My 2021 Retrospective (I Finished a Novel!)

It’s never too late to achieve your creative dreams.

As you can see from the title of this post, the overarching triumph of this year for me was finally—finally!—finishing a novel after 15 years of not doing that. I did finish the first one I ever wrote, and then…nothing. I tried three or four times, and have multiple drafts of multiple novels in various files on various computers. But I just couldn’t seal the deal with them.

It would be easy to say that it was because I was busy (getting a PhD), or that it was because I couldn’t get any of my short stories published (I came close so many times, but no cigar). But in truth it was because I didn’t believe I could finish a novel, or rather, I didn’t believe it mattered if I did. I was laboring under the weight of the belief that whether other people liked my work—wanted to publish it—was an important part of the creative process. It was only after I decided to take ownership of my art and commit to a creative practice that was for me and only me that I finally finished a novel.

Still, it wasn’t easy. Another issue I struggled with was the anxiety of too many choices. When you write a novel, your freedom is absolute. You can make the story go in any direction, make the characters do anything. You are like a god. One of the reasons I wasn’t able to finish a novel for so many years was because I couldn’t figure out how to finish them. Write endings. Make the choices necessary to wrap up the stories. How do you know if it’s the right ending? Ultimately I had to tell myself that I just needed to write something as an end. I could change it later.

I still remember how it happened. I was sitting at my kitchen bar under low lighting. I typed some sentences, then some more. And then suddenly, that was it. I’d come to the end. It felt rather anticlimactic, and now that I’m fully into the revisions process, I understand why. Finishing the novel is just the beginning! That’s the least of the work you need to do. But it’s still a very big deal, and it’s the thing I’m most proud of about this year.

And I’m glad I have that triumph, because things on the business front, they’re…not going as well. The truth is I’m an artist, not an entrepreneur, and I will only ever be able to do business uncomfortably at best. But I had hoped to be further along at the two-year mark (I hung out my signpost in early 2020). I’m making a little money through Patreon subscribers and occasional coaching clients, but progress has been slow. This is to be expected, and I’ve realized that it may take me many (many) more years to build my business up to a decent and sustained income level. Fortunately I have other sources of income right now. But still, I can’t pretend I’m not disappointed by my performance in this area.

My lack of much success in the business arena has been eye-opening for me, however. Through the ups and downs of entrepreneurship I’ve realized something that will guide me forward this coming year. It’s this: I don’t want to be an entrepreneur. I don’t want to do business. At least not in any conventional sense. I’m an artist. That’s what I want to be, and it’s what I am personality-wise and in how I see and experience the world. Any business I do going forward will have to happen in the periphery of me doing my creative work.

I don’t know what this means in terms of income. Maybe I’ll always have to earn money through means not directly related to my creative work. Or maybe over time business will pick up for me on its own. My one goal for next year is to figure out how to be more consistent in showing up on social media. I’m putting out tons of creative work through my blog and podcast, but no one is going to find me if I don’t promote it!

Despite my disappointments in business, I feel this year has brought me clarity. I’ve developed a sense of peace about my purpose in this world, and my creative practice has gained depth and resonance. I feel grateful to know myself as an artist, even though I’ve come to that understanding later in life. It is not too late. It’s never too late to achieve your creative dreams.

Get Friendly With Your Ultradian Rhythm

Learning to trust our intuitive preferences is essential.

Back in the olden days when I thought that being a “real” writer meant developing certain specific writing habits and hitting explicit targets like word count, an author I admired did an interview about her work routine. She said that when she finally decided to get serious about writing, she committed herself to writing four hours a day. For a long time, much longer than I like to admit, I thought that four hours a day was what you had to put in to be a real writer. But now I understand that’s bullshit.

I think that four hours is too much time to dedicate to writing. To any single task. And while it may work for that particular author, in general trying to remain focused that long is not only difficult but can actually be harmful. This is because humans operate in accordance with an ultradian rhythm. You have no doubt heard of the circadian rhythm that governs each 24-hour day. The ultradian rhythm governs our biological functions throughout the day in 90-minute increments. For example, when we sleep we cycle in and out of REM sleep on an ultradian rhythm. Our ultradian rhythm also governs how long we can focus deeply on any particular task before our brains give out.

Before I learned about ultradian rhythms, I thought something was wrong with me that I only seem to be able to sit down and write for about an hour, hour and a half max. The thought of writing for four hours straight seems nuts to me. I suppose in rare cases I could power through such a session if I had to (I’ve never had to, even when writing my dissertation), and I don’t doubt that some people like working in longer sessions. But most of us will only be able to do around 90 minutes of focused work before we fade (and that’s an average—my ultradian intervals seem to be around 60 minutes; some people’s may be closer to two hours).

If you pay attention, you’ll be able to pinpoint the exact moment that brain fade happens. Your brain basically says, “Yep, I’ve had enough now.”

Learning to stop when that happens is essential to developing a sustainable writing habit (or any other kind of habit), because it allows you to rest and regenerate before you’re entirely depleted. As I’ve talked about recently on my podcast, it can take a lot longer to recover from burnout than it would have taken for you to rest and regenerate in order to avoid it. While it’s possible to power through in the short term, you’re harming your chances of being able to sustain your motivation over the long term.

Many people can only do one ultradian period of highly focused work in a day. But I find it’s possible to do two or more periods of around 60+ minutes as long as I make sure to rest during (learning how to strategically use procrastination and distraction can help) and between. I use these periods for creative work. Other activities in my life, such as admin work and household chores, don’t require that kind of focused energy, so I intersperse that stuff in between my creative sessions. And of course I also schedule copious amounts of rest and rejuvenation periods, which include taking walks, watching TV, or journaling.

I find that chunking my daily life according to a loose ultradian rhythm feels natural and relaxing. It just makes sense in some deep way—because it makes biological, physiological sense. Throughout the night I usually wake up around every 90 minutes (particularly in the first half), and I no longer view that as indicating I’m doing sleep wrong. I’m just cycling out of an ultradian interval.

Learning about the ultradian rhythm made me realize just how important trusting my intuitive preferences is. I’ve always naturally found myself doing writing sessions of 60 to 90 minutes; it’s what feels good to me. I could have saved myself years of angst if I’d just accepted that as how much I need to work. Instead, I felt bad about myself, tried to force more. How many other intuitive behaviors do we have that we don’t accept and learn to work with because culture tells us they’re wrong? If we paid attention to what feels good to us and let that guide us, we’d probably find that life starts to feel a whole lot better. And we may even end up getting more done, because we’re working with our energy cycles, not against them.  

