Thoughts become perception, perception becomes reality. Alter your thoughts, alter your reality.
— William James
The greatest skill you can develop as a music creator is learning to see the abundance of inspiration all around you.
Because if you’re aiming for long-term success with your music, it’s crucial to understand how to stay consistently creative and productive. Or at the very least, be able to create even when you're not feeling inspired.
This is because musical output is the lifeblood of any artist, for professionals and beginners alike.
The repeated completion of your songs is what will give you the experience to create better music, refine your skills, develop ideas and shape the sound that will become your artistic identity.
It’s what separates the pros from the amateurs, at least that’s what I noticed from my limited world view.
How The Pros Do It
I clearly remember in 2019 at the peak of my creative crisis when I began to really question how my favorite artists did it.
How did they stay consistently creative month after month, year after year?
Just like clock-work, release after release. All while I was still work on the same ideas from years before?
What do they know that I don't?
If they're able to do it, and so many artists with diverse and backgrounds do it why can't I learn?
Shortly after this crisis I became obsessed with figuring it out.
After the events of 2020 and the help of the internet I began to seek books on creativity, bought courses, attended virtual workshops and paid memberships to access my favorite artists creative process in the hopes that I would be able to understand the thinking behind their process.
I wanted to understand how they tap into this creativity almost at will (or so I thought)
After some years of collecting lessons and insights from all these various sources, it all led me to a surprising realization:
Creativity and inspiration is all around us at all times and it has a lot more to do with the way you perceive the world than it is about actually feeling or being creative.
The way to see it all is with a change in perspective, a mindset shift.
To live as an artist is a way of being in the world. A way of perceiving. A practice of paying attention. Refining our sensitivity to tune in to the more subtle notes. Looking for what draws us in and what pushes us a way. Noticing what feeling tones arise and where they lead.
— Rick Rubin
At least for me, changing my perspective was the most impactful change I ever made.
I saw more inspirational content in more places.
It increased how creative I feel on a day to day basis.
I felt the eagerness to sit and joy to create like I did when I first started.
It greatly diminished the frequency of feeling creatively blocked (and when I did it helped me quickly overcome them and get back to creation).
That's when I became aware of the undeniable link between the way we think and how it affects the way we perceive the world around us.
But before I share some of these ideas it's also important to understand the opposing force take take us away from these states.
The obstacles that keep us from viewing the world with curiosity, excitement and abundance. The mental hurdles which discourage us from pursuing our innate desire to create.
The antithesis of inspiration and creative energy.
Because to defeat it we must first know who the enemy is.
Identifying The Invisible Enemy
Most artists struggle with staying consistently creative for extended periods of time.
A lot of this is due to the unpredictable nature of our perceived creativity, how often we feel inspired to create and our inability to tap into creative flow at will.
For most artists these 'perfect storm' events are rare, and typically can’t be repeatable.
More often than not artists are far more familiar with the with the invisible enemy of creative energy and creativity.
Steven Pressfield calls this enemy Resistance.
Resistance is an energy field radiating from a work-in-potential. It's a repelling force. It's negative. Its aim is to shove us away, distract us, prevent us from doing our work.
— Steven Pressfield
In fact, the effects of Resistance are so prevalent that it leads many artists to develop their own unique strategies, rituals and tricks to quickly rescue them from its grip.
For example:
Brian Eno created a deck of cards Oblique Strategies to quickly overcome his day to day creative blocks. In his deck each card offers a challenging constraint or suggestion to move forward.
Ludwig van Beethoven was known to often take long walks in the countryside with a notebook to capture his ideas. He believed that walking stimulated his creativity and helped him develop new musical ideas.
Salvador Dalí the famous painter used a technique called the "hypnagogic state" which he claimed enhanced his creativity. He believed that by tapping into this half-awake, half-asleep state allowed him to access surrealist and vivid imagery.
While it's evident that every creator feels the effects Resistance at varying degrees, for most artists what makes these creative obstacles so difficult to overcome also happens to be their sole weakness:
They originate within ourselves, our inner world.
In our mind.
So before we get to the good stuff let's look deeper into Resistance. What is it and how does it manifests itself in our work and lives?
The Effects Of Resistance (And All It's Friends)
Resistance is the voice inside your head telling you you're not good enough to create music.
Resistance is the lack of motivation which keeps you away from getting in the studio.
Resistance is the endless editing keeping you from finishing your songs.
While I could write volumes about the different manifestations of Resistance, what's important to remember is that it has no sole identity, it’s a shapeshifting energy which can take many forms.
In essence, Resistance is anything that keeps your from achieving or working towards your dreams and genuine desires.
