I have never been one for affirmation practices.

But having moved cities recently, I’ve been more open to change. Recently while reading The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, I had to write myself a set of creative affirmations, and in doing so I unexpectedly stumbled upon unspoken fears of mine behind each of them.

Doubt thrives in ambiguity. I’ve found this just as true for relationships as I have for my inner life. This article is to give my creative fears some shape so that I may have a chance to overcome them.

This is also a beacon - I urge you to write to me if you find yourself relating to some of these fears.

The book had its own affirmations around the fear of creating, but they didn’t ring as true to me because I am by nature already inclined to create. So below I crafted a few of my own.

My Affirmations

1. I am, and will remain, creative.

2. My creativity is original and novel.

3. Through the use of a few tools, my creativity will flourish.

4. My creativity will lead to knowledge, peace, joy, truth, and love.

5. As I listen to my creativity, I am led with purpose.

6. I will act on my creativity and create.

My Fears

1. “I am, and will remain, creative.”

I am afraid of running out of creativity.

I am 27, and by far my biggest fear is that I am nearing the end of my creative prime. Throughout my life I’ve had a pesky habit of marking how most artists I admire created their breakthrough work or magnum opus by roughly the age of 25.

Age is, of course, a fever chill
that every physicist must fear.
He is better dead than living still
when once he’s past his thirtieth year.

- Paul Dirac, 1933 Nobel Laureate in Physics

Dirac went even further when he reportedly congratulated Heisenberg on turning 30 by telling him

You are now past 30 and you are no longer a physicist.

This fills me with a deep sense of panic, like I’ve missed the train to the rest of my life. The time pressure is killing me.

To confront this fear, I first have to acknowledge the examples that feed it.

Examples

• Alexander the Great marched into Egypt by age 24. Napoleon was 28 when he stood where Alexander did, victorious at the Battle of The Pyramids more than twenty centuries apart.

• Einstein was 26 when he published the theory of special relativity. Newton was 22 when he began his foundational work on mechanics and gravity.

• Jobs released the Apple II by 22, and had already taken Apple public by 25.

• Nirvana released Nevermind when Kurt Cobain was only 24. Daft Punk released Homework by 22. Nas was 20 when he released Illmatic.

• Mozart was 25 when he arrived in Vienna and premiered the first of his seven great operas.

• Hemingway was 26 when he wrote The Sun Also Rises.

• Michelangelo started carving The David at 26. Picasso was 25 when he invented Cubism.

• Orson Welles wrote, directed, produced, and starred in Citizen Kane at 25.

• Bruce Lee was 24 when he gave the famous one-inch punch demonstration, and starred in his breakthrough The Green Hornet just a year later.

The clock ticks just a little louder for me every second. This pattern is hard to ignore and, as always, makes me feel unsettled and anxious. So I set out to find a new set of references.

Counter Examples

• Caesar wasn’t Consul till he was 40, and was 32 when he stood at a statue of Alexander and lamented at how little he had accomplished in comparison.

• Schrödinger was 38 when he published his work on wave mechanics and the Schrödinger equation in 1926. Ben Franklin only started studying electricity around 40.

• Scorsese was 33 when he made Taxi Driver.

• Leonardo da Vinci didn’t start on The Last Supper till his 40s, and hadn’t even begun his work on the Mona Lisa by 50.

• Monet created his breakthrough Impression Sunrise at 31, but most of his iconic work came three decades later and through his 80s.

• Van Gogh painted The Starry Night at 36.

• Dostoevsky was 45 when he wrote Crime and Punishment. George R.R. Martin wrote Game of Thrones at 47 and will be dead long before he finishes it.

• John Bardeen was 39 when he co-invented the transistor which enabled modern computing (go ECE @ Illinois).

• Anthony Bourdain wrote Kitchen Confidential at 43.

Alas these counter examples don’t yet settle me much - if I let myself, I still feel an insurmountable dread about my age. Either I need to sit with these new references for longer, or I don’t think my anxiety is empirical, so data analysis of age and creativity has not dispelled my fears. I fear I might have more work to do on this.