When Putting Your True Self Out There Makes You Feel Anxious and Embarrassed

We all want to be liked and approved of.

For creative entrepreneurs, putting your private self into your public work is often a requirement—or at least it’s a current norm. Confessionary social media posts are in style. Being authentic and honest about your own journey, and sharing that with followers in a way that resonates with their own, is how business is done in the burgeoning creative economy.   For many, this is a challenge because it means revealing yourself in ways that feel deeply uncomfortable. This post is for those of you who are struggling with how to approach this new cultural and business expectation of a blended private/public life.

This is not a post about boundaries—that’s a worthwhile subject but one that has been widely covered elsewhere. This is about that icky feeling of anxiety mixed with embarrassment or shame that you get when you’ve revealed something about yourself publicly that feels very personal. These feelings originate in our primal fear of being rejected by the group. As one of my clients once asked me about putting my own private stories out there for public consumption: “Did anything bad happen when you did that?”

This amorphous “bad” thing that could happen if we share too much or if people see who we really are is the dark storm cloud blocking us from both delving too deeply into ourselves and putting what we excavate out there into the world. We want to be liked, approved of. This is totally normal. The problem is that after a while, being likable becomes unlikable, because it’s not real (or it’s not the whole truth). It’s boring. What we think will make us unlikeable, the stuff we keep buried and private, perhaps even from ourselves, is what provides nuance and depth to our public personalities. Think of it as a painting: you need shadow along with the light to create something with meaningful depth on the canvas.

I’m sure that sounds rather conceptual, but it’s a helpful image to keep in mind, because what people remember is that resonance they have with someone who has revealed themselves to be fully human. Part of this is the relief we feel when we realize we’re not the only screw-up in the room. Part of it is that we have a natural fascination with what in the olden days was termed a “human-interest story.”

Creative entrepreneurs may be required by the current norms of the creative economy to be their own human-interest story, but it also makes good business sense. In a world of product glut, people make purchases based on resonance, fellow-feeling, and values. It’s difficult if not impossible to offer anything truly unique these days. Every time I have a brilliant idea, a 3-second Google search shows me it’s already been done a dozen times.

What you can offer is your unique story, warts and all. Especially the warts. Just as Tolstoy says about families (all happy ones are alike, all unhappy ones are unhappy in their own way), our embarrassing, anxiety-producing quirks are what make us unique. Or to put it another way, being “good” always generally looks the same, but our secret struggles, dreams, insecurities, sorrows, and passions are what make us interesting human beings.

So has anything bad happened since I started putting all my “secret” stuff out into the world? Nothing more than the anxiety and embarrassment I tend to feel in waves. My guiding philosophy for putting anything out there is this: the way people receive your work (or you) is 100% about them, and you have 0% control over it. They’re going to judge you either way, so you might as well give them something to chew on!

You won’t ever get all the people to like you. When you start being honest, your overall approval rating probably won’t go down (and may even go up). Some people may decide they no longer like you (remember, this is all about them—perhaps they hate your honesty because they’re not being honest themselves), but some people who didn’t like you before might decide they do.

I can promise you that it gets easier over time. You can start small! Really, really small. Use self-deprecating humor if it helps. It’s all just practice and experimentation. No one’s saying you have to reveal all the stuff. I have many things I don’t talk about and probably never will. I only share stuff that measure up to about a 5 or maybe a 6 on the discomfort Richter scale. I started at 1.

And if you need a final piece of wisdom to ease your mind about sharing your true self with the public, there’s this: often the worst thing that happens is you find out nobody actually cares that much anyway!

No Time for Creative Practice? Learn to Listen to Your Energy Cues

Most of us have an energy problem, not a time problem

The major reason we don’t get around to our creative projects isn’t that we’re too busy. Most of us have the time somewhere in the day, even if it’s just twenty minutes. And that is absolutely enough daily time for a solid and rewarding creative practice. The problem is that when that twenty minutes shows up in our schedule, we either don’t notice, are too revved up to sit down and be creative on cue, or are too exhausted to do anything but collapse on the sofa and catch an episode of 30 Rock on Netflix. But by doing a little energy magic, we can open up more energetic space in our lives that we can fill with creative practice – and other stuff!

We need a framework to understand energy before we can start to work our magic, and this article in the Harvard Business Review provides a good one. It divides energy into four categories: physical, emotional, mental, and spirit-sustaining. The trick is to figure out what activities in these four categories give you energy rather than drain you. The best way to do this is to simply pay attention to the activities you are already doing throughout the day. Chances are you’re already working some energy magic without realizing it.

Physical energy is the one we tend to be most cognizant of in our health-obsessed culture. Often just that act of moving through the day is physically draining for most of us. Getting out of bed, going to work, doing chores…these activities are usually not generative in terms of physical energy. But exercise often is. Many people use exercise as a way of counterintuitively generating more energy. It may tire them out, but it also releases endorphins, which are both calming and energizing. Now, I don’t like exercise. But I do like talking walks. That counts! Maybe for you it’s gardening, yoga, jumping rope, or wiggling. Move your body in a way that renews you.

Emotional renewal usually comes in the form of interactions with others. For sensitive creative types, interactions can often be draining, but if you pay attention, you’ll find that there are certain types that give you a burst of energy. For me it’s often a simple, low-pressure exchange with a check-out person in a store. It’s brief, usually friendly, just a perfect type of interaction for me. The HBR article suggests practicing expressing appreciation for others, which I think is brilliant. It also points out that we often feel emotionally drained when we feel like victims of circumstance. Learning how to examine our assumptions objectively can help us move past that mindset and reconnect with our personal power.

Mental exhaustion is perhaps the most common type we deal with in our productivity-centered culture. The truth is we just don’t have as much capacity to focus and get stuff done as we think we do. In the course of the day we have one, maybe two 90-minute windows to concentrate on challenging tasks before we’re drained. This is called our ultradian rhythm, and understanding it can be life-changing. I’ll be writing a separate post on this in the near future, but to start working with this rhythm the first thing to understand is that pushing yourself past it results in rapidly depleting energy and quality of work. You can learn to recognize your own ultradian time period by paying attention to when you reach that point where you are having to really force yourself to concentrate. You may hit it sooner or later on any given day. That’s your natural stopping point. Give the task a rest and come back to it later, preferably the next day.

Spirit-sustaining energy is the one we often stumble on the most, and it’s the one most important to creative practice or any activity that’s closely connected to what we would call our heart or soul. When we feel our lives lack purpose and meaning (an extremely common affliction in our culture), we lack this energy and everything else gets harder. But here’s where us creative folks have a leg up: for us, creative practice can give our lives a feeling of purpose and meaning. It really can be that simple. We have a magical energy-generating engine inside of us: our urge to create. Uncovering it and keeping it running through creative practice can permeate all other areas of our lives with clarity and vitality.

