Real chat with real creatives

One of the biggest barriers to creativity is lack of time. You’re busy. Your days are demanding. You have a long list of tasks from last week that you’ve yet to tackle.

But is it really a tangible, true-blue lack of time, or more of a belief or feeling that time is scarce or non-existent?

“If there is something you want to be doing, you have the time to do it,” said artist and author Bridget Watson Payne. She interviewed numerous people for her book How Time Is On Your Side who didn’t seem to have time for their creative work—and yet carved out “pockets of time in all sorts of amazing ways.”

Payne interviewed a woman who wrote two children’s books in 10-minute bursts on her phone while riding the subway. One book took 3 months to complete; the other took 1 month. Payne interviewed an artist who works for a ride-sharing company and “lets creative ideas percolate in the back of his mind while driving” and jots...

Mistakes! Monsters in my worlds of creating, teaching and performing. The number one fear I hear from creatives is “What if I make a mistake?” Not “what if I don’t sound expressive?” Not “what if I don’t sound interesting?” No: mistakes dominate as the greatest fear. And I completely relate. I gave up my entire music career for four years due to mistake-phobia.

It’s strange, because as humans, we’re born problem-solvers. We’re always looking to fix and improve things. Problem-solving is the basis of our innovation and evolution: it’s creativity and life-affirmation in action, from the pianoforte to record lifespans.

Sometimes we humans are accused of “negativity bias.” We look for problems without appreciating what actually is working. We get stressed out as a result. But here the thing; problem-solving isn’t inherently negative. What is negative is our fear of making mistakes, our...