8 Steps to 10X Your Creativity

Creativity is poorly understood by most people.

The majority understand creativity as a random, lucky connection in the brain, rather than an executable process. Most people think that because of this randomness there are creative people, and then there are not.

This is actually a harmful myth that pervades our society and stops so many people from producing great work.

The truth is most creative professionals are not luckier than the rest of us. They just happen to understand the right process, and they stay accountable to that process.

In Willpower Doesn't Work, we learn of John Burke, an American pianist who consistently creates incredible albums and executes them on time. In the book, Burke's creative process is broken down to a micro-level:

• He decides to create a new project.
• He decides the release date.
• He maps out all the key milestones.
• He calls his team members and schedules and pays for recording services.
• He schedules creative time in his calendar.
• He protects that time fiercely.

Because of the right process, he's forced to be creative. And it works.

Contrary to popular belief, you can distill creativity into a process.

Most of us aren't willing to accept this hard and uncomfortable truth because embracing it means we're now obligated to show up. There is no wall. No excuses.

I want to give you not just the wake-up call to change the way you work, but the exact tools that I use to create things at a much faster rate and at a deeper level than most people.

In this article, you're going to learn:

• How to consistently find the best ideas.
• How to powerfully organize your thoughts and create something.
• How to create an environment that puts you into a deeply creative state, so you can rapidly and efficiently execute the creative process.
• How to create powerful reasons for doing your best creative work.
• How to put your body into the best possible state so you feel amazing while you work.
• How to make sure stuff gets done, no matter what, essentially eliminating writer's block and all of its nasty, dangerous equivalents.
• How to save hours worth of time when making your projects.
• Why you should create things now.

This really is exactly what I do to create my articles, courses, posts, and anything else I release. These aren't just ideas, they're steps you should use today. Let's get started.

Cast The Vision

Information is readily available to everyone today. It's not a scarce commodity and is exponentially less valuable than 50 or 100 years ago.

Thus, it's not those who can hoard things, but those who can create things, who become indispensable.

The most creative among us are those who will excel. It sounds simple, and it sounds common-sense, but then why do we have far too many people who aren't actively creating?

The truth is, creativity is hard. Fun, but also hard. You will experience discouragement, rejection and failure from time to time.

During these times, if you don't have a compelling vision of why what you do is important, you'll be tempted to give up. The reason you need to cast a powerful vision for your creative projects is because those with no clear idea of the impact they want to have will often have very little.

Walt Disney went bankrupt close to a dozen times.

But he saw where things were going. The end-goal was in his mind.

He saw the lives he could change.

He saw how his unique abilities and contributions could change the world.

He saw the results.

In short, he had the vision.

And that's what gave him the fuel to keep going. It gave him the unusual courage to manifest his ideas into reality. He had powerful and strong reasons for why he did what he did. And likewise, you need equally powerful reasons.

In order to avoid what Teddy Roosevelt called "those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat," you need to be really honest with why you do what you do. You realize more about yourself, your audience, and your future when you hone in what your why is really all about.

"I realized at that very moment what my whole life was about. I finally realized why I wanted to go to the next level....I had finally found my true 'why,' and my mission had never seemed clearer." - Dean Graziosi

As you may have heard before, you find your why by starting with a basic question and asking why to each answer exactly seven times. If you haven't done this exercise already, you're nowhere near as focused in your creative projects as you should be.

Follow this simple outline to get started:

1. Why do you want to become a master creator?
2. Why do you want the answer to #1?
3. Why do you want the answer to #2?
4. Why do you want the answer to #3?
5. Why do you want the answer to #4?
6. Why do you want the answer to #5?
7. Why do you want the answer to #6?

This last answer is the true reason why you do what you do. This is a game-changer. You'll instantly change the way you operate on a mental and physical level when you go through this. You'll focus all your efforts around that one ideal.

"But you want to remind yourself of your deepest why when you're doing something. And you want to operate from that level because at your deepest level, you'll be operating from your heart, not your head. Thus, your performance will be much deeper, more authentic, and powerful. The stakes will be higher." - Benjamin Hardy

Suddenly, you have a clear vision of how the things you create will help you and others become better. You're no longer playing small. You've chosen to un-limit yourself.

