1. To do your finest work don’t accept a lot of work. It’s better to release one masterpiece than 1000 mediocrities.
2. Solitude is the savior of your highest talent. In other words: you can push outright magic or you can hang with the herd but you don’t get to do both.
3. Rest a lot. The dominant chant of the productive class these days is “hustle and grind”…
…The suggestion is that if you’re not working all the time you will never win. I’ve found that elite productivity comes via a cycling of intense periods of work balanced with profound periods of rest (this includes active rest; I explain all of this in my new book The Everyday Hero Manifesto which you can now order here).
4. Chill with Artists. Most of my free time is spent of personal growth, family activities and conversations with my friends—many of whom are artists. If you allow naysayers and people who minimize your ideas and creations, your productivity will be restricted. And over time, you’ll begin to operate like them.
5. Rush to Beta then Optimize to Mastery. I move swiftly and enthusiastically to the first version of a new project. This makes me feel as if the heavy lifting is done (even though it’s just the beginning). Then I spend months and months and months of painstaking editing to iterate the work up to the level it needs to be at.Â
6. Kill Your Darlings. It’s an old writers mantra (credit: William Faulkner) which speaks to the fact that to make your magic real you need to delete everything from your creative project except for that which is absolutely astonishing. Masterwork is much more about what you leave out than put in.