Creative Expression and Our Spirit(uality)

When people think of the word “creativity”, they typically relate it to something artistic, or someone artistic, hence the term “a creative”, which usually represents someone working in the arts.

But creativity is the core of everything created in the universe. In that sense, creativity isn't reserved for painters, musicians, writers and filmmakers. It's one of the most fundamental things human beings do.

People don't typically consider businesspeople, scientists, blue-collar workers, salespeople or accountants to be “creatives”. But in truth, they're creating all the time. Businesspeople create ventures, deals and organizations from nothing. Scientists create new knowledge and possibilities. Blue-collar workers physically create things and often have one of the shortest fulfilment cycles between effort and visible output.

Even salespeople create. They create desire and possibility through clever use of words, tone and reasoning.

And yes, even accountants can be creative. The problem is when accountants get too creative, there's usually a bunch of people who lose their mortgages and retirement funds and one or two banks go under. Maybe stick to the formula on this one, lads ;)

Is It Creative if It's Within a Formula?

You could argue that many of these things aren't really creative because they operate within existing structures.

Business building, for example, has frameworks. There are established principles for business modelling, marketing, finance and operations. The same is true of supposedly “pure” creative pursuits.

There is a structure to a screenplay. There are structures within music. A film requires a process involving writing, budgeting, casting, rehearsing, filming, editing and hundreds of other things I won't pretend to understand.

But structure doesn't eliminate creativity. It gives creativity somewhere to live.

A screenplay can follow the same basic structure as thousands of screenplays before it and still tell a story that could only have come from that particular writer. Two musicians can use the same instruments, chords and musical structures and create completely different pieces of music.

I've increasingly come to see discipline and creativity in a similar way.

We tend to imagine creativity as this completely spontaneous force that arrives whenever it feels like it, while discipline is rigid and boring. In reality, some of my best creative work has happened precisely because I created enough structure in my life for creativity to have somewhere to go.

The frame doesn't have to suffocate the art. Sometimes the frame is what allows the art to exist.

Creativity and Spirituality

I believe creativity is one of the purest forms of spiritual expression available to us in this physical world. Think about the last genuinely original idea that appeared in your mind.

Where did it come from?

You can explain some of the neurological processes involved. You can trace influences, experiences and associations that may have contributed to it. But the subjective experience of an idea suddenly arriving still feels deeply mysterious to me.

You're walking, showering, praying, lying in bed or doing something completely unrelated, and suddenly something appears that wasn't there a moment earlier.

A sentence.

A melody.

A business idea.

A solution to something you've been wrestling with.

An image.

A joke.

Wherever you believe that ultimately comes from, there is something extraordinary about it.

Personally, I've come to experience that mystery as something spiritual. I believe our capacity to create is connected to God, and that bringing something into the world that didn't previously exist can itself be a form of spiritual expression.

You don't have to share that belief to experience the phenomenon.

But for me, creativity and spirituality have become increasingly difficult to separate.

We Spend Far More Time Consuming Than Creating

This is the part I've become much more interested in lately: Modern life has made consumption almost effortless.

We consume other people's food, entertainment, music, ideas, opinions, images, videos and lives. We scroll through other people's experiences while sitting completely still. We can spend hours consuming without creating a single thing ourselves.

And consumption is not inherently bad. I love performances. I love music. I read. I listen. I watch. Other people's creations can move us, teach us and inspire entirely new ideas within us.

But I know this with absolute certainty from my own experience:

Consumption cannot provide the same fulfilment as creation.

It can entertain you. It can stimulate you. It can distract you. It can educate and inspire you. It can even move you profoundly.

But there is something fundamentally different about taking what exists inside you and bringing it into the world.

You made something.

It wasn't there.

And now it is.

I think this distinction has become increasingly important because we're living in perhaps the easiest time in human history to spend an enormous percentage of our lives consuming what other people have created.

And this is particularly relevant to men.

So much of our attention can become directed outward. Other people's businesses. Other people's success. Other people's opinions. Other people's bodies. Other people's lives.

At some point, I think every man needs to ask himself a very different question:

What am I creating?

Men Need Expression, Not Only Achievement

I think a lot of men lose this part of themselves as they get older.

Life becomes increasingly organized around utility. Work. Money. Responsibilities. Providing. Achieving. Fixing problems. Building security.

All of these things matter. I'm ambitious myself and have spent a large part of my adult life building businesses, chasing ideas and trying to create financial freedom.

But somewhere along the way, a man can stop asking what wants to be expressed through him simply because that expression has no obvious economic purpose.

Maybe you used to draw.

Maybe you played guitar.

Maybe you wrote.

Maybe you loved photography, cooking, building things, making music or telling stories.

Then adulthood arrived and you quietly decided that if something couldn't become a career, business or measurable achievement, it wasn't a particularly productive use of your time.

I think that's a mistake.

Not everything valuable needs to be monetized.

Not everything needs an audience.

And not everything you create needs to be good.

There is value in expression itself.

I’ve experienced immense benefits since prioritizing my creative expression and allowing dedicated time for my artistic passions to come to life. During the years I ignored them, my life was radically less fulfilling. It was filled with busyness, chasing, doing and numbing, but very little genuine expression.

That distinction matters to me much more now.

A fulfilled man cannot spend his entire life consuming and achieving. There needs to be some form of expression too.

Creation Connects Us to Something Deeper

There's something that just feels right when you watch someone completely immersed in creative expression.

Watch a singer channel something through her voice, or a guitarist seemingly embody every note with bizarre bodily movements that would look completely insane in almost any other setting.

You don't simply watch a great performance.

You experience it.

Something internal has been turned into something external, and now another human being can feel it.

That's extraordinary when you really think about it.

And you don't have to perform on a stage to experience it.

You can experience it cooking dinner.

Writing something nobody will ever publish.

Making up a story for your children.

Building furniture.

Taking photographs.

Writing jokes.

Planting a garden.

Starting a side hustle.

Making music badly in your bedroom at 39 years old.

The output isn't really the point.

Creation brings us into a different relationship with ourselves. Instead of continually asking the external world to give us something to experience, we're taking something internal and offering it to the external world.

Perhaps that's why it can feel so deeply fulfilling.

You Don't Have to “Make It”

One of the strangest things about how we treat creativity is that we seem to believe it only becomes legitimate once somebody else validates it.

The accountant has his shit together.

The lawyer is successful.

The entrepreneur is ambitious.

The artist is “finding himself”.

Until, of course, he makes it.

Then suddenly everyone retroactively decides that spending all those years making art was a wonderful idea.

But I've increasingly come to believe that we've misunderstood what “making it” means.

You don't need to sell a painting for it to have been worth painting. You don't need a million people to hear your music for it to have been worth making. You don't need a publishing deal to write, an audience to perform, or a business model attached to whatever strange thing keeps asking to come out of you.

There is something deeply human about taking what exists only inside us and giving it form.

And for me, something deeply spiritual too.

Perhaps the artist was always making it.

Because the act of making, of bringing something uniquely yours into the world, was part of what made him whole in the first place.