If you learn to recognize your energy cues throughout each day, you can gradually make changes that will open up that energetic space you need for your creative work.

Why Do We Talk So Much About Goals?

It’s okay to not have goals.

Have you ever noticed how much we talk about goals in our culture? From new year’s resolutions to aspirational advertising, we live in a very future-oriented, acquisition-based, improvement-obsessed paradigm. We rarely question the assumption that we need goals. But do we?

The problem with a goals mindset is that it orients us permanently toward the future. We are always thinking about the arrival. Achievement, satisfaction, even happiness all exist in the space where the goal is realized. But of course when we get there, we realize there are ever more goals. It never ends. There’s always more to do, always more to get. There’s nothing wrong with having ideas about where we’re headed, nothing wrong with dreams. But if we’re regimenting our lives around goals, we risk neglecting the quality of our lives.

Is this the case for you? Only you can decide if it is, and what that means to you, but if the space of your day is taken up by how much you can get done, and you find yourself exhausted, dissatisfied, and experiencing existential terror as the years tick by and you still haven’t found purpose or fulfillment, you may want to examine your relationship with goals and their associated outcomes.

Consider that you may not want what you think you do.

I used to have a big dream for myself. I wanted to get a novel published. And I failed. It devastated me. I wasn’t able to write another novel for fifteen years. Now I’m on the road to publication again, but I’m going about it differently. While I nominally have a goal of publishing my novel, I recognize that what I really want is how I imagine publishing will make me feel. Like I’ve arrived, like I’m a real writer.

It's okay to want those feelings. But it’s important to recognize that publishing isn’t the only, or even the best, way to get them. And letting a goal dictate how you feel about yourself is a dangerous game. The world is full of stories of middle-aged folks having crises because the things they thought they wanted didn’t make them feel happy or fulfilled.

I only started feeling like I was a real writer, like I’d arrived, when I started taking myself seriously despite any goal and achievement thereof. This is what brings fulfillment and eventual happiness: the ability to find value in the self for how you live rather than in what you achieve. Achievements are nice but they’re icing. When you live based on a clear understanding that it’s the feelings around achievement that you are actually craving, you can begin to look for other, smaller ways in your daily life to attain those.

Here's what that looks like in reference to my example of wanting to feel like a real writer: I write as much as I can, I regularly put stuff out on a blog while I toil away at the larger project of my novel, I insist on seeing myself as a real writer and describing myself as such. Together all this adds up to a feeling of arrival. What about publishing my novel? I still really want that! But I feel good about the journey now, as challenging as it can sometimes be. That’s a big win.

Goals talk is only just talk because that’s what it’s supposed to be.        

We all know go-getter types who actually do set goals and achieve them, as if they’re part machine, but most people we know probably spend more time talking about their goals than they do actually achieving them. We’re probably a bit like that ourselves. Most of us use goals talk to feel like we’re doing goals. Imagining accomplishing our goals feels like we’re actually doing it in the moment. But the come-down is that later we feel awful when we don’t accomplish them. It’s a bit like a drug reaction. But if we understand that this is what goals can do for us, give us a chance to test out ideas and have good feelings in the moment, we can have fun goals talk without the hangover.

I’ve learned over time that goal setting is best done sparingly, if at all. My quality of life is higher without them. As I point out above, this doesn’t mean living without any idea of the direction I’m headed. But I no longer use a goal setting methodology (visualize outcome, create steps for achievement, feel bad when things aren’t going well, consider it a failure if I don’t realize the goal…). Instead I focus on how I want each day to feel. Sometimes I want to feel busy and accomplished, and sometimes I just want to sink into an endless peaceful moment. Then I find activities that go with those feelings. Somehow the stuff that needs to get done gets done. Most of the time haha.

You Can Learn to Fiercely Protect Your Creative Practice

Even us timid people can be bold when it comes to defending our creative space.

A friend recently commented on how fiercely I protect my creative practice. The amusing image that popped into my head of myself armor-clad with sword drawn is at odds with how I see myself usually. I lack self-confidence, and I’ll avoid conflict at almost any cost. And yet she’s right. I defend my creative practice against anything that threatens to encroach on it. Somehow I’m bold and audacious within that space.

Part of my defense involves prioritizing my creative work over other things, but much of it is the mental and emotional labor that defending the inherent value of my creative work requires. When the main work of your life is something that doesn’t earn any money and doesn’t involve caring for others (e.g. being a wife/mother), you inevitably find yourself in a position of having to protect and defend against judgement (much of which is self-judgement due to conditioned cultural beliefs), incomprehension, or just plain indifference.

How is it that someone like me, so unassuming and even timid in general, is able to so fiercely advocate for her own creative practice? Moreover, how am I able to continue to do my creative work in the face of the often inhospitable world? I’m not a warrior, I don’t believe my creative work is all that important in the grander scheme of things. I’m not out to change the world with it. I just want to be happy, and my creative practice is how I ensure that on the day to day. Creative practice is my antidepressant, you could say. That alone is reason enough to protect it, but that’s not what enables me to do so. Likewise, I believe in the inherent value of my practice, but that’s not enough to engender my fierce protective instincts.   

What enables me is the space I’ve created around my creative practice, like a buffer zone between my work and the rough edges of the world. While I created that space out of necessity, I’ve come to find that I’m a different person there. Whatever boldness and audacity doing creative work requires in the first place becomes what I use to defend my creative practice against anything that threatens it. This could be something as small as an overbooked schedule. It could be something as big as a relationship that is using up the emotional energy I need to put into my creative work. In the creative entrepreneurship spaces I have recently found myself in, it often looks like explaining that for me creativity is a way of life, a way of being in the world. It’s not part of something else, not part of a business, for example (although business could be a part of creativity…perhaps). Creative practice is the thing around which all other things revolve. It is my center.

I think a creative practice requires this kind of fierce protection. Creativity and the time and space to do creative work are so easily encroached upon. Even robust practice can erode like sand from the repeated insistence of the gentlest waves. It can happen without us noticing. Life takes over, things come up, creativity can wait. If you don’t insist on that time and space and on the importance of your creative work (at least to you, if to no one else), it will inevitably languish.

You’ll feel strident, like you’re repeating yourself endlessly (I have to do my work. No, really, I have to do my work). You’ll feel selfish (I’m sorry, I can’t do that. I have to do my work). You’ll feel weird (I know everyone is doing [the thing everyone is supposed to want to do], but I need to do my work). All this is what following your passion and purpose feels like, I think. This is what it requires from you.

