📝 Show Notes

What is a Creative Lifestyle?

A creative lifestyle is a way of living that prioritizes curiosity, exploration, and self-expression.

The approach to live a creative life is characterized by being:

1. custom-tailored
2. passion-centered
3. flow-motivated
4. mastery-oriented
5. insight-cultivating

This is the type of life that the greatest genius of all time embraced, like Leonardo Da Vinci, Einstein, Steve Jobs, Van Gogh, Jim Carrey, just to name a few.

Having a creative lifestyle depends on being conscious and deliberate about developing habits that enhance and support creativity. Twyla Tharp, on his book “The Creative Habit” says that creativity is a habit, and the best creativity is a result of good work habits.

Those habits may imply cultivating curiosity, open-mindedness, mastery at your craft, studying, exploring, travelling, experimenting. This is highly personal, and it depends on your personal traits, inclinations, and how your brain and heart works.

There are infinite mixtures and recipes for this lifestyle: some are very ambitious, putting more weight to fame, money, comfort, luxury, while others don’t really care about that and go the full monk artist route.

Jim Carrey is an example of someone who had a “very successful” career, really committed to being rich and famous, only to finally recognize that this kind of success was an empty goal.

None of these variants is necessarily right or wrong. There are as many ideal creative lifestyles as living creators in the world.

For the sake of clarity and richness, I’m going to expand on the 5 core aspects of a creative lifestyle.

5 Core Qualities of a Creative Lifestyle

CUSTOM-TAILORED

“The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.”

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

This lifestyle is designed by you and for you. It’s an expression of your creativity. You aren’t interested in replicating a lifestyle template inherited from school, from work or family. You are using all your knowledge, experience and resources to design and create a truly personal way of live from scratch, custom-tailored to your own creative vision and personal needs. Yes, others may not understand it, and that’s a signal that you’re following your path and listening to yourself. This is a conscious approach that enables you to be flexible enough to modify and update it as needed.

PASSION-CENTERED

”Your passion is your compass. It will guide you through life’s challenges and help you find your way.“

—Steve Pavlina

It’s passion-centered because you are not settling for activities that aren’t related to your natural inclinations, interests and curiosity. You’re moved by an inner fire, some higher intelligence that leads you with energy and enthusiasm towards a specific direction. This is the basic drive that allows you to connect emotionally with a project, falling in love with it and moving you forward to realize it. This child-like visceral interest toward something is recognized in this lifestyle as a source of energy, and we give it a high hierarchy, as something that is possible of giving meaning to our lives and greatly enrich it.

FLOW-MOTIVATED

“The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times . . . The best moments usually occur if a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.“

—Mihaly C.

One of the goals of this type of lifestyle is to cultivate what is known as flow state, which is a state characterized by a sense of focus, engagement, effortlessness and deep fulfillment.

The formal characteristics of being in the flow state are:

1. Complete concentration on the task;
2. Clarity of goals and reward in mind and immediate feedback;
3. Transformation of time (speeding up/slowing down);
4. The experience is intrinsically rewarding;
5. Effortlessness and ease;
6. There is a balance between challenge and skills;
7. Actions and awareness are merged, losing self-conscious rumination;
8. There is a feeling of control over the task.

If you are someone who is into creating, you know what I’m talking about. The engagement you feel when doing a challenging task with a focused mind. You may agree that this state is very pleasurable—but what’s more impressive, is that according to Mihaly’s research, it’s a way of literally inducing happiness.

He said that flow is:

a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable that people will continue to do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it

For me, this is the one of the main reasons I’m a creator. All of my activities are somehow related to invoke this flow state: when I’m coding, playing guitar, doing muay thai, writing, running… Accessing flow state was life-saving for me in moments of deep lack of meaning and existential angst.

MASTERY-ORIENTED

”The only way to become a master is to never stop learning.“

—Robert Greene

It’s a lifestyle that values learning above anything else. You will learn with patience, applying new acquired knowledge in real-time, honing your craft in a progressive movement towards excellence.

When you are mastery-oriente, you reap deep fulfillment during the process of creation, deeply commiting to the path, not by some extrinsic reward you may get, but by an intrinsic motivation that will make you happy just by doing what you know is the most important thing: following your creative aspirations.

INSIGHT-CULTIVATING

”What is to give light must endure burning.“

—Victor Frankl

You will develop insight, because the path of mastery is a path of challenge. You will feel anxiety and pain in the process of creating new things. It’s not a bed of roses. But this pain of bringing something to life, is a pain that you accept and understand as necessary for new things to come. This pain makes you stronger and wiser. Your resilience, your capacity to reflect and adapt to challenge will sky-rocket.

Final Words

So, when I speak about Creative Lifestyle, I’m referring to a lifestyle that has those characteristics. This doesn’t mean that you wouldn’t be looking for financial freedom, or to build up money and actives, generate passive income, etc. But there are plenty of podcasts out there that are focusing in that way, on how to make money, what car to buy and stuff.

This podcast is not about that. What I want is to create a space for artists, creators, smart professionals that are looking for an alternative outside the conventional meaning-making machine of media and capitalism.

• Are you nurturing those qualities of a creative lifestyle in your own life?
• If not, what can you change to start living things in a more conscious and deliberated way?
• How can you start listening more to your deepest passions?
• What can you do to access flow state in a more consistent way?
• What is this skill or art that truly calls you since you’ve memory and you would love to improve and become a master at?
• How can you expose yourself to challenge in a way that makes you a more insightful and wise person?
• What you need to learn from you current challenges?