Friends,

I’m super inspired by this thing I read (via Seth Godin) that Miles Davis recorded 48 albums before Kind of Blue — Davis’ masterwork and the bestselling jazz record of all time.

Kind of Blue was Davis’ really big break.

And sure, he was an undisputed creative genius. This record was improv, after all. Not painstakingly planned and played with precision. It was improv. And it was inspired.

But here’s the deal: The people we celebrate as creative geniuses generally create a lot of things not everyone thinks are genius before they hit it big. Way before. Everyone I’ve ever known or studied who was a so-called overnight success had been creating or practicing for years before they made it big—even in this Internet age.

Then, their so-called big break arrived because of two things:

1. The sheer mastery that’s born of practice, and
2. The practice of inviting inspiration then acting on it, without hesitation.

Inspired action sounds flukey and spooky. Sounds like something you have no influence on making happen, something that only happens to creative genius types.

But that’s just not true. Getting receptive to inspiration and obeying it when it comes are muscles built with practice, too.

Catch this principle: The way you trigger your big break is with practice.

And the prerequisite to practicing something is starting it. Now. Whatever it is.

What’s amazing about the time we live in is that if you want to sing and put it out into the world, you can start doing it, start practicing, right now. You can find a coffee shop with an open mic. Or a church choir. Or get a $50 mic on Amazon and record some YouTube videos. Or sing into your phone and put something on SoundCloud.

If you want to write, you can just write. Put it on Medium. Reach out to publications. Build an audience, slowly, then: snowball.

If you want to do anything creative—if you want to create anything—there’s no need to wait for your big break or ask for permission from some bigwig to get started anymore.

My friend, the entrepreneur Katherine Krug, worked on a series of companies early in her career, cultivating clarity all along the way. As she got clearer and clearer on what kind of life she wanted to live, she got receptive to receiving a truly divine download. When it came, she listened. And she got started. She built a product she knew people needed (BetterBack) and crowdfunded to get it marketed and sold. Then she did that again, to the tune of multiple millions of dollars.

Along the way, she made it to Shark Tank, though she ultimately turned down the funding she was offered. And last week, she was on QVC, continuing her conversation directly with her customers: the people who need what she makes. Big breaks? Yes. But they didn’t just float into her email box magically. She got in alignment with her own desires, and got started. . . attracting her big breaks.

Counterintuitively, your most inspired creations—whether it’s software, a business strategy, a book or a blog post—will come with practice. And your big breaks will flow from there. They will come after you start creating. Not before.

By “start now” I don’t mean making lists. Or checking them twice. Or trying to get a perfectly crystal clear plan of action down in spreadsheet format.

I mean sitting down and doing something. Allowing yourself to take that inspired idea and start working on it, giving yourself permission to change course along the way.

It’s very common that the moment you even decide to take a step in the direction of what you want to create, internal resistance and roadblocks may rear their heads. Resistance can show up as a crisis, an addiction (including the addiction to drama), negative self-talk, overwhelm or just plain old procrastination.

But the single most common way internal resistance shows up in my people (that’s you) is perfectionism. Perfectionism is just a bad thought habit: the thought that you can’t or won’t start unless and until you can be really, really good. It’s a bad habit of thought that gets you stuck so you don’t ever have the chance to practice and get good. Perfectionism is tightly related to unworthiness (the idea that if you’re not performing perfectly, something is wrong with you) and to the dread of others’ critical opinions (caring too much about what others think). More about both of these later.

Anne Lamott’s book Bird by Bird is a perfectionism cure, and applies to anyone who wants to create anything. She says that a shitty rough draft (SRD) is the only way to ever get to anything good, which means it behooves you to hurry up and get your SRD done. Meaning, get it started.

Having now used this model over the years to write 3 books of my own, I can tell you there is a secret side effect to the SRD: because you’re trying for shitty, you get out of your head and often create something that’s not actually shitty at all. Maybe it’s even good. And even if you don’t, in the process of allowing yourself to create shitty things you create MORE things, which gets you the practice you need to create something great.

Once you’re creating, your great work and big break might come all of a sudden, or maybe your overnight success will take a few years. Maybe it’ll take a couple of decades, and you’ve already lived almost all the way up to the tipping point that will trigger your big break. Maybe you’ve been getting ready all this time.

Which leads me to the other important thing here: It’s worthwhile to invest some attention to making sure your creative process is intrinsically enjoyable. Make sure it’s fun and flowing and easeful and expansive. Learn how to get into the flow state as often as you want, then do that as often as you can. And learn how to relax and trust the process: We’ll talk more about trust in divine order and timing, and how to build it next week.

If you fall in love with the process, you’ll create more beautiful things. More elegant solutions. More thriving teams. More magnetic things. But also, if you fall in love with the process, that process will become a bigger and bigger part of how you live your life. It’ll become part of who you are. And you’ll stop living from a place of grasping, yearning and desperation for particular outcomes.

You’ll do it for the love of it. You’ll learn to surf the waves of life, instead of trying to fight them. (h/t Jon Kabat-Zinn)

That, in turn, will feed and perpetuate a virtuous cycle of inspired action in your life. Inspired creation. Because you love the process of creating, you’ll continue to create great things. Impactful things.

It’s why Saul Bellow said “You never have to edit anything you write in the middle of the night.”

It’s why Billy Joel said, “When an album is fun to make, it’s usually good.”

It’s why Miles himself said of his own records: “‘So What’ or Kind of Blue, they were done in that era, the right hour, the right day, and it happened. What I used to play with Bill Evans, all those different modes, and substitute chords, we had the energy then and we liked it.“

And these things you’ll create from this place, from this beloved, joyous creative process, they aren’t just great things. They are powerfully magnetic. They beacon out to the collaborative components that will come together to create even more inspired, impactful things: the prospective partners, customers, employees, co-creators.

What you create when you feel this way are the magnets for your big breaks. So, if you want to trigger your big break? Start creating. Start practicing. And start now.

Head up + heart out,

TNN

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