I didn’t develop my fierceness overnight. It grew as my practice did, in pace with it, organically over years. So don’t worry if you don’t feel fierce about your practice. I advise clients to find one way they can prioritize their creative work, big or small. Take one vacation day a month to do your work. Cancel one activity – better one that drains you than brings you joy, but either will do – and do your work. Once you begin to experience yourself prioritizing your creative work, you’ll grow in confidence that you can find your boldness, and that your work is important enough to protect and defend. You’ll begin to want to don your armor and draw your sword in defense of it. If I can do it, you can do it.

Divergent Thinkers Have an On Switch

Misfits exist for a reason.

I’ve spent much of my life feeling like I’m doing it wrong. It’s like other people know something I don’t: they get it, and whatever “it” is eludes me. Growing up, I noticed my brain seemed to work differently than it was supposed to. The first time I took a standardized test I failed, because the questions didn’t make sense. I couldn’t pick an answer from the multiple choices because in my head I was thinking of all the contingencies, hidden variables, and alternative possibilities inherent in the question. What was supposed to be a problem of logic appeared anything but to me. I didn’t realize at the time that this was simply a symptom of my highly imaginative, non-rational (intuitive) way of seeing the world. My logic isn’t based on rational cognition.

When you grow up feeling like you’re doing it wrong, like you may even be a bit stupid because you just can’t figure things out the way you’re supposed to, you start to wonder what your use is. What possible role can you play in society when you can’t understand the rules of the game? Maybe you allow your difference to be pathologized: there’s something wrong with you, clearly. It’s not developmental, exactly, but it could be psychological and emotional. Therapy and meds may help you be a normal person who can have a normal life. You look at the people around you living out their normal lives seemingly happily, or happily enough, and of course you think that’s what you should want.

Or maybe you consign yourself to your fate. For whatever reason you just weren’t born for this world or this time, it sucks and it’s unfair, but you have to accept your alienation because what choice do you have? This is who you are. Therapy and meds don’t make much of a difference because your difference is more fundamental than emotions or psychology, or even a chemical imbalance. It’s about who you are. But still, there’s that question. What is your use? Why are you like this, what purpose does it serve? Because you know you’re not alone. There are others out there like you, and there has to be a reason this type of person exists, some evolutionary advantage to being out of step, of not seeing things the way others do.

I think there is. Divergent thinking may not be valued during times when maintaining a status quo is seen as paramount (which is most of the time), and it may even be feared and rejected during those times, but when the status quo is experiencing a great upheaval, divergent thinking is exactly what we need. Times of turmoil, when old ways no longer function well or are being outright challenged, are times that need people who can see opportunity in chaos, who even thrive in such circumstances.

Something interesting happened to me when the Pandemic of 2020 hit. It was like I had an on switch inside of me that got flipped. Even though I experienced the worry and sadness I saw leveling those around me – and I was cognizant that I occupied a relatively privileged position of being able to avoid many direct and personal effects of the Pandemic – that year was the most creatively rich and fulfilling of my life thus far. It was as if the confusion and disquiet of crisis awoke in me some kind of constructive response that I’m still not sure I fully understand. I had a distinct feeling of “this is my time.” I can’t explain it, but there it is. I’ve spoken to others who had a similar reaction, so I know I’m not the only one.

I think this is the reason divergent thinkers exist. We play an important role in society at all times, but in particular it’s those liminal periods of uncertainty and ambiguity where we can shine. Where other people may react with fear and grief, we sense the possibilities and may even feel excited by them. And this is one of those times in history. Maybe the Pandemic didn’t hit your switch, but something else might. One thing that holds misfits back from recognizing our potential is that while we are usually aware of how we don’t see things the same way as others, we aren’t as aware of how we do see things. Often we can feel guilty about our true thoughts and feelings because they aren’t the "correct” ones.

You’re not doing it wrong. In fact, you may be doing it right. Wake up to your potential by learning the value of seeing things differently. And you may find that you’re not that different from the many other misfits out there, looking for their people!

The Protagonist Bias and Creative Rejection

The truth is, almost nothing is personal.

Dealing with rejection is part of being creative. If you’re putting your work out there in the world, inevitably you’ll experience rejection of some kind. Our protagonist bias can make dealing with it more difficult. This is a bias that emerges from seeing ourselves as the protagonist of our own life story. It can make us take things personally when the truth is, almost nothing is personal.

Humans are meaning-makers. That’s what we do all day long. We interpret what we see and experience by creating a story from it. The story is how we understand the sequence of events, and anchors us in linear time. It’s causal by nature: something happens that has effects, which then have more effects. Even if we’re not consciously aware of the story we’re creating, our brain is constantly doing this for us in the background.

Understanding our lives through stories has its benefits, but there is one major drawback. It positions us as protagonist, and gives rise to an illusion that everything that happens to us is somehow about us. This is reinforced by the stories we see and read for entertainment. The basic plot of a novel or TV show centers on the experiences of a protagonist, and all events are connected to them either in that the protagonist makes them happen or is impacted by them.

As the star of our own story, we suffer from the bias that what we experience is personal. When we hear people laughing in our vicinity, many of us have a knee-jerk reaction that they’re somehow laughing at us, even when we know it’s extremely unlikely. We’re interpreting everything from our own perspective, and it’s a natural and adaptive trait to assess things in terms of what they have to do with us. But it also leads to many faulty assumptions.

The truth is that almost nothing outside of ourselves has to do with us. That is to say, our own reactions belong to us, but the outer circumstances that elicit them do not. Knowing this can help immensely when it comes to dealing with how people receive our creative work. We may feel that people’s reactions to our work have to do with us, but they don’t. Not at all. Two different people can see entirely different things in our work. Their reactions are 100% to do with them and their own internal mindscapes.

Not taking people’s reactions personally is difficult, though, even when we know they aren’t. That’s because we identify with our own work. We see it as an extension of ourselves. This is where we need to detach. We need to make a hard break between our work as it belongs to us during creation, and our work out in the world where it belongs to consumers. Once we put it out there, it’s not ours any longer. It has a life of its own. Many writers I know don’t read reviews, either negative or positive, to help them make this break. What people think about their books doesn’t have anything to do with them.

The one sticky area is when you have work out specifically for critique, which is often part of the creative process whether it occurs within the confines of a critique group or when you have your work on submission. I’m not going to lie, critical feedback can suck, because you can’t make that hard break. You have to listen to and parse feedback in these cases. But the same rule applies: any feedback is ultimately 100% about the person giving it. It’s not the truth, it’s just an opinion. But it can be very difficult to deal with critical feedback and I advise choosing critique partners and other feedback opportunties with extreme care. Remember: ultimately your creative process is yours. You get to decide what it looks like and what kind of feedback you let into your life.