And it's different for each one of us…
For some it can manifest itself lack of time, money, distractions, fear, excuses or maybe just as simple as laziness.
All these forces are agents of Resistance and we must stay vigilant of it at all times, because it’s goal is to lead us away from our true purpose.
However, it's not all doom and gloom.
The positive here is that we have a fighting chance against Resistance because as we learned the battle is fought in our minds.
And this is within our control.
Even if resistance and all it's friends, shapes and manifestations don't manage to break your artistic spirit, for many it's presence becomes just another "part of the process".
Maybe even you’ve grown to accept theses mental blocks as unavoidable struggles of creation.
But I believe it doesn't have to be that way.
There’s ways to minimize it’s effects.
There ways to maneuver around it.
There are ways to live in prolonged state of creative inspiration.
So let's jump into these perspectives and mindset shifts which have helped me reduce my runs in with Resistance, creative blocks and quickly moved me into action.
4 Mindset Shifts For Endless Inspiration
Everyday we’re constantly interacting with the information and contents of the world around us.
A lot of how we interact with the world is dependent on our current beliefs and perspectives which we’ve gained from past experiences.
However, because we are conscious beings with free will we’re also capable of directing our thoughts. We can momentarily suspend our beliefs, look at life from a new angle, and new perspectives.
These new perspectives can give as a new vantage point, some that might offer us a view of the world which is teeming with endless inspiration and creative energy at every turn.
So today I want to share with you the 4 most impactful mindset shifts and perspectives which have helped stay consistently creative and productive.
Disclaimer: While I can’t promise you these will work for you or their effectivity I believe if can gain something of value from them. These are simply perspectives that have helped me become more prolifically creative artist, maybe they can work for you too.
So without further a do, let’s begin.
1) Your Life As A Source Of Inspiration
Each and every one of us has a story and it's being written everyday. Our conversations, the information we consume, the places we visit and people we meet can all be ingredients for a compelling story.
And at a core level this is what music is all about:
Storytelling through sound.
When we develop the skill of seeing the narratives and stories play out in our day to day lives you can begin to pull from them and use it as raw material for your own creative work.
This can be done metaphorically, literally or even more abstractly if that's your preferred style.
The benefit of this mindset shift is that you get to use your everyday life as inspiration, which means that for as long as you're alive you'll have inspiring, personal and authentic material to pull from.
When you view the world through this lens it becomes difficult to NOT feel inspired because at any minute of your day you could simply:
Record the running water from your shower and use it as sonic texture in your music.
Use the story of your first heartbreak as the foundation for a verse or chorus.
Make drum kits from random objects around your home.
Suddenly the world around you becomes an endless playground with infinite possibilities. But more importantly, you begin to weave a sonic story only you can tell, in your own authentic way.
Suddenly you’re not just reacting to trends or making music for playlist placements, you begin to create for your own self-amusement, your curiosity and for the joy of leaving your story behind.
2) Making Music Is Like A Puzzle
When you're trying to make a song, it's like solving a puzzle, and it's just fun trying to figure it out.
— Rick Rubin
Treating my songs like a challenging puzzle set did wonders for my creativity and musical output.
This slight shift in perspective allowed me to start viewing the process of creation as riddle and a fun game where it’s fun making the smaller connections that make up the whole.
Whereas before I would put the weight of expectation, perfectionism and an unattainably high standard of quality for each production — All of which ended up demoralizing me when I finished and my song couldn’t meet that reality.
From experience, when you begin to you view music creation through this puzzle filter you rid yourself of the grand overwhelming tasks of completing a full song (which is a product of thousands of creative decisions).
This helps us break up the building blocks and elements of our song into small achievable tasks that have a clearly defined purpose and effect on the song as a whole.
Ex. Risers for excitement, bass line for groove, reverb for space, etc.
The joy then becomes the moment we fit and complete each small piece (the process), rather than making the completed song the focal point (the outcome).
3) Create Then Curate
One of the most creatively liberating practices I've tried over the years is the idea of what I’ve come to call Create Then Curate.
This is the process where artists first generate a large volume of ideas and then select and refine the best ones. This approach ensures only the most authentic, resonant and high-quality pieces are developed and kept.
The practice can be explained by using the analogy of panning for gold.
Gold panning was popularized during the California Gold Rush in the mid 19th century.
Back in these times, California was filled with gold deposits and flakes, nuggets and remnants we're abundant along riverbeds, caves and in within the ground.
One technique developed by miners was the practice of panning.
The process of panning for gold requires one to shovel a large quantities of dirt in to a pan with water.
