PNTV - The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp

You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in less time. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today, another great book, the Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp. Twyla Tharp is one of the world's leading choreographers. She's created 130 dances for the world's top organizations, from the Joffrey Ballet to the London Royal Ballet. She's amazing. One of the most prolific creative human beings on the planet. And this book is awesome. I'm going to share with you a quote from the Philosopher's Note that captures the essence of this book very well. She tells us, quote, I will keep stressing the point about creativity being augmented by routine and habit. Get used to it. In these pages, a philosophical tug of war will periodically rear its head. It is the perennial debate, born in the Romantic era between the beliefs that all creative acts are born of A, some transcendent, inexplicable Dionysian act of inspiration, a kiss from God on your brow, the that allows you to give the world the Magic flute. Or B hard work. If it isn't obvious already, I come down on the side of hard work. That's why this book is called the Creative Habit. Creativity is a habit and the best creativity is a result of good work habits. That's it in a nutshell. Well, there you go. We are complete. That's it in a nutshell, the Creative Habit. But let's have fun looking at a few big ideas. The first one is rituals. If you want to create powerfully and enter the zone of the creative habit, you need to have rituals. You need to make rituals the cornerstone of your life. We talked about this in our class on Habits 101. It's what Scott Adams refers to as his systems that allowed him to create 9,000 comic strips. You do not create 9,000 anything without rituals, without routines, without habits, without systems. Twyla describes one of her rituals is getting up at 5:30 in the morning, putting on her workout clothes, heading outside, hailing a cab, telling the driver to take her to her gym and then working out for two hours. But she says the ritual is actually complete. The moment I tell the driver where to take me, take me to the gym. Ritual is complete, amazingly powerful. Every single day you ask Scott Adams what he's going to be doing on a Saturday in 2017, he'll say, I know exactly what I'm going to be doing. On 6:10am I'm working on a comic strip. It's what I do. It's the ritual that drives my creative habit, which allows me to create at a prolific level that makes everyone else think I'm a genius. Just divinely inspired. Yeah, that and I work unbelievably hard and I create systems that make it easy to do my rituals using our finite willpower wisely to create habits and rituals that go on autopilot. That's the name of the game. That's the first big idea. Second one is Mozart. Mozart. She goes off on the fact that he was one of the hardest workers in history. Yes, he was born with some gifts. Yes, he was born to the father of one of the world's leading instructors of music to children. And he worked furiously hard. It's the word that she and Carol Dweck uses. Furiously hard. So hard that at 28 years old, his hands were deformed. Imagine that for a moment. Imagine how hard you'd have to work to literally deform your hands. That's amazing. Year in and year out, decade in and decade out, he just crushed it. And he didn't have an easy life. He didn't just sit back and write when the inspiration struck. He was constantly needing to make enough money to take care of his family, completing compositions right before they were going to be performed. It was nuts. Furiously hard. Think about that when you think of Mozart. Not that he was some genius in some other unaccessible realm. Yes, he had the gifts and he loved what he did. And he worked incredibly hard. Same with anyone else. We admire distractions. We want to reduce them. So we've been talking a lot about over the last week or so. Yesterday we did. You are the placebo. We talked about the fact that creative people operate in the alpha brain state. Now you're in beta. I'm in a mellow beta right now. If I was constantly hopped up on email and social media and all those things, I'd be in a very active beta. Right? Which is where we are. And we're doing those things. We want to be able to play from an alpha beta perspective where we're mellow traffic, dropping out of beta into alpha. That's where the creative goodness occurs. Now we're not going to be able to tap into that consistently and let our subconscious mind help us out behind the scenes. If we're constantly distracting ourselves, if we're paper cutting our consciousness with little things, or as Stephen King described it as putting jumper cables to his brain, you can't think that way. So Twyla challenges us. Give yourself one week to eliminate distractions. I like to play a game based on Stephen Covey's four quadrants. He has his quadrant two, which is important and not urgent stuff. Then he has quadrant four, which is not important, not urgent stuff. It's distractions, basically. So it's the stuff that what I used to do was email or ESPN or news. Those were my primary distractions. So as I turned pro, by the way, Steven Pressfield is all about rituals. The amateur works when they're inspired. The professional knows that they need to show up for inspiration to show up. Somerset Maund style, right? Yeah. I only write when inspiration strikes. Thankfully it strikes at 9am sharp every morning. But we need to reduce our distractions. And when I turned pro, basically said, look, I need to eliminate quadrant four activity. I am no longer going to do the not important, not urgent stuff. I'm going to shift all of that into important but not urgent quadrant two, which is where we optimize our lives, renew ourselves, give ourselves the opportunity to optimize our lives and actualize our potential. So I literally have not. I email once or twice a week, emailing basically one and a half people