Do all endeavors show a similar age distribution for great work? Where artists and musicians might get by on pure ability, do technologists and scientists first require years of knowledge accumulation? What if modern science and technology have made an outsized impact on the number of years required for this knowledge accumulation before original contributions?

Perhaps I need a new set of affirmations on why I’ll beat the creative clock.

Or perhaps my life would be better spent satiating my sense of adventure and curiosity, rather than chasing some abstract metric of regard for my artistic output.

2. “My creativity is original and novel.”

I fear my creativity has become derivative.

I remember novel creativity felt endless when I was a kid. My creations felt as expansive as Leonardo’s - a cardboard diorama bigger than me thrice over one day, to finding ways to recycle paper another, to taking apart my friends’ toys the way da Vinci dissected cadavers, all in curiosity to fuel my next creation.

But lately, market forces bit-by-bit turn all my creations into B2B SaaS.

With few things around to reference I had to rely on imagination to get through the day. But where absence once forced invention, abundance now forces convergence.

You can’t make art with someone else in mind.

- Rick Rubin

Defense:

I suspect this might say more about my input distribution than my creative faculty. Spending too much time on Tech Twitter has made me think in tweets and pattern match my way towards my next creation.

Novelty also comes from cross-domain collision, and in these times of art x tech renaissance we live in, a step towards novelty might be to intersect a third interest. The other day I wrote down ten other fields of interest I had before college narrowed my focus to just computers. I suspect there might be something there.

Originality may require less effort at being original and more effort at living broadly enough that strange things have a chance to collide.

Lastly, taste develops faster than output. As I get older, I become more dissatisfied with derivative work because my ability to detect cliché improves. This can feel like declining creativity when it may actually be rising standards.

3. “Through the use of a few tools, my creativity will flourish.“

This affirmation is straight out of The Artist’s Way, where it’s referencing how writing three pages every morning (Morning Papers) and going on Artist Dates (something I already over-indulge in) will stimulate my creativity.

I chose to include this because I’m somewhat skeptical that my life will materially change in the near future, and by implication the distant future, and that it might be too late for me.

Defense:

One of the great misconceptions about the artistic life is that it entails great swathes of aimlessness.

The truth is that a creative life involves great swathes of attention.

- Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way

In doing the Morning Papers, I’ve found myself turning my attention towards my creative life, as evidenced by my writing this very personal essay itself.

And if creativity begins in attention, perhaps this fear is unfounded and easily dispelled :)

4. “My creativity will lead to knowledge, peace, joy, truth, and love.”

I fear my creativity over time has become trite, insincere, and rooted in greed. My ideas have become money making vessels first and self-expression second.

I have trained myself over time to ask of an idea Who will pay for it? How will it sell? What can this become? Long before asking Is it beautiful? Is it true? Does it mean something to me?

Defense:
This is a habit, not an intrinsic property of my creativity.

Recently, Corgi, a massively successful B2B insurance company, has overtaken the San Francisco startup zeitgeist. And I found myself wondering: Would I be any happier if I was its founder? The answer was a resounding no, and that if I had the choice I would much rather pick an empty day over going into work there.

Having become aware of this, I feel much freer. Knowing what I don’t want may someday inform what I do.

Also, perhaps I’m being overly critical here. Is a creation insincere simply because it makes money? Was it not my curiosity that led me every time? Money is just the universal language of value creation.

Making money is art, and working is art, and good business is the best art.

- Andy Warhol

5. “As I listen to my creativity, I am led with purpose.”

What’s the point? What’s the point of creating if I feel like my creative peak is behind me, my creations are derivative, and fall short of my visions?

Also while striving may be a necessary condition for great work, it is not a sufficient one.

Defense:
I have never spent much time in these valleys of sorrow because by nature I am inclined to create, so I am not too worried about these doubts debilitating me.

But I do fear wasting away in obscurity. To that, I may find comfort in the fact that I find the process of creation quite fulfilling by itself.

Even though I, Bruce Lee, may die some day without fulfilling all of my ambitions, I will have no regrets.

I did what I wanted to do and what I’ve done, I’ve done with sincerity and to the best of my ability.