Don’t feel bad about being cautious about or even rejecting feedback. Protecting yourself is necessary, particularly if you are an HSP and very sensitive to feedback, critical or otherwise. Your creative practice is sacrosanct, and anything that interferes with the joy you feel in creative process needs strong boundaries around it. Don’t let anyone tell you that you have to get feedback, or that you have to listen to it. You don’t. Feedback does not necessarily make work better. Listening to the wrong kind of feedback can make your work worse. Pay attention to your feelings in these matters. Feedback only helps if you are open to it, and it’s the right kind. Trust yourself. What matters is how you feel about your work, not what other people think about it.

Doubling Down on Creativity in Difficult Times

Make your creative practice sacred.

When life gets busy and we’re stressed out and exhausted, what are some of the first things we jettison? You’d think it would be what’s causing us so much anxiety, but no, we double down on those things. If we just work harder, faster, more, we’ll get things right and life will feel good again. It’s the pleasurable activities we jettison: our hobbies, our leisure time. Let me just get through this busy period, we think, and then I’ll have time for the fun stuff.

I’ll have time this weekend to write. I’ll have the energy then. Maybe.

I want to wait until I have the space to really focus on my music. Next month after all these deadlines, then I’ll be able to really dedicate myself to it. Maybe.

My new year’s resolution is going to be to spend more time painting. Next year is going to be my year. Maybe.

How many weeks, months, and years have gone by like this? Life always gets in the way somehow, doesn’t it? And meanwhile we still don’t feel creatively fulfilled or like we’re fulfilling our potential. I’ll get to it when life doesn’t feel so hard, we promise ourselves. Except life always feels hard.

I spent years of my life making promises to myself that I’d finally finish a novel, and I never did. Until I realized something about creativity that changed everything for me. Creativity isn’t a luxury. It’s not something we have to wait until we are free and clear of life difficulties so we have the space and time to do it. Creativity is the way through difficulties. We have evolved the capacity for creativity because it’s how we move through challenge.

Think about it. Which of our ancestors were more likely to survive existential threats? Often it was probably the ones who were willing to get creative. Creative thinking has been selected for throughout the evolution of human beings. Creativity isn’t something that is gifted on some and not others. It’s a type of cognition and energy we can all tap into that can lead us through difficult times in life if we trust it.

Instead of waiting for the space and time for creativity, we can use creativity to make time and space for ourselves. The key is to find a creative practice that is generative for you (energy-producing rather than energy-draining), and use it as a way to heal and regenerate from the daily traumas of life. When you hear people talking about creative practice as sacred or spiritual, this is what they mean. It is a way to step away from ordinary, stressful life and reestablish your connection to your inner peace and joy. This is creative practice as sabbath, or as a meditation or mindfulness practice. It is creativity as refuge.

It sounds good, but perhaps isn’t easy to put into practice, right? Like any habit, in the beginning it requires a little pushing, but not in the form of a grand plan or schedule. Not in the form that has failed in the past: I’ll carve out some time this weekend, next month, next year. I’ll put in fifteen minutes a day, starting Monday. The problem with plans is that they always start in the future. Plans are thoughts, not action. And when you make a plan for something that is in actuality quite a tricky thing to establish as a habit, there is going to be a high failure rate.

The secret to having a creative practice is to do it now. That’s right. Why not now? But you have all this stuff you have to get done…. Do you, though? Right now, this instant? Do you have five minutes? That’s enough to start. Make a doodle. Write three sentences. Sing something. Then go do those things you feel you have to do, and let the knowledge that you just experienced something creative, sacred, all your own go with you as you continue through your day.

That’s your start. Do it again the next time you think about being creative. How about now? Be creative now. Let that part of yourself lead you through a few minutes of special space and time that is your secret little sabbath-in-the-middle-of-the-day.    

Are You Afraid to Put Your Work Out There? This Will Help

Eight guidelines to help you get brave about putting your work out into the world.

Time and again the number one thing my coaching clients say holds them back from fulfilling their creative dreams is fear of putting their work out there in front of other people’s eyes. Fear of negative judgement, or worse, being totally ignored (this is a far more common outcome) can become a real creative block, and keep people from even starting a creative project. It can hold others back from finishing, because the thought of putting their work out into the world for consumption steals the joy from their private creative practice. The chasm between the subjective experience of creative practice and the objectification of your creative work in the public sphere can feel vast and terrifying.

I understand this fear because it held me back for many years. I experienced a lot of rejection in the early part of my writing career and it eventually wore me down until I was unable to write at all. When I started up again, I knew I would need to develop some better mental skills to help me deal with this fear of being seen and judged. I still struggle with putting my work out into the world, but I’ve come up with some guidelines that have helped me, that I share with clients and now am sharing with you.

1. In the beginning, it’s just hard. There’s really no getting around the fear and anxiety of taking those first steps of putting your work out there. But I promise, it gets easier, and the rest of the tips are meant to help with that.

2. Volume. When I started my blog, each post felt so precious because I felt like I had to make each perfect. This made me feel extra vulnerable. But after I had a bunch up, I stopped worrying so much that each one was excellent. If you are working on larger projects, like a book, consider joining a critique group where you can get feedback on small bits.

3. Consistency. What doing your creative work regularly helps with is realizing that not all your stuff has to be brilliant. I write a weekly blog post. Some weeks I’m on fire, others definitely not. I post regardless (mostly). Some of my blog posts are just “eh.” That’s okay. Same goes for my fiction.

4. Nothing is personal. The way people receive your work and what they think about it is 100% about them, and you have 0% control over it. Repeat this to yourself as much as necessary.

5. Be specific about the feedback you want! Asking for and receiving feedback deserves its own separate post, but in the beginning when you are putting your work out and need some encouragement and practice with hearing people’s responses to it, tell your friends exactly that! Ask them to tell you one thing about your work that they liked, that inspired them, that stood out, that made them think. Tell them you do not want any critiques or advice! Just positive, loving, encouraging words. And choose which friends you ask carefully. You know which friends are great at positive support, and which aren’t. Then, believe what they tell you.

6. Make sure you enjoy doing your creative work. If you enjoy your process and feel good about your work, that will go a long way toward insulating you against difficult feedback.

7. Take all feedback with a grain of salt. Again, people’s opinions on your work are 100% about them. Pick and choose what you listen to depending on context, the type of creative work you are doing, and ultimate goals. Be your own advocate, believe in yourself and your own judgement, and stand strong in your own truth.