This isn't just a nice idea that goes around in self-help books that nobody ever uses. This is powerful. This works. I currently have my own why, seven layers deep, on the wall behind me. It dictates the reasons I wrote this and reminds me of the people I serve. It can do the same for you.

Record Your Ideas

How do you think I came up with the ideas and the content for this article? Really?

The answer is simple, but it's another one of those things that people usually don't do: write your ideas down.

I reserve the back page or two for article and other creative ideas in my journal. Whenever inspiration strikes, I write down a simple one-liner that makes sense to me that I'll remember later. I don't try and write the entire outline, I just plant the seeds of thought. I put down little phrases that will ignite my memory when I look back at it later.

Here are some unfiltered, raw ideas from my journals that I'll later turn into creative projects as an example:

• Bad self-help words.
• Review of Who's Got Your Back plus more networking.
• Receiving: humility, throw out asks, etc.
• False peaks: where you should really go.
• Marketing to networking to generosity.
• 10 things to do with your journal.
• Article about reading: "I don't have time to read."

I take these ideas, convert them into word documents, Facebook posts, Medium drafts, and then I have the roots from which to start. It's really not that complicated. This journaling process enables me to capture the thought whenever it hits without having to spend an hour in that very moment fleshing it out.

I'll often have new creative ideas for my business at night, and I reach down and grab my journal and quickly write down whatever it is so I can go back to that creative page and use it later.

I even take this a step further, and in a rather circular way, capture ideas about how to improve my actual creative process that I detail in this article. This enables me to keep getting better and better.

Using a notebook or journal like this is so easy, yet 99% of people don't do this in their life. They let their ideas slip away and waste so much potential their brain was trying to offer them. As one of my mentors has told me:

"Those things which are easy to do are also easy not to do."

Start carrying your notebook with you. If you don't have it on you for some reason in the moment, record a voice recording or quick note on your phone. Regardless, from now on you absolutely have no reasons to waste the ideas that come your way.

You'll also find, when you start actively writing down your ideas, you'll get more of them. You'll have cross-connections and more ideas. You're actively priming your brain to produce more ideas. You begin to expect regular creative breakthroughs from yourself, and start seeing it happen. You're training yourself to become a more creative person. As it turns out, creativity is a learnable skill.

Create The Outline

In Essentialism, Greg McKeown discusses how he managed to stay ahead of his assignments in Stanford by using careful planning and scheduling all his work out in advance.

"Even before the first day of class I knew what the big projects were and would start on them immediately."

By doing this, he was able to shortcut a lot of the mental fatigue and decision-making most students encounter when they approach their projects the night before the deadline. He eliminated the guesswork.

Likewise, you need to shortcut the work required for your creative projects. One of the most prolific writers I know frequently teaches how he gets three things really clear before writing any article:

• The headline.
• The main idea.
• The sub-ideas in basic bullet points.

Such an outline can be created in a page or less. Then, he has direction to create a coherent and flowing article that's 10-20 pages, or even an entire book. Small investment upfront, large returns.

You can adapt this exact strategy to whatever it is you create. If you're making a course, break the sub-ideas into modules. Break the sub-ideas for your writing into chapters or even paragraphs.

With this method, you'll know exactly what you need to do when you sit down to do your work. You won't need to use decision fatigue to decide which part of the project to do. You simply break things down in logical order and execute.

Do The Work

After you have the outline, it's time to get to work. Schedule the hours in the day when you're the most creative and most productive, preferably in the early mornings, and calendar in those hours.

Most people resist doing this, but remember: the ideas are organic, the work is not. Record your ideas at all times of day whenever they come, and then do the work during one specific time of day. Protect your creative time each day.

Doing the work consistently at the same time releases two hidden benefits:

• It gets you into the right mindset during that time of day to ensure you get it done with quality and consistency.
• Blocking that time chunk forces you to not work on creative things everywhere else in your schedule. This allows you to rest, recover, and generate new ideas.

