Reading "The Creative Habit" by Twyla Tharp made me realized some very important points about creativity.I'll try to share them all with you in this post, but for the whole experience, read the book. It's a fascinating account of the work and discipline behind the craft of the creation of ideas.

• Everything that happens to me is usable. Everything feeds into creativity, but you need to be prepare, to see it, to retain it and to use it. You need to get ready to create.

• No one starts a creative project without a certain amount of fear. Write your fears down and be as specific as possible about them. Finally, stare them down, look at them in the eye and shake them down. Create a ritual; buy a new notebook, clean the apartment, buy a bottle of wine... A habit becomes a rituals, and rituals have this spiritual component, where the faith invested in them converts them into an act that provides comfort and strength.

• Solitude is an unavoidable part of creativity. You're never lonely when your mind is engage in playing with ideas, push them around, make them your companion.

• Immerse your self in the details of your work, and at the same time step back to scan the work, don't get so involve that you lose what you're trying to say.

• Metaphor is the lifeblood of all art. Metaphor is our vocabulary for connecting what we're experiencing now with what we have experienced before. It's how we interpret what we remember. Metaphor transforms the strange into the familiar.

• Write down the goal for every creative project. That way you can always go back that anchor, to remind you of what you were thinking at the beginning if and when you lose your way.

• Every point in the creative process is a good time to start something, to take it from there into anywhere it goes. Every step is a potential new beginning.

• The first steps of the creative act are like groping in the dark: random and chaotic, feverish and fearful. These moments are not pretty, but there is a way to get to something of value: Scratching. The way you scratch a lottery ticket, you dig through everything to find something.
Ideas come upon you mysteriously, unbidden. Scratching is where creativity begins. it is the moment where your ideas first take flight and begin to defy gravity.

I really like this definition of creativity.

• Henry James said that genius is the act of perceiving similarity among disparate things.

It implies that the wider your range of interest, the more connections you can make between disparate things.

Learn, connect, create, execute.

Make it a habit.