Last year, Rick Rubin published The Creative Act, and the book became a NY Times bestseller. I have some friends who find the book a bit…cringe. I love it. Especially the first half of the book. It’s vague. It’s indulgent. At times, it’s spiritual. What I find so compelling about it is captured in the title’s second half: “A way of being.” It’s a book about creativity as something that’s embodied, that’s lived, that’s explored, and that’s expressed day in and day out. Yes, it’s funky. Maybe even at some points pretentious. However, it also offers a refreshing perspective on creativity because it doesn’t cast creativity as this or that skill or capacity, and it doesn’t operationalize creativity toward problem-solving. Of course, there are skills we can learn and practice to develop our creativity, and creativity can help us with problem-solving. But creativity is also more than that. We can be creative simply for the sake of being creative. We can choose to live a creative life. We can choose to see the world in ways that are creative and open to difference and interpretation.

Similar to Twyla Tharp’s book The Creative Habit, Rubin’s book The Creative Act is about doing creativity. Habits, after all, are repetitive, and when we are committed to them, our habits become our way of being. Of course, there are also many differences and it’s interesting to consider how those differences reflect Tharp’s practice as a dancer and choreographer and Rubin’s practice as a music producer. But the commonality between them is that creativity occurs by doing. It’s not just something we think about. Creativity is something we do. 

One thing that stands out to me about The Creative Act and Rubin’s discussion of creativity is how different it is from so much of so-called design thinking. I’m not entirely opposed to design thinking. But design thinking tends to bracket out creativity, and when it engages with creativity, it’s often as a tool for something else. Rubin, precisely because of and through his vague and indulgent aphorisms, reminds us that creativity can be much more than a tool.