It’s always hard to put yourself out there. But you can get better at it with practice. Don’t feel bad if you struggle with it! Us creatives are all in the same boat with this, and believe me when I say that we all feel similar fears, insecurities, and self-judgment. So here’s my final guideline:

8. Reach out to other creatives! Find people who aren’t afraid to talk about their struggles and difficult feelings, and share their journey with you. Knowing you’re not alone is one of the best ways find strength on your own journey. And you’re not alone, I promise.

How Group Shaming Makes Change Particularly Difficult for HSPs

How to recognize and deal with the phantom judges in our heads.

Shame is one of the most powerful tools communities use to maintain cohesiveness. The other is the feeling of belonging. These are two sides of the same coin, and that’s why you often see them paired in group dynamics. The stronger the explicit rules of belonging, the stronger the shaming when you violate them. Take a cult, for example. You don’t just leave a cult, you’re excommunicated.

Belonging is a very pleasurable emotion. In involves feeling safe, loved, accepted. Group shaming is a deeply painful emotion, because it strikes at the core of our very being: we feel rejected, bad, alone. These emotions are hardwired into us, because sticking with the group elevates our chances of survival. When we stray from group norms, we may be shamed, but more importantly, we expect to be shamed. We know what’s coming.

It’s this expectation of shaming that makes it so difficult to effect changes for ourselves that lead us down a different path. Any time we challenge the status quo we are making ourselves vulnerable to criticism, which in my opinion can be and often is wielded as a shaming technique (as opposed to constructive critique, advice, or feedback, though these can also hide a secret heart of shaming, particularly if they are unsolicited). Other people may or may not criticize us for our new choices, but the judges in our heads sure will. These judges are our internal Greek chorus of conformity. They exist to make sure we don’t stray too far from the group. They have our best interests in mind, evolutionarily speaking. But emotionally speaking? Not so much. They make us feel like shit when the stakes aren’t basic survival. Which mostly they aren’t. But our brains don’t know that.

Change is difficult for a lot of reasons, but these internal judgy voices are a major reason. They’re the voices that say, “What will everyone think?” And, “What if people think I’m wrong/bad?” “What if people decide they don’t like me?” They’re the voices that start up every time I publish a blog post about one of my opinions. What if people disagree (and tell me I’m stupid, wrong, and bad)? When I do an interview about my ideas on anti-productivity, these are the voices that tell me the collective rage of my productivity-obsessed culture is going to come at me and blow me straight to hell. That may sound like hyperbole, but psychologically speaking that’s what being group shamed feels like, because often group norms are tied to morality. Doing the right things means you’re a good person. Doing the wrong things means you’re bad. Shaming is a form of emotional ostricism. Its purpose is to give you a taste of the hell of permanent shunning.

If you are an HSP, it’s likely your internal shame-throwers are particularly vocal. Part of the reason is because HSPs are often shamed for being the way they are. While HSPs comprise a relatively large minority (estimates are 15% to 20% of the population), it is a form of neurodiversity that is not widely recognized or understood. That is changing, but most HSPs have had the experience of being shamed or at least misunderstood for their high sensitivity, strong emotional reactions, and difficulties managing anxiety in “normal” environments like school and work. Being an HSP is painful not just because of the condition itself. It’s also because we are so misunderstood, and often do not even understand ourselves because of the lack of informed studies about how the HSP brain operates.

HSPs are also particularly vulnerable to these internal judgers because we are highly sensitive to any kind of feedback, good or bad—this has to do with how their brains function at a neurochemical level and can’t be therapied away. This is why tough love generally backfires on HSPs. Please, for the love of everything, do not use tough love on an HSP. Their brains will code you as a danger, and this will impact an HSP’s ability to trust you. I’ve lost friendships because my brain was not able to move past the scarring experience of tough love, as much as I wanted to move past it! Competitiveness and aggression are likewise damaging to HSPs. Gentleness and kindness are what work for HSPs. Extreme gentleness and kindness (or what seems extreme from a “normal” perspective). HSPs will blossom and flourish in a gentle and kind environment where we feel safe. If the environment does not feel safe, we will shut down.

Being aware of how our internal judges seek to keep us on the path of conformity is the first step in changing our lives through daily choices. Your internal judges are not you. They are the collective voice of your cultural conditioning. If you disagree with them, that’s fine! You will feel uncomfortable doing so, especially at first. It’s enough just to start to pay attention to when you disagree. Start thinking about why. What do you think? How do you feel? Respect your own thoughts and feelings. They’re real, they’re legitimate. You’ll be surprised how life can start to feel better just through the simple act of paying attention to what you think and feel. Eventually you’ll learn to recognize the judgy voices for what they are: phantoms. They may always be there, because cultural conditioning runs deep, but calling them out for what they are will give you power that you’ll be able to use to make decisions more in line with what you really want.

On Belonging

If you want to feel you belong with others, first you must feel you belong to yourself.

I’ve recently joined Andy Mort as one of the facilitators of The Haven, his gentle community for deep thinkers and sensitive creatives, where I run a forum called “From Burnout to Book.” Writers of all kinds and at all stages of their own writing journey can find kind and compassionate encouragement there, and I invite you to join us. If you sign up to the Haven using my special link, you will get a free 45-minute consultation with me about your writing, so I can learn how to better support you in the forum. The Haven is a wonderful community and a true home for us gentle souls, and we’d love to have you there!

The Haven is built around a year-long contemplation of themes that change with the seasons, and in October we are reflecting on belonging (we just recorded a podcast episode about it that will be coming out soon, available here). Let me ask you a question: Do you feel like you belong, truly belong, anywhere?

I’m one of those people who’s never felt they belong. I have always had this deep-seated feeling that I don’t belong here, in the world. It mostly manifests as a sense that other people all know what they’re doing, they belong in their own lives, but I somehow don’t. It’s like an existential version of imposter syndrome. I can’t say where it comes from, though I have my suspicions it has its roots in being a shy, highly sensitive kid who often experienced rejection and was deeply hurt by it. Its origins don’t really matter to me, though – what interests me is how belonging, and not belonging, have resonated through my life, and how I see these things now, as an adult looking backward and forward from the middle stage of my life.

Being a misfit is a part of my sense of self (I’m an Enneagram 4, after all!). It’s something I value, but also something that has always been painful. I left the US at age 16 to go live abroad, because I did not feel I belonged in my home culture. I spent the majority of the next decade living in other countries, because not fitting into a culture where I was a foreigner was easier than not fitting into my own (and I genuinely love learning about other cultures and studying languages).