Slowly as you pan the sand in varying motions you begin to see the sediment and dirt begin to separate because of their different densities, ultimately revealing the small gold flakes that we're hidden in the muddy sediments.
In a similar fashion at the start of our songwriting process we want to throw in as many ideas as we can into our DAW (our pan).
We don’t care if they’re good or bad at this moment we just want a lot of ideas.
Some call this:
Idea vomit
Idea generation
Throwing shit at the wall
Once we have countless ideas (more material than we think we’ll need) it’s time to begin the next step of the process:
Refinement and elimination.
As we edit, refine and bring out the standout musical bits from that initial pile of ideas, we begin to rediscover the ones that will make our song memorable or that we feel are worthy of keeping (finding the flakes and nuggets of gold).
Another way to think of this is what actor and comedian Jordan Peele calls shoveling sand into a sand box:
When I’m writing a first draft I’m constantly reminding myself that I’m simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.
— Jordan Peele
When we view music creation and inspiration through this lens it becomes apparent that to achieve these results we don't need to be or feel inspired.
Simply produce a lot of ideas into your DAW and then find the inspiring bits that speak to you within them.
Once we come across these inspiring ideas we can use the momentum of this excitement to carry us on to see it through and reach the next iteration of our musical idea.
This approach gives us back some sense of control over the enigmatic nature of inspiration. We begin to question if inspiration really is outside of us and out of our control or if it can be influenced by taking action.
4) Copy The Music You Love
For most of our life we’ve been conditioned to believe there is something fundamentally wrong with copying others.
But if we dig deeper, we realize that imitation is essential in almost every discipline. In fact, even greater than that. Copying is a human instinct, a survival tactic and a fundamental way in which humans learn and grow.
But how does copying the music we love help us overcome mental obstacles of creation and help us see the inspiration all around us?
Well, this comes down to how easily accessible most music is to us nowadays.
If you’re reading this you have access to all of humanities recorded history. You have playlists upon playlists of music you like and enjoy, and each one of these songs contains an abundance of musical ideas and interesting bits of audio such as:
Arrangement structures
Chord progressions
Melodies
Samples
Themes
Vocals
This is all material you can pull from, get inspired from, study, dissect all of which you can later serve as new seeds for your original ideas.
Giving yourself permission to copy can serve us in many positive ways.
Personally it’s one of my favorite ways to quickly jump into creation when I’m not particularly feeling inspired.
Copying music can serve us a launchpad to spark our creative juices or to simply provide you with inspirational material and momentum for your new original productions.
Start copying what you love. Copy copy copy, at the end of the copy you will find yourself.
— Yohji Yamamoto
Living A Life Of Creative Abundance
While Resistance can’t be completely defeated or avoided, shifting our mindset and taking a look at life and creation from new perspectives can be effective to combat it’s effects.
As we practice to look at our music and creative work through these lenses we become accustomed to them and it becomes our default state.
Once this happens we can begin to live in a reality where creative blocks and all the other mental obstacles become afterthoughts and or at the very least they are greatly minimized.
While these perspective and shifts aren’t the end all be all, these are simply the most useful ones I’ve come across.
It’s important you set out to explore the angles, perspectives and vistas that work best for you, since in the creative world rarely does one shoe size fits all.
Lastly, I'm on a looking to help 5 music producers systemize their creative process so they can finish more music in the next 90 days (all without the creative blocks or relying on inspiration or motivation).
If this is you DM me the word "MUSIC" on Instagram or send me an email to info@soundandcreativity with subject line "MUSIC".
As always thank you for reading, until the next one.
— Hermes
Great insights and observations in here that can apply to any creator aspiring to be prolific.
I've given you some feedback and suggestions via Loom here: https://www.loom.com/share/e7366cb04d204be98f29a31fc3b55e6b?sid=58e331b7-b3ac-4ee4-bccf-d9c755206c80
Key Takeaways and Frameworks:
-- Use P.A.S. (Problem, Amplify, Solution): you do this for a couple of your 4 mindset shifts but could do it for all)
-- When writing the "Amplify" and "Solution" parts, I find it most intriguing when the writer does this with Personal anecdotes to "Amplify" the problem. This is a way of showing the reader instead of telling the reader what you're going through.
-- By showing through personal anecdotes, you're also taking me as the reader from the dark place you were in, into the light of your epiphany. This gives your epiphanies (in this case, your 4 mental models) much more gravity and meaning.
This all this results in a more powerful message that readers can relate to by way of walking in your shoes. The more a reader can relate, the more hooked they'll be.
Hope this is helpful!
Join our writing club at feedbackfreak.com if you're interested.
Lovely read. Thanks Hermes 🤙