing words into the doc would be “signal,” and the time I spend clicking away to respond to texts, or scroll through social media, would be “noise,” from a time management perspective. Good technique, then, means spending my time productively.

Now it’s time for an important distinction:

The best possible technique is not equivalent to zero noise. A degree of noise is desirable, and, in many cases, necessary.

Examples:

The difference between my voice and your voice is not one of signal, but noise: the different shapes of the roofs of our mouths cause a variance in overtone distribution, which make our voices unique and easily distinguished from one another.

The same process of audio physics, variance in overtone distribution, is the reason a clarinet, oboe, violin, and timpani all make recognizably different sounds.

The difference between the bullet-point plot summary, though totally correct, and the experience of reading the entire novel, is one of signal to noise. Style is noise! Individuality is noise! Strip away noise and you have something totally robotic, alien, and devoid of feeling.

Finally, a so-called “bedside manner” from a doctor, versus someone blurting out “you’re gonna die,” is the difference between desirable noise and unbearable signal.

A good technician, then, maximizes signal within the range of productive returns.

I just brought in another concept, the law of diminishing returns. In short, it refers to the point at which more of a particular resource begins to confer less benefit. The point of negative returns indicates the point where more of the same resource now begins to strip away benefits, not merely cease adding to them.

Technique is about maintaining the SNR that confers maximum benefit.

Logical arguments brought to life by emotion, not hijacked by them.

Meals that are both nutritions and palatable, not hyper palatable with zero nutrition.

Time spent productively, but regularly punctuated by periods of rest, inactivity, and even boredom.

How to cultivate technique:

In any activity, clearly define what constitutes signal on the one hand and noise on the other.

Repeatedly practice producing signal.

In the beginning, there will be a lot of noise. In my case, as a writer, my earlier newsletters have weaker arguments, non sequiturs, unclear wording, and a lack of formatting.

Refinement of technique leads to a greater command of signal production, and, concordantly, noise reduction. One day, you will notice you’ve removed too much noise. You’ll feel empty and alienated by your own work.

Now you know where the line is.

In order to properly maintain the right balance of signal to noise, you need to consume material that exemplifies a good SNR.

Read good writing. Read the western canon, not blogs. There is a saying: great film composers listen to classical composers. Bad film composers listen to film composers.

I write blogs, but I read the classics. And my girlfriend’s text messages. Promptly. See how I threw in some noise right there?

If you’re always going to be a few steps behind your heroes, at least pick heroes who are ahead of your own competition.

Read, watch, and listen to the masters. And then iteratively participate in the fundamentals of the craft.

Now for creativity.

If technique is the productive application of skill, creativity is the inventiveness that selects the correct technique in the absence of outside direction.

Driving is a technique; improvising a new route when you hit a roadblock is creativity.

Playing in an orchestra requires technique; playing through the same parts without the use of your right index finger requires creativity.

Writing coherent sentences and paragraphs requires technique; deciding what to say next requires creativity.

I could go on, but I think you see the point. When you have to forge a path yourself without outside input, or with merely suggestive guidance, this is creativity. Having an idea and then struggling to bring it into material form is the process of creative endeavor.

Jobs that are not repetitive, where every day is a journey unto itself, are creative jobs. Maintaining mystery and romance in a marriage requires creativity. Correcting people without embarrassing and discouraging them is creative. Coaching people is creative. Software engineers and people who write code, contrary to the opinions of some, are highly creative.

The bottom line: knowing how to do something is not the same as being able to figure out what to do. The difference between technique and creativity is the difference between execution and selection.

The reality is that technicians who lack creativity will always require the supervision of creative people: they cannot think on their own. Similarly, creative people often rely on the sheer manpower of technicians.

Can you raise your level of creativity through intentional activity? I say yes, because I have increased mine, and fairly systematically.

To point you in the direction of greater creative expression, I’m turning now to the work of Carl Rogers, a pioneering psychotherapist. Why? Because creativity is about the flow of ideas, not linear and mechanical thinking. The flow of ideas is amorphous, and that makes people uncomfortable. Why does it make people uncomfortable? Because, for many, whatever cannot be controlled, or easily defined, or shut off, is seen as threatening. Things that are unlike you, or unlike your inflexible notions of who you are and what you do, are threatening.