What I realized after a while, though, was that living overseas was in part an attempt to escape myself. For a time in a new place I was able to pretend I was a different person, exploring different ways of being in a new culture, but my self always caught up with me eventually. Usually around the one-year mark, if you want to get specific. Wherever I went, there I was.

It’s telling that I didn’t start to feel like I belonged somewhere until I started to feel like I belonged in myself. The sense of being rooted in myself, living the life I’m meant to live (whatever that means), is what brought me home, finally. I don’t mean physically: I’ve been back in my home culture for many years now. I’m referring to the feeling of having found my thing, and my people. And what brought me to this place, my home, as I see it, is accepting who and what I am. I’m a writer, a creative, a person who must live and be in that realm of creative energy and inspiration for the main of my time. Even if it means my life isn’t successful in a conventional sense. Even if it means I never make much money.

What does it feel like to belong? It feels safe, and unbounded by conditions. It feels like not having to change myself, or perform thoughts, feelings, or actions. You know you belong when you enter a space that was already holding you before you walked through the door. That’s how I feel in the Haven, and it’s how I feel in my own life. I have made space for myself, I am holding myself compassionately and with deep and unconditional support.    

So often we go about things in an inside-out way. If I belong with others, I’ll feel like I belong (to/in myself). If this equation isn’t working for you, try flipping it. If I feel like I belong (to/in myself), I’ll belong with others. I found my people when I became my own people. Focus on yourself, know who you are, do what pleases you. You may find that this is what turns the world toward you, and brings you to a place of greater belonging that has always already been holding space for you.

Change Your Future by Switching Out This One Word

The difference between “look” and “feel.”

So I know that’s a bit of a dramatic title. But this one little trick really can make a huge difference in your life if you let it. First, though, let me ask you a question.

Do you remember what you wanted your grownup life to look like when you were a kid?

I love asking people that question, because you get the most diverse answers. One of my friends told me she doesn’t remember having any specific dreams about the future. Another said she wanted to be a professional thinker (hey, me too!).

We are often asked to visualize our futures. It’s almost a cliché that at some point you’ll be asked where you see yourself in six months, a year, five years. Our perspective of the future is very conceptual. We are encouraged to think about what we want it to look like, in order to set goals we can then work toward.

What if instead we asked ourselves what we want our future to feel like?

To do this effectively, we need to eliminate all visual aspects of our answer. Our first reaction to this question is probably to imagine a situation, thing, or person we think will make us happy. Try cutting out the visual. Close your eyes and go into your body and ask it how it likes to feel. Pay attention to your body’s response when you ask it what feeling good is like.

For me, feeling good is a lightening and lifting in my chest, like I’m uncurling from a fetal position and throwing out my arms to embrace the sky, sun warm on my face. That’s how I want my life to feel like.

Now comes the challenging part. It’s tempting to want to embed your desired feeling back into a visual picture of all the stuff that’s going to make you feel that way. Resist this temptation! Nothing’s wrong with wanting things, but we’re trying to work a little mental magic here, so we need to de-link our desired feeling from our conceptualized futures. Instead, think about the things in your life that make you feel the way you want to feel now.

For me, it’s when I’m authentically who I am online in a way that leads to genuine connection with others. Or when I’m reading, researching, thinking, or writing. Or when I’m being my natural, unguarded and un-boundaried self with my dogs.

Now comes the easier part. Keep doing the things that make you feel the way you want to feel. Do them more. Do them every day. Find more things that make you feel that way. After a while, you’ll discover you attach your happiness less and less to the stuff you think you want, and more and more to the things you’re actually doing. You’ll have learned how to be in the moment rather than the imagined future.

But we still need or at least want goals, right? It’s difficult to live 100% in the present moment. Most of us are working toward something in life most of the time. Let’s take a look at how we can rewrite goals so they put us into the present moment rather than that imagined future.

Here are some of the things I think about when I am imagining what I want my life to look like:

• Thousands of Instagram followers.

• Money coming in.

• More friends.

When we switch out that one little word, go from look to feel, it changes how we see things. Here are some things I think about when I am focused on what I want my life to feel like:

• Having fun making dorky TikTok videos.

• Challenging myself to develop a business that fits into a creative model rather than trying to fit my creativity into a business model.

• Meaningful connection with other creatives who are putting their work out there.

See the difference? The second list of goals is both more specific and focused on how I feel. It is oriented around values such as having fun, challenging myself, and creating meaning for myself and others. Plus, these are all things that are already a part of my life. By doing this exercise, I’m learning how to value what I already have and training myself to focus on my feelings rather than acquisitions. This frees up my mind to find other creative and fun ways to continue to feel good about my life.

It takes practice to change how you think about your future, but if you work at it you’ll get to a place where you realize your happy future has arrived, and you’re already living it! 

August Prospective 2021: Thoughts on Burnout and Breaks

I’m taking an August holiday - see you back here in September!

Hello Readers! I want to thank you for visiting my blog and reading my essays. I’ve been posting weekly here for a year and a half, and it has been a joy. I plan to continue my regular posts here well into the future. Writing is how I think and learn and have fun.

I’ve decided to institute an annual August holiday from blogging. Mostly this is due to a question that has been on my mind lately: “Can I really continue to post every single week…forever?” And while I have not encountered any serious impediments thus far to doing so (my inspiration has not failed me yet!), this question just won’t leave me be. Surely at some point this will become onerous. Right? I mean, posting every single week can’t be sustainable forever. Right?

I don’t know the answer to that question. But I do know that creative work is my lifeblood, and if it ever stops being fun, that will be a very bad day. And I also know that burnout doesn’t just happen overnight. It’s a cumulative process where we push ourselves a little, then a little more, then a little more… Like a frog in a pot of water being slowly heated to boil (what a horrible metaphor, I hate it, but it aptly describes the circumstances that lead to burnout, I think). By the time we realize we are on our way to burnout, it’s often too late to forestall it.

I don’t ever want that to happen when it comes to my creative work. And lately I’ve been feeling a little tired. Traffic is down on all my platforms - here, my podcast, social media - probably because people are either on their summer holidays (Europe) or getting ready for the school year to start (US). August feels like a good time to take a break, give myself a breather, take my own staycation holiday.

And to begin to prepare myself for the next phase of creative entrepreneurship. Over the next six to eight months, I will be working on turning my creative business into an actual business. That is, launching my first major product and upping my game in market research, networking, and promotion. In addition, I’ll be readying my novel for querying or possible self-publication. It will be a thrilling but nerve-wracking time, and I want to be ready. Because I want to be able to enjoy it. I want it to be a time I remember as life-giving and full of creative joy.

So I will see you all back here in September!

