---
title: The Creative Act
author: Rick Rubin
goodReadLink: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60965426-the-creative-act
---

## Everyone is a creator

- To live as an artist is a way of being in the world

## Tuning in

- We are all participating in a larger creative act we are not conducting. We are being conducted. The artist is on a cosmic timetable, just like all of nature.
- In this great unfolding, ideas and thoughts, themes and songs and other works of art exist in the aether and ripen on schedule, ready to find expression in the physical world.
As artists, it is our job to draw down this information, transmute it, and share it.
- We are all antennae for creative thought.
- To pick up on signals, don't look for it, or try to predict and analyze our way into it. Instead, create an open space that allows it. A space so free of the normal overpacked condition of our minds that it functions as a vacuum.
- Practicing a way of being that allows you to see the world through uncorrupted, innocent eyes can free you to act in concert with the universe's timetable.

## The source of creativity

- The Source is out there. A wisdom surrounding us, an inexhaustible offering that is always available.
- Art is a circulation of energetic ideas. What makes them appear new is that they are combining differently each time they come back.

## Awareness

- The universe is only as large as our perception of it. When we cultivate our awareness, we are expanding the universe.

## The Vessal and the Filter

- The vessel holds the sum of our thoughts, feelings, dreams, and experiences in the world.
- Information is filtered uniquely for each person before entering the vessel.
- Artists seek to restore childlike perceptions, a more innocent state of wonder and appreciation untethered to utility or survival.
- One can think of the creative act as taking the sum of our vessel's contents as potential material, selecting for elements that seem useful or significant in the moment, and re-representing them.