on our team, one other guy, infrequent way. Not been on espn, haven't been on the news, Google news in months. Since I decided that I'm all in, this is it and all that energy has been shifted to this creative work. It's amazing how much vitality is created when we reduce distractions. Not only do we get more of that time back, we also are able to lock in on one thing and then our subconscious, as I just described, can go to work with us and for us. That's the third idea. What are your distractions? Inventory them. Notice what you do when you're tired or when you're stressed. When you're looking to let off some steam and see if rather than doing those things, you can meditate for a minute or two or five, or you can bust out 25 pushups and 25 squats. Takes you a minute or two. Not a big deal. You can lay down and take a little nap or do some breathing exercises. Find ways to shift from the not helpful distraction stuff that to the renewing quadrant two stuff. It's a big idea. Fourth big idea is two of them combined. One she says, if you want to be great, great creatively, you got to start by copying. So everyone says, find your own path. You got to do this and this. And they say, yeah, whatever, okay. And you need to start by understanding what greatness looks like. And I forget who it was who shared a story of the fact that Hunter Thompson, when he was young, literally typed out F. Scott Fitzgerald's the Great Gatsby from the first letter to the last letter on his typewriter. He banged it out because he wanted to feel what it felt like to write something that good. That's amazing. Kobe Bryant, as he was mastering his craft, he would obsessively watch all the great performers and he'd try to copy their moves. He tried to take this from Jordan and this from this other athlete and see if he can weave it into his beingness and his athleticism. Bruce Lee, the same thing, mastered multiple arts before he created his own art. So we got to be willing to start by copying. That's what I'm doing right now. I'm just all in. Let me just see what the great teachers say. I sit there, and every morning I spend two and a half hours writing these notes. Then the time I'm typing their quotes. Oh, this is what they said. And it's amazing how I can go from reading it one level, typing out the quotes. It's at a deeper level. Then I read it as an MP3 deeper level. Then I challenge myself to record this TV episode deeper level. And all that is getting into my consciousness. And you need to think about how you can do it in your domain. Who can you copy that you really admire? How do they do that? See if you can create that on your own. Do that enough times and you'll get that mastery where you can express your essence even more authentically. Second part of this read, she says she can't think if she's not reading. All these great people talk about how important it is to read, which is why I do this as well. I'm obviously excited to encourage you to read more and introduce you to people you may not otherwise have heard about or books and topics you may not otherwise have wanted to dive into. We need to read. The. The most successful people I know have huge libraries. They spend an incredible amount of time reading. We need to cultivate that habit in ourselves. And she says, read. She reads like an archaeological dig. She's in it, and she's marking up everything, folding the pages over, writing notes. She's like, by the end of it, it's my book. I've written all over it. Someone else couldn't even read it. I've owned it archaeologically. I'm digging for ideas. She says, if you looked at my books. And I'll share a link below to a video I created years ago about how do I read a book, how I mark it up and all that kind of stuff. But read A and B. Read archaeologically. Look for ideas you're going to be able to implement in your life. Huge idea. Big part of the creative habit. And finally, she's a choreographer, so obviously she's engaged in her body. But she says it's so important you kickstart your mind with your body. Be active. Being sedentary is as bad as smoking. They tell us it's nuts, right? Sitting all day long is toxic for not only our life force, but our creativity. Get up, move. Create regular patterns throughout your day. I like to start my day with a little yoga. Then I do my burpees. I've got my little burpees plus one challenge going. I did 70 of them before I record the MP3 in this video. I'll work out at noon today and then I'll relax in the afternoon. But find ways to. Maybe I'll do One of those 25 push ups, 25 squats as a break in the afternoon. Find ways to engage in exercise in micro levels and on a daily basis and jump start your brain again. Exercise is like taking a little bit of Ritalin, a little bit of Prozac, and it's awesome. Get on it. Body, mind connection. Copy the great ones, read the great ones. Eliminate your distractions, identify what they are and get rid of them. Remember, Mozart works ridiculously hard. Deformed hands, 28 years old. Rituals are the essence of the creative habit. I hope you enjoyed and I look forward to sharing more with you soon. Let's do this. Have an awesome day. See you. Hi, this is Brian. I hope you enjoyed that Philosopher's Notes TV episode. If so, I think you'll enjoy everything else we offer at BrianJohnson. Me. Two basic things. One our free newsletter. It's called the Optimizer. Over 50,000 people start their day with it and they tell us it's pretty awesome. And 2 our optimal living membership program. This is where I put all my best stuff. 10 bucks a month for a ton of wisdom. Two primary things in there. Philosopher's notes plus optimal living 101 classes. When you sign up, you'll get instant access to 250 philosopher's notes, which are basically six page PDFs and 20 minute MP3s where I capture my favorite big ideas from great books. The PNTV episodes are kind of a mini version of all that Goodness. You'll also get instant access to all my Optimal living classes. 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