Creative Hygiene & The Myth Of Instant Genius

Wake-Up Call #34

Imagine living on a diet of nothing but gooey candy.

Since you were 5, here’s your routine:

• Taffy for breakfast

• Marshmallows for morning snack

• Swedish fish and peanut butter cups for lunch

• Tootsie rolls for afternoon snack, and

• Cotton candy for dinner

Oh, and you don’t brush or floss.

Ever. Okay, maybe you do it once or twice a year.

Twenty-five years in, you turn 30 and decide it’s time to change your ways.

You switch to a raw veggie diet overnight. Next day, you’re excited to dive into a healthier new you. You crunch into a carrot and wham. The feeling of your teeth crumbling, along with the carrot.

You’re in pain, so you go to the dentist, who asks about your diet and oral hygiene.

She’s mortified and says some version of”

“Dear Dope, what’d you expect? You can’t ignore your oral hygiene and proper nutrition for 25 years, then magically expect your teeth to come back online and be honed and strong and ready to kick carrot-crunching butt overnight!”

This makes sense when it comes to our teeth. Even, your health, or relationships.

If we want them to be there for us, and to be not only minimally functional, but primed to deliver awesomeness when it’s crunch-time (forgive the dad pun, I just couldn’t resist), we’ve got to pay attention to them along the way.

• Oral hygiene is critical for teeth that deliver when we call on them.

• Relational hygiene is essential for relationships that are there when we most need them.

• Mental hygiene is necessary for finding ease in a freakout world.

But, what about creative hygiene?

What about your ability to be high-level creative? On demand?

Somehow this same idea—that hygiene matters—seems completely foreign when we think about the realm of creativity.

I mean, shouldn’t it just be there when we need it?

Shouldn’t we be able to creatively write or speak or paint or draw or design, anytime and every time?

Shouldn’t we be able to innovate or problem-solve or build at the highest levels, on-demand?

Shouldn’t we be able to craft or weave or color-match or code, this instant?

Even though we’ve done little to keep these muscles trained and sustained, maybe for decades?

Um, no.

Simple truth: no creative hygiene, no creative performance.

Look…

Most of of did some kind of regular creative activities, art, spatial problem-solving, or play when we were young. Even if it wasn’t our thing, it was just a regular part of school, or home-based activities and weekend classes. It was hard to go more than a few days, let alone a few hours, without doing something that stretched your brain to create, or to make.

Then, around middle-school, that all started to fall away as “teaching to test” took precedence over creative expression and engagement.

This wasn’t on you.

Schools cut art and shop and performance, or made them elective. Studying for hours a day, sports, and other activities, often tailored toward college-resume-building extracurriculars took precedence over pure creative expression (unless art was your jam, of course). Academics, core classes, writing standardized 5-paragraph analytical essays, formulaic problem-solving, and APs took the lead.

These aren’t bad skills to have…when they’re not the only ones. When they’re more of a “yes, and” to creative hygiene than an “either, or.”

As we headed into our teens, then adulthood, unless we proactively did something to keep daily nonlinear, lateral-thinking, creative practices and pursuits in our world—to embrace creative hygiene—our magical, mystical maker muscles began to atrophy.

Then, one day, years or decades into a life built more around box-checking, linear-thinking, safety, and predictability, we hit a moment where we needed to tap those muscles, only to find them weak and withered. The creative juices had become dusty old powder.

So, we did the delightful thing us humans do. Shamed ourselves for not being able to write, draw, paint, design, perform, or solve like we used to be able to. You know, like a billion years ago, when that’s all we did. All day, every day.

Yay, psychic pile-on!

Here’s the deal…

Just like our teeth that need regular stimulation, brushing, flossing, and a variety of hard and soft, nutritive things to push up against, our creative muscles need the same.

For so many, we spend our entire adult lives doing little, if anything to regularly nourish our creative juices, to build and keep the muscles sculpted, agile, and ready to rock.

We don't engage in any sort of creative hygiene practices. So, of course, our capabilities won’t be there for us when we most need them. Instead of being surprised, let’s own the fact that the creative apathy and ignorance that got us here ain’t gonna get us where we want to be.

Good news, all is not lost. Well, not yet…

If we want to be on-demand creative at a level that makes us regularly say, “holy shit, I did that,” we need to reclaim creative hygiene as a regular part of our lives.

So what then, might creative hygiene look like?

Well, here's one fun example. I'm actually speaking this right now, not writing it. And I'm speaking it at about eight in the morning as a hike in the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains at about 6,000 feet above sea level. Something that I do for about an hour and a half, two hours, four or five days a week. Even in the snow. Because it literally is out my back door.

But also I do it not just because, psychologically, it's just incredibly powerful and rewarding and energizing for me. I also know this is a critical element of my creative hygiene practice.

Because…

When I'm on the trail with no one else around surrounded by breathtaking, often majestic natural beauty, my brain pops with ideas. It is the single most-effective ideation mechanism I’ve ever experienced. It primes my noggin to look, to listen, to see, to feel, to take in with all of my senses, to smell, to hear. The undulations of the trail, the pine needles, deer, wild turkey, black bears, and wind whipping through the trees. The rocks and dirt and peaks. The crisp morning breeze against my face. The crunch of the snow beneath spike-wrapped boots.

These experiences make my life better. But, they also serve as a daily practice. In seeing. In paying attention. In inviting wonder, and wondering. Then, delivering the raw material for a more informed and expansive creative contribution and expression. The outflow side of the equation that is the beneficiary of all this inflow.

When I then sit with the invitation to express something in words or images, to come up with new ideas, to innovate and see better solutions, things pour out. The river flows much faster, much deeper, and with far fewer obstacles along the path.

And, I do this, with intention, daily.

Because I want it to come.

I want it to be there for me, when I need it most.

And, of course…

Your mileage may vary.

Moving in nature is just one form of creative hygiene, one that happens to be accessible to me.

Yours may look very different.

Here are 5 more examples of Creative Hygiene practices:

1. The Artist’s Way - Morning pages

2. End-of-day free-writing - Give yourself a writing prompt, then allow 10-minutes to riff on it, total stream-of-consciousness without editing

3. Fast-5 brainstorming - pick a topic, theme, question or interest, then give yourself 5-minutes to brainstorm 5 creative takes, sub-questions, ideas, or ways to explore or express it.

4. Weekly lateral thinking challenge - Pick a problem or challenge, it doesn’t need to be big or complex, and spend 10-15 minutes coming up with the most unconventional potential solutions you can imagine.

5. Guided visualization/meditation - find a guided audio visualization or meditation that you can listen to 3-5 times a week that lets your brain come back to a place of stillness and attentiveness

These are just ideas, out of thousands of possibilities.

The big idea though, is to embrace creative hygiene as an organic part of your life, so that when you most need your creative muscles to be strong and agile and ready, they’re there to support you in doing amazing things.

End of the day, creative genius most readily finds us when we tend the garden from which it springs over time.

With a whole lotta love & gratitude,

Jonathan

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Wake-Up Call #33

My question now is what about you?

Do you already have creative hygiene practices, habits or behaviors?

If so, share one or two in the comments, the more we can all learn from each other, the better. Plus, I’m just really curious.

And if not, take a look at the 5 + 1 practices I shared above, and ask what one you might be willing to begin exploring on a regular basis.

What might you build into a routine that embodies the creative hygiene needed to truly prime your brain to access its highest creative capabilities with more ease, more honesty, and higher levels of genius and expression when needed?

Think on it, walk with it, start to say yes to your own creative hygiene. And, if you’re inclined, share your take, and your practices in the comments.