What We’re Missing in Our Conversations About Creative Entrepreneurship

Creative commitment is the missing ingredient.

It’s no secret I aspire to be a part of the creator economy. I’m a creative entrepreneur: I put out creative work (essays and a podcast) on a regular basis for public consumption, and I’m seeking to monetize my work through offering coaching, Patreon tiers, and hopefully soon a creative product such as a course or ebook. I’ve joined a large a growing group of people seeking to do that same thing. Competition is fierce, rewards are scarce, but that is perhaps the nature of all business ventures. That’s not my problem with the whole thing.

My problem is that I see two things getting lost in the conversation around creative entrepreneurship. The first is that the creative part of things usually gets subsumed by the entrepreneurship part. For people who are primarily business-oriented, this is fine. But for those of us who consider ourselves first and foremost creatives, we can find ourselves being distracted from what drives and motivates us: the joy of creativity, our lifeblood.

My second problem has to do with the way we talk about entrepreneurship. We are overly focused on the external manifestations of success (think social media followers, money), and of it happening on a relatively short timescale (think a year or two). For many of us, entrepreneurship is going to look like a long, hard road of frequent failures, a success sprinkled in here and there. Most of us will never “make it,” if making it is defined by riches and fame. Some of us may perhaps find modest success. Many of us will give up.

The interesting thing is that the first of these problems can provide us with a solution to the second. Committing to creativity can see us through. The first reason is that the long, hard road of entrepreneurship looks a lot like creative life, as anyone who has ever tried to publish their writing or get noticed for their music or art will tell you. I have decades of experience in not achieving my creative dreams behind me, and while that may seem heartbreaking on the face of it (it certainly felt that way often enough), it actually has been a great gift. I am now able to truly find joy in my own creative process regardless of outcome – and this is the holy grail of creative life.

Entrepreneurship is different, of course. The point is to generate revenue through providing value, so doing it for the love of it isn’t enough. But as a creative entrepreneur, I can use my hard-learned lessons in persistence and patience to keep me on the path through the inevitable failures and disappointments. I believe that success is often simply a function of sticking it out. You keep showing up, and eventually you’re the one in the room with the biggest body of work behind you and the greatest face recognition value.

But the most valuable tool in our kit is our capacity for creative commitment. By making our commitment to creativity rather than entrepreneurship, we can weather both that long, hard road of entrepreneurship and make it a little less frustrating for ourselves. Entrepreneurial success entails making money, and there are many ways this can play out over time in the life of a creative, many or most of which we can’t predict or control. But creative success entails feeling fulfilled by your creative work. It doesn’t rely on extrinsic measurements of value such as money or esteem. It is about how you feel about your work. It’s about that joy of creativity that drives and motivates you.

Commitment to creativity through thick and thin – through sickness and in health, in other words – may seem weird, because we don’t often think of creative work in those terms. Usually we think of creativity as serving some other goal, not as something that has value in and of itself. But for creatives, it is a way of life, of being in the world. Making a commitment to your creativity can be the essential ingredient that sees you through, because what it means in a practical sense is that you keep doing your creative work regardless of how the entrepreneurship part is going. On the entrepreneurship journey sometimes you’ll be up, and sometimes you’ll be down. Your balancing force is your creative commitment.          

Are You an Analyzer or a Synthesizer? Or, What Robots Can Tell Us About Creativity

What we can’t program into AI tells us a lot about ourselves.

I started my PhD on an interdisciplinary fellowship that required me, a social scientist, to be housed in a STEM lab with other fellowship students who were in fields such as ecological engineering and biochemistry. I’ll never forget what our faculty mentor said on our first day.

“We don’t need more analyzers,” he said. “We don’t need more people who study ever-smaller parts of the problem. We need synthesizers. People who see the bigger picture and cross disciplinary boundaries.”

The fellowship was meant to train a new generation of scholars who were not constrained by the traditional academic project of specialized analysis in disciplinary silos. Unfortunately, I realized early on that while academic institutions may pay lip service to the value of interdisciplinary scholarship, the way they and their peripheral institutions (i.e. funders, publishers) are structured makes it extremely difficult to do good interdisciplinary work.

The problem is that analytical work is just easier to value within our system. We know how to fit it into existing structures of knowledge, and it’s easy to calculate its value based on known parameters. Analytical methodologies are more predictable and easily systematized. A prime example is the scientific method. It looks the same regardless of your project.

We have a system built on analysis. So what about synthesis? What is it about the work of synthesis that makes it kind of like that guest you regret inviting to the party because they’re so perplexing and disconcerting? Here’s where robots come in.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has seen amazing advances in the last fifty years, and is currently a burgeoning and exciting field of inquiry. One of the challenges is figuring out how to program self-directed learning. AI robots are skilled at analytical tasks like deduction and modeling – both important in terms of learning based on expected outcomes. But they have made few strides in synthesis – which is a learning process that results in unexpected outcomes. Analysis is inward-looking and makes use of a set of constraints that guide the inquiry and outcome. Synthesis is outward-looking and requires both an open field of inquiry and open-ended outcomes. Analysis can deliver understanding of current conditions. Synthesis can deliver new solutions to current problems.*

What are AI robots missing? According to roboticist Hod Lipson, two essential types of intelligence: creativity and curiosity. We have not yet figured out how to program and operationalize these traits in AI. Partly this is because we don’t understand how they work, particularly creativity. Creativity is fundamentally an experimental and evolutionary process. Evolution proceeds through trial and error, and without a specified or predictable end goal. It is experimental in nature, and very much dependent on a complex interplay of constantly changing inputs and incremental outputs.

Curiosity is perhaps the greatest driver of creativity, besides the problem structure itself. Curiosity is an active drive that pushes us to pursue knowledge not only about the world right there in front of us, but about abstract unknowns. It is what enables us to not only learn what we need to know about our immediate environments in order to survive, but to imagine what lies beyond the horizon. It is at the core of human adaptability and our success as a species. And on an individual level, curiosity functions in a similar way. Curious people often fare better because they’re better at handling uncertainty, ambiguity, and novelty. They’re creative problem solvers.

The challenge of programming creativity and curiosity into AI underlines just how distinctive and exceptional these traits are in human beings. They are perhaps among our most valuable characteristics, and should be fostered at every turn. While it remains to be seen if we’ll figure out how to design AI robots that match humans in these capabilities, we can intentionally direct and grow our own creativity and curiosity. And may I suggest we combine those with another trait that thus far eludes AI: kindness.

*This and the following sections on AI and robots were inspired and informed by this paper by roboticist Hod Lipson and this interview with scientist Lex Fridman.