Can you be creative and hold on to certainty? Ferrazzi greenlight

Never Eat Alone co-author Tahl Raz interviewed author, speaker, and entrepreneur Jonathan Fields for the Social Capitalist about his book, Uncertainty: Turning Fear and Doubt Into Fuel for Brilliance. In the interview, Jonathan spoke about ritualizing aspects of your day to free your mind for creative projects.

When you talk to a lot of the most creative people in the world, they have a knee-jerk reaction against routine, and they’ll say, “I can’t be bound. I can’t have structure. I can’t have all this constraint. I need to be able to freestyle and create and innovate.” Then, what you find is that it’s actually less so within their working lives, but many of those same people, in their nonworking lives, in everything that goes on outside of the time that they’re tasked with saying, “I’m working,” is insanely ritualized. So if you ask that same person who said, “I could never be bound like that,” “Well, what did you have for breakfast today?” They’ll tell you, “Well, I had a sesame bagel with a smear of cream cheese and a half a tomato and a half café latte.” Then you’ll ask them, “Well, what did you have the day before that?” and you’ll get the exact same answer. And you start to realize that probably dozens of small touch points throughout their day have become highly ritualized. What they’ve done essentially, and I started to see this as a pattern across a wide variety of people in all careers, arts, and entrepreneurship, was to create all these little moments where they’re removing uncertainty, removing the decision making element of a lot of the day-to-day decisions. It’s like it had a side effect of dropping all these little certainty anchors throughout the day where they knew what was coming next and it allowed them enough creative space to go up into the ether and to take bigger risks, and to feel like they were less tethered during that part of the day where they said, “Okay, this is my job to go and do things that scare me.” So it was really something to see that pattern. The most fundamental thing was what you wear every day. A classic example is Steve Jobs. He essentially wore the same thing for decades. So, all the way from that to ritualizing the actual work process. You know Steve Pressfield, who is a legendary writer and wrote a great book The War of Art? He sits down at the exact same time every day. He places his desk the same way. He incants the muse from Greek mythology before he writes, and that’s his ritual. He commits to a fixed time, where that’s sort of the way that he frames himself. What you find is it creates a lot more stillness in people, and it allows them to go to that place where they know, “This is the time where I have to do the work and take risks.”