You can’t expect much more from life.

- Bruce Lee

And even if there is a gap between what I could create and what I do, I cannot think my way across that gap.

6. “I will act on my creativity and create.”

Time (at my advanced age of 27) is a limited resource, and I fear wasting it on creating the wrong things.

I restrict myself to the medium of code, and tell myself how I can’t indulge in other mediums till I’ve solved The Money Problem* first. Within that medium too I push off my creative pursuits to do the “urgent” ones first.

(* Solving The Money Problem is simply attaining a level of financial independence needed to take beautiful risks.)

Creativity is also higher friction than addiction - addiction to the algorithm, social media feeds, TV, people. I hate the days I let myself get consumed by those addictions.

Defense:
I overvalue focus. I create false dichotomies where I can only work on one thing or the other, when in reality I have the time and energy to pursue both.

My mind acts as though I get one creative bet and must choose correctly. In reality I can probably fit a new project into a month, and thankfully there are 12 of those in a year. So I should take 11 of those opportunities to explore and fail. It would be foolish of me to expect every creation to succeed. How lucky people are to have the chance to fail.

To fail is to be free.

I wrote a piece called Fail Prolifically some time ago, that I might publish another day, in which I argued how falling on my face over and over again has unexpectedly made my inner life much richer.

And while I do falter with my addictions, I don’t think they represent me as a person. A bad day doesn’t have to be a bad week, a bad life.

Lastly, originality is partly downstream of volume. The more I create, the more I may find intersectionality of interests I mentioned before.

My Conclusions

It’s a life’s work and I wonder if I’m up to the task.

- Ethan Hawke

My fears build on each other. Fear of age makes time feel scarce. Scarcity makes me optimize. Optimization narrows what I allow myself to make. Narrowness makes my work feel derivative. Derivativeness makes me question whether any of it is worth doing and pushes me further from the life I want.

My hope in having shone some light on these doubts is that now I may give myself the chance to subconsciously work through them over the next few months and years.

I remain as afraid as ever. My fears haven’t disappeared, but they are no longer shapeless. Naming them has reduced their power. The questions remain open; so does the future.

I suppose I’ll discover the rest in the act of creation :)

My Other Work

Yet for years I had struggled to maintain consistency - until recently.

I built Gets The Worm to gently nudge me out of bed with reminders of why I wanted to wake up early and to talk me through my grogginess and excuses.

It’s worked so well for me that I now wake up earlier than my wake-up call on most days.

GetsTheWorm.com

With less than 5 minutes of a guided, thoughtful set up, I’ve been having better days, better weeks, and even a better year so far.

Check it out for yourself!

PS: If you have your own ideas you want to integrate AI phone calls into, use Redial to set it up in minutes.

Open Interface, in one line, is self-driving software for your computer. It runs on MacOS, Windows, and Linux, is open-sourced, and available to download from this Github repository.

Below is a brief demo of asking it to create a meal plan in Google Docs.

Using an LLM backend (OpenAI’s GPT-4V), Open Interface figures out how to convert user-requests to a series of keyboard-strokes and mouse-clicks that it can then execute automatically to open applications and do tasks.

Check out Open Interface on Github - github.com/AmberSahdev/Open-Interface

Nudge Notifier is now live and available to install for MacOS for all your nudging needs.

Nudge automatically notifies you on Slack and Discord when your long-running terminal commands finish or fail.

Need to catch up on the latest season of White Lotus? There’s a Nudge for that.
Need to take your puppy to the dog park? There’s a Nudge for that.
Need to take your midday beauty-nap? There’s a Nudge for half of that.

No more waiting on long builds at work, no more babysitting your terminal.

Go out and go for that run you made the resolution for, or don’t, you really shouldn’t let an email tell you what to do (ask me, my manager is still waiting for my 2022 TPS reports)

Head over to NudgeNotifier.com to learn more and feel free to send this to your friends, coworkers, enemies, ex-lovers, tinder dates, greedy landlords, or knitting club!

Live, Laugh, Love,
Amber Sahdev
Nudge Notifier
contact@NudgeNotifier.com

Share

Share