Creativity is about openness, welcoming what is different, and being willing to undergo change in the process of engaging with that new and different something, whatever it is.

In order to think and act in new ways, you have to be able to trust yourself, and locate a source of inner guidance. This is more than instinct, but something at the core of personhood itself.

I mentioned Carl Rogers. In writing about his decades of clinical work, he links an increase in openness, in fluidity, flexibility, and creativity, with becoming more psychologically mature.

Essentially, people who better understand themselves, and don’t use rigid intellectual constructs as a means of holding the complexity of reality and of their selves at an arm’s length, are both more authentic and more creative.

They look for much more specific and novel ways to use language from one moment to the next, preferring not to follow well-worn repetitive grooves and instead to respond inventively to all that is unique to this present moment.

How to be more creative

Enshrine the qualities that, according to Rogers, promote psychological maturation:

Authenticity: start to care more than you do right now about the words you say and how you say them. See what happens if you actually admit to being bored during a conversation, or that you don’t know what to say, or that you’re feeling uncomfortable.

Do not tactlessly blurt out whatever comes into your head, but pay attention to when your words and your thoughts are veering away from each other, and speak in a way that brings them into alignment.

That the outer is reflected in the inner is what is required, not that everything on the inside be brought out. Lord, no.

Unconditional Positive Regard: do you like yourself? Do you encourage, support, and advocate on behalf of yourself? Or do you do the opposite in some way? Are you living life like it’s a game that can be won fair and square, or do you, beneath the surface, think of yourself as a kind of loser? Someone who’s already defeated?

For a long time, I thought that the best of what life has to offer is meant for people very much unlike me, and my best bet was to just get lucky. This had very negative consequences on my willingness to try, and to face challenges, and to put myself out there.

I’m happy to say that’s no longer the case, and that I’ve made a full recovery, so to speak. Part of that change was that I adopted an attitude of unconditional positive regard toward myself. Meaning, I’m fundamentally operating from a place of self advocacy: being a good person, doing good, and receiving good from others and from life is something I now view as completely normal and expected.

You’d be amazed at how much falls into place when that belief is truly operant within a person.

How do you cultivate that? By learning to keep promises to yourself, and treating yourself like someone who’s future has value. Little by little, day by day, you acquire more and more self regard in this way.

Understanding: this is downstream from authenticity. Understanding yourself means parsing what you really want and value, who you really are, from all the ideas about yourself that have been foisted on you by others. These others aren’t limited to your parents. Your teachers, peers, romantic partners, messages from television and social media – they can all become examples of introjection – ideas about life and selfhood that come from someone else, but are adopted so uncritically that they are mistaken for your own.

Social media tells you to be outraged about, say, an event happening all the way around the world in a country you’ve never heard of and know nothing about. Suddenly, social acceptance seems to hinge on parroting the new slogan that’s circulating around – no blood for oil, believe women, silence is violence – and now you believe it, too!

That’s introjection. You have no idea what you believe – beliefs are whatever the evidence has convinced you of. The apparent contagion of social values is called introjection. The real you may or may not share those beliefs, but how would you know?

To understand yourself, start by finding the contradictions between rigid ideas of who you are, and actual examples of your behaviors, words, and thoughts that contradict “the narrative.” Have the courage to admit them to yourself. Just like you gain credibility, rather than lose it, by admitting to a mistake, owning up to these contradictions in the moment you observe them earns you a great deal of credibility with yourself, and the channels of understanding only continue to open as a result.

Finally, you need acceptance.

Acceptance, in this context, means relaxing whatever rigidity has hitherto prevented you from engaging fully with the information that the enterprise of understanding has confronted you with.

The water in a river does not maneuver around the rocks in its path – it makes contact, and the contact itself is what guides the water around it. As tired of a metaphor as “be like water” might be, the notion that you cannot simultaneously avoid and integrate something is not a tired observation.

By definition, you are enhanced, not diminished, by accepting new information. Again, definitively, you have only diminished yourself to the extent to which you have shut out reality.

Acceptance is the embrace that annexes more of the knowable into your domain. It is not resignation, but acquisition of resource and, therefore, power.

