ON CREATIVITY – TRAINING YOURSELF INTO ‘THE ZONE’ (worth repeating) You get much

ON CREATIVITY – TRAINING YOURSELF INTO ‘THE ZONE’

(worth repeating)

You get much better at getting into “the Zone” that you find in the shower (or as you’re just waking up), if you practice writing. I can get almost the same experience just writing. But it’s true that either the shower or driving is hard to beat.

After the first year or two of writing an hour a day it takes declining effort, finally approaching zero, to write what’s in your brain – shower or no. Why? Because you train yourself to stay in ‘the zone’ and not ‘come out of it’. I used to run from the shower and write it down as fast as I could, by reciting it to myself. I just did what every writer recommended. Don’t try to be better. Just write. You will get better. Best advice I can give is to ignore spelling, puncutation, sentences, and just write a stream of consciousness. then go back and make sense of it. Over time you will get better at organizing your stream of consciousness without effort.

The real problem that most of us have to overcome is that our imagined visions FEEL like they’re sensible. But until you write them down you haven’t TESTED whether they’re sensible.

This experience is a cognitive illusion – or bias – that lets us get inspired by an opportunity, yet work to obtain more information until it’s born out or not. It’s evolution at work. Our brain gives us a chemical reward that says ‘keep investigating this opportunity’.

But we can’t confuse that intuition with understanding. If you can’t state something, you only intuit that there is a relation. You don’t in fact understand that relation, nor can you test it by articulating it.

I ‘knew’ a lot of what I am doing today in 1986. I knew it in 2001. I knew it in 2006. I knew it in 2009. And I knew it in 2012. But what I learned in each of those drafts, was that I knew nothing at all. I intuited something. But it wasn’t until 2012-2013, and maybe into 2014, that I knew what I intuited. Meaning, that I could write down the roadmap that I intuited as a mere direction in …. what… when I was twelve?

Your mind is always path-finding. Train yourself to use it.

It takes a lot of time.