Jon Butcher says creativity isn't just for artists. He blocks two to three hours each morning for his best work, then saves afternoons for easier tasks. The key is knowing when you're sharpest and protecting that time.
Chapters
Let's talk about creativity. A lot of people think that they're not creative. And I happen to think that everybody is creative in different ways. You've just really got to tap into it. Creativity is simply being able to create something, anything. You know, an accountant can create a financial spreadsheet that's actually a creative act. And that person is creative. If they want to explore other ways that they can be creative. They might try cooking or they might try painting. Guaranteed. If you look for the things that fascinate you, that you really enjoy, you can find ways to be creative, even if you think that you're not. I'm an artist from a family of artists, and my mom and dad met in art school. We have art businesses. Art is pretty much all we do. So creativity is something I'm very familiar with. And people have asked me in the past, how do you really get your creative juices flowing and turn yourself on creatively? And I've learned that there are two schools of thought on this, especially in the art community. The first school of thought is to be disciplined with your creativity. So if you're a painter, you wake up every morning at 9 o' clock and you paint whether you want to or not. You paint from 9 to 5, or whatever your workday is. The second school of thought is you do creativity when you become inspired to do it and you wait for that inspiration to come. A lot of people will have long periods of time where they're sort of dry, and all of a sudden, bam, that inspiration hits and then it just pours out of them. I'm kind of a combination of both. One of the things I think is really valuable is for you to understand your daily rhythms, for you to understand what times of day or night you're most creative. So a lot of musicians, they don't even start to get creative until nighttime. They're night players, which I used to be like that when I was working on music full time. But now I'm not like that anymore. I'm doing more writing. And I found that first thing in the morning with my coffee before anything else. That's my prime writing time. So I've literally blocked two to three hours out in the morning where I'm doing nothing else. That's my key creative time. By the afternoon, my brain's pretty much gone. I can do. I can do busy work, I can do production work, I can work out, do physical labor, but I no longer have the capacity to write at the highest level. So it's a great idea for you to try to understand your daily rhythms. There will probably be a time when you are most creative in the day. That's when you want to do creativity. And then you can either use discipline and every single day, no matter what, you're going to try it. Some days will work out and some days won't. Or you can. You can wait for inspiration and let it flood you when it comes.
