Creativity Doesn't Require Talent, It Requires This

Today on Ultimize Discover, you're getting a short practical sample from the Ultimize universe. Use this on its own, take one idea and apply it today, or go deeper at ultimize.com. Ultimize is the world's largest personal development podcast, audiobook, and online learning network. Ultimize. Here's something you can try today that costs nothing and has a direct impact on your creative output. Put your phone in a drawer, walk out the door with just a pad and pen, and stay outside and walk for 20 minutes at least. No podcasts, no music, no scrolling, just your own thoughts and something to write them down on. You'll be surprised what surfaces when you give your brain actual room to think and to work. This is The Everyday Creative, and I'm your host, TJ Walker. This is a part of Ultimize, the world's largest personal development podcast, audiobook, and online learning network. In this limited series, we're going to dismantle the belief that creativity belongs to a certain kind of person and replace it with a practical daily system anyone can build. The framework is 3 words: Notice, Capture, Create. 10 episodes, real, Immediately Usable Tools: A Creative Practice That Actually Sticks. So subscribe now so you don't miss the first episode. I'll see you there. Here's something that's probably true about you, even if you'd push back on it hard. You're more creative than you think. I don't mean to pander, but hear me out. You're not a little more creative, but significantly more. The problem isn't that you lack creativity. It's that you've never been given a practical daily system for producing it. Let me tell you what I'm doing right now. I'm 63 years old, and tonight, tonight I'm performing a stand-up comedy routine at an open mic night for the first time in my life. I have no idea whether it'll get a single laugh. The material might be terrible. The timing might be off. I've spent weeks writing it anyway, not because I've decided I'm a professional comedian, but because trying to be funny in front of strangers is one of the most creatively demanding things you can put yourself through. You have to notice what's genuinely absurd about ordinary life. You have to capture those observations in a form someone else can actually follow. And then you have to create a moment of shared recognition between you and a room full of people you've never met. So it's notice, capture, create. That's the framework this entire series is built around, not because I'm trying to turn you into a stand-up comedian. What I just described is exactly how it works in practice though, this whole practice of creativity. Most people who do open mic nights never progress beyond them. I might be one of them. They never headline a club, they never release a special, and honestly, that's completely fine. Theodore Roosevelt said it best, it's not the critic who counts, it's the person in the arena. The value of creative attempt isn't in how polished the result is necessarily. It's in the attempt itself. You don't have to be good at something new to benefit from trying it. You just have to actually try. Here's what I want to challenge before we go any further. Most people who call themselves not creative have confused two very different things: having a creative skill and having a creative practice. A creative skill is something developed over time—writing, drawing, designing, performing. A creative practice is simply the habit of doing creative things regularly, whether you're good at them yet or not. You can have an extraordinary creative practice without much creative skill at all. In fact, that's exactly how creative skill gets built in the first place. Creativity is not a talent. Not a gene you either inherited or didn't. It's a behavior, a set of daily actions that, done consistently, produce a steady output of new ideas, new connections, and new ways of solving old problems. If you're doing those actions, you feel creative. If you're not doing them, you don't. That's not a motivational claim, it's just how the mechanism works. The Notice, Capture, Create framework gives you a simple 3-step daily structure. You notice, you pay deliberate attention to what's interesting, surprising, or slightly off about the world around you. You capture, you get those observations out of your head and into a usable form before they disappear, and they will disappear quickly. Then you create, you make something from what you've collected, even if it's small, even if it's rough, even if it doesn't get a single laugh. Here's what the research on creative consistency shows. Creative output is a function of creative input and creative practice, not, I repeat, not of raw creative talent. The people who feel most creatively alive aren't more gifted than the people who feel creatively stuck. They're simply doing specific things every day that the stuck people aren't doing. Those things are learnable, they're teachable, and you're going to have all of them before this series is done. In our next session, we're going to look directly at where the "I'm not creative" belief comes from because you didn't arrive at that belief by accident. And understanding how it got built is the first step toward taking it apart. And relax, this is not a series about turning you into a stand-up comic. It's about how you can be creative in every aspect of your life. Notice, capture, create. The framework we introduced in the first session applies directly to this one because this session is about the daily habit that makes that framework real. Instead of just theoretical. The most powerful thing I've ever done for my creative output has nothing to do with talent, training, or inspiration. Here's what I did: I started putting my phone in a drawer once a day, walking out the door with nothing but a notepad and a pen, and walking around for about an hour. No podcasts, no music, no set destination, just walking and thinking and writing down whatever surfaced. The results surprised me. That single daily practice done consistently generated hundreds of course ideas, ideas that became the financial engine of my business and the foundation of my own financial security. Not because the walks were magical, because my brain cut off from external input and given nothing else to do had no choice but to generate its own material. The notice step in the Notice Capture Create framework works best when there's genuine space to notice something. The walk created that space every single day. I also do a few shorter daily practices that keep the creative muscle warm. Every day I do one doodle on a doodle app, not because the doodles are good. I'm not going to show them to you, but because making something visual daily matters more than the quality of what gets made. It sends a little reminder to my brain, hey, you're creative. Every day I also go to a word app and learn one new word, not because I even want to impress anyone with my vocabulary or even use it. Every day I journal, not a polished essay, just observations, questions, and things that caught my attention. These 3 habits take maybe 5 minutes combined. Together with the walk, they form a daily creative practice that means the creative part of my brain is never starting cold. Here's the key insight behind all of it. Creativity works like a muscle, not like a faucet. A faucet you can ignore until you need it. A muscle atrophies when you don't use it. And it strengthens when you do use it. People who feel uncreative on demand are usually people who only ask the creative muscle to perform without training it. They sit down to generate ideas and get nothing, and they take that as confirmation that they're not creative. What it actually confirms is that the daily practice isn't there yet. The phone away walk is the habit I recommend most strongly because it's the one with the highest creative return per minute of investment. Put your phone somewhere inconvenient, turn it off, walk outside with just a pad and pen, stay outside for at least 20 minutes, write down anything that surfaces. No evaluation, no filtering, no judgment. That's a stupid idea, loser. None of that stuff. Your brain can't compete with the speed of the internet.. But put the internet away, and it turns out your brain doesn't need to. 20 minutes of real thinking will produce an idea worth acting on far more reliably than 20 minutes of scrolling through other people's content. There's a complementary morning practice worth adding alongside the walk: the morning idea capture. Before you check email, before your brain is still in its most associative state, spend 5 minutes writing down every idea, observation, or question that surfaces. Again, don't evaluate, don't filter, just get it on the page. And when I say write, you can do what I do, which is I just dictate into my phone. I'm too lazy to write and I can't read my own handwriting. So however you want to capture the ideas is fine. Aim for at least 10 items. The research on creative output is consistent on this point. Volume of idea generation predicts quality of output far better, far better than any attempt to produce only high-quality ideas from the start. You need the raw material pipeline running daily. This is how you build it. In our next session, we're going to focus specifically on the capture side of the framework. Because the daily habit generates ideas, but if you don't have a reliable system for holding on to them, most will be gone before you can use them. By the way, quick question for you. Have you ever noticed how easy it is to consume content and how hard it is to actually do anything with it? I mean, you can listen to 100 episodes, read 10 books, and your habits are exactly the same. That's the gap most people never close. So if you're listening to this and thinking, yeah, I want to actually improve, go to ultimize.com. We've got free courses there for you, either on communication skills or building better habits. And it's designed to get you to actually use what you're learning, not just hear it once. No cost, no catch. Just go to ultimize.com and start. Ultimize.