Creativity Is What You Do Before You Feel Like It

"I begin each day of my life with a ritual: I wake up at 5:30 A.M., put on my workout clothes, hail a cab, and tell the driver to take me to the Pumping Iron gym. The ritual is not the stretching and weight training I put my body through each morning at the gym; the ritual is the cab. The moment I tell the driver where to go, I have completed the ritual."

— Twyla Tharp

Context

Tharp opens The Creative Habit with this passage because it makes her central argument as concrete and unglamorous as possible. The ritual she describes is not spiritual, not meditative, not even particularly inspiring — it is a cab ride. The point is that the decision to show up has to be made before the creative work begins, and the way you guarantee it is by making one small, automatic commitment that removes the option to reconsider. Once she is in the cab, the morning is decided. Without the cab, she would be at home negotiating with herself about whether today is the day she actually feels like working. The question Tharp spent her career answering is not whether you are talented or inspired — those things matter but cannot be summoned. The question is whether you have designed your life so that the work happens regardless. For fifty years, the answer for her was: yes, at 5:30am, in a cab.

Reflection Question

What is the equivalent of the cab in your creative or professional life — the one small, automatic action that, once taken, commits you to the work? And if you don't have one, what does that say about how often you're actually getting to the thing that matters most to you?

Application Tip

Design your own "cab" for the one creative or meaningful work you keep deferring. Make it a single, specific, automatic action — opening a document, picking up a pen, putting on particular music, making a particular cup of coffee — that you do before you have time to deliberate. The action itself doesn't have to be impressive. It just has to happen automatically and be connected to the work. Do it tomorrow at the same time you would normally be deciding whether to do the work. Tharp's insight is that the battle is never the work itself. The battle is the moment before you begin. Win that moment with a ritual and everything after it tends to take care of itself.