Now to address the glaring objection:

Why approach creativity from this angle? Why not simply prescribe some linear but effective exercises to develop creative thinking, like beginning each day by making a list of 25 new ideas, all addressing some area where your thinking has been stuck (you’re welcome to use that!)?

Because the method I’ve just outlined represents a hardware upgrade, or an investment in your systemic capacity, rather than merely handing you newer and better software, or thinking tools, to run on your otherwise unchanged hardware.

Ultimately, the various thinking exercises that foster creative problem solving are themselves techniques.

To invest in psychological maturation is to widen your mind from a trickle to a river, and from a river to a vast ocean.

I got serious about this kind of work, and, a few short years later, almost nothing feels like “work” anymore. This is the difference between “mindset hacks” and actually growing up. One is a content creator’s gimmick, the other is what your dad was trying to impart to you.

At last: what is artistry?

If technique is knowing how to do something, and creativity is knowing which of the things you know how to do to do(forgive me), then artistry is here defined as knowing why you are doing what you do in the way that you do it.

Artistry is vision: not merely being able to know how to use tools, and how to select the right ones, but having a vision of oneself as participating in the continuity and development of civilization.

The apex of this mentality, as I have here defined it (which obviously differs greatly from the conventional working definition, which I say is meaninglessly similar to “creativity”) was put forth by Friedrich Nietzsche:

“I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous — a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. I am no man, I am dynamite.”

Artistry, here, is categorically beyond creativity. In the same way that my approach to creativity is not an extension of technique, but an enhancement of the entire technical capacity, artistry is an enhancement of the entire creative capacity. Creativity governs the way in which technique is exercised, and artistry governs the way in which creativity is exercised.

There is no sense in avoiding it: artistry is for those who dare to work as the authors of culture. My approach to creativity involves an expansion of the sense of self, so my approach to artistry expands the concept of the world. You see yourself the way you do, in part, because of your beliefs about the world.

Let me be a bit pedantic: you are a person living in a world.

If you were to just get better at being the sort of person you are in the sort of world you’re in, that’s technique.

If you expand your sense of self to the point where being a good person means more than it did yesterday, that’s creativity.

If you expand your concept of the world in which your person is operating and expanding, that’s artistry.

Growing in technical capacity is about daily habits.

Growing in creative capacity is about striving to unlock the locked doors within yourself, and may take time. For myself, I would clock the process at about two years.

Growing in artistic capacity is a lifelong enterprise because it is limitless.

So, how do you grow in artistry?

As a technically competent creative person, set about expanding your horizons.
Read more.
Learn more about the world.
Read philosophy, read history, and study art, music and literature, rather than merely consuming them (consuming them is still necessary!).
Ask yourself questions like how did the world come to be as it is now?
Go and read Plato and Aristotle, and then go read the criticisms of both of them. Read about the Persian War, read biographies of great composers, and the history of whatever artistic movements you’re fond of.
Start asking why, and dig for answers.
Whatever you hear people talking about, go and pull the data: go beyond accepting the opinions of others and try to come face to face with actual information as often as possible.
Strive to live in objective reality, and let the fire of knowledge consume the deadwood of groupthink.
The best advice I ever received, in this context, came from Munir Beken, a former professor and mentor of mine: a composer is interested in everything.

Be interested in the world in the way a God might be interested: this all belongs to me.

The world isn’t your property, but it is yours to explore. Permit yourself a bit of grandiosity, but make sure not to become smug and arrogant. Be grandiose in the sense of daring to take on the eternal projects of humanity: making sense of ourselves and our place in the world.

Form ideas of your own about where meaning is located and how it is communicated. Imagine yourself as someone after whom your chosen enterprise can never be the same.

The Bach cello suites languished in anonymity for years after his death, and Nietzsche was not widely read during his lifetime. If you need instant gratification and reinforcement, seek it in the application of technique, where the daily victories are made.

Artistry is for the long haul. Artistry is eternity and immortality.

Forgive the greatly expanded tirade I’ve set before you today. See it, perhaps, as a prospective cosmology for you to adopt. A ladder taking you from human to angel to God. Dare to create a world from which you will one day retire and leave to others, who may or may not ever know you existed: you will be a better person today and tomorrow and every day unto death if you choose this for yourself.

Thank you for reading. Talk to you soon.

-Jas