A rule I like to use during each creative session is the 55-5 rule: engage in non-stop creative work for 55 minutes and then take a 5-minute break. Adjust the times to fit you, but keep your work periods to less than 90 minutes.

Create The Environment

Clean your desk. Seriously.

Your surroundings demand your attention. The more mental energy you have devoted to distractions, the less mental energy you have devoted to your creative work.

Simply optimizing the environment you're in when you create can have profound effects. Create the experience, and then you'll be able to adopt the master creator identity and create things in an exciting flow state.

In the book Invested, Danielle Town explains how when beginning her journey as a stock investor, she created an investing office. She got the right books, tools, and other things she would need and put them all in one space.

Decide how and where you're going to do your best creative work. Your desk should only have on it the thing that you're working on right now. Everything else belongs in a drawer, on a shelf, or behind you on the floor.

Protect your health as well. You create best on an empty but not hungry stomach, when most of your blood can be used to fuel your brain rather than digest food.

Use what I call the 1, sip, 1 method. Before each creative session, drink one glass of water. Sip a second during your creative session and conclude your creative session with a third glass of water.

Your body houses your mind which produces your results. Take care of it.

Don't Be Stopped

During your creative sessions, you should be 100% on. This means dividing your work into the separate categories of the project. Don't confuse or mix them, or your work will be less productive.

Each creative project has multiple facets. Writing, for example, includes planning, researching, writing, editing, and formatting. But during the creative sessions, I want to be focused almost entirely on one specific part, usually the writing.

That means I can't get distracted by research or anything else.

You'll notice that I use lots of quotes, research, and other ideas in this article, but I separate that into a different day. If there's something I want to research or a quote I feel I need to add, I go back on the second day and add it in during an editing or research session. I batch my activities. Writing and editing are two different activities and should be treated as such.

When I actually write, I write. One time I wrote two thousand words in forty minutes. I already had the outline and I just let the words come. I heavily edited the article later, but during the creative time, I was focused only on creating.

Powerful results come when you simplify your focus.

Control Your Inputs

"You need better inputs. Try something new. Get confused. Seek novelty. Connect that to the familiar and you will think smarter. Explore the range of possibilities to see what works. Push thought-limits." - Richie Norton

One of my mentors frequently says that creativity is simply making connections between different parts of the brain.

This is an undeniable truth. I've always thought of my brain and my own creative process as a 100-1 rule. For every major creative project, the work is the culmination of ideas and connections from many previous books, conversations, and experiences.

As Zig Ziglar said, in life, you have to put in before you get something out. Prime the pump.

Disciplined creative professionals understand that the books they read, the media they consume, and the people they talk to all inevitably influence their creative outputs.

Avoid media channels where other people decide what messages you consume. I limit my radio and television usage to special occasions and for specific reasons. I want to consume media with my agenda in mind, not somebody else's.

If you input garbage, you'll output garbage. If you input great fuel, you'll output incredible creativity. Remember that.

Share Your Projects

"If you truly believe that what you have is useful and valuable to your clients, then you have a moral obligation to try to serve them in every way possible." - Jay Abraham

You probably create, in part, because it makes you happy. It fulfills you. It gives you energy. I create for that reason too.

However, you can unlock much more powerful meaning when you share it with others.

The reasons you market, sell, share, and distribute your creative ideas and projects are no longer for self-gain. The reason you share and spread is because you have a moral obligation to help as many people as you can.

Remember, Zig Ziglar always said:

"You can get everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want."

This applies deeply to networking, sales, and creativity.

Your creative projects are a way for others to get what they want.

You're now committed to creativity because it helps others grow, change, and improve, not just yourself.

That's why you're willing to go through the work, the process, and the obstacles you face.

Are you willing to face your inner fears and take the leap?

Conclusion: The Call To Greatness

"You have brilliance in you, your contribution is essential, and the art you create is precious. Only you can do it, and you must." - Seth Godin

Remember who you are.

Remember what you stand for.

Remember who you serve.

Remember why you serve them.

Know that creativity is not luck. It is a process mastered with the habits I've shared above.

Go create something incredible.