the zone of genius

on inspiration, discipline, and capturing creative potential

Levon Helm of the Band

I’ve been trying to figure out the formula for creative output. Because, despite my doe-eyed belief that inspiration was all I needed to flood the world with creativity, it turns out it is only one component of a two-part formula.

When you are outside your zone of genius (the area where your ideas are most clear, potent, inspired), you develop a somewhat distorted perception of inspiration. You think your inspiration will keep you at your craft day and night. At least this is how I felt: If I can just have unlimited time to write, if I can just spend all my time with a notebook, a coffee, a laptop, I’ll write so much that I’ll overwhelm the world with my ideas. But talent, inspiration, inclination—I’ve come to learn—is only half the battle. Sitting down, showing up, being consistent, disciplined, and present for your inspiration to materialize is the other half.

“The separation of talent and skill is one of the greatest misunderstood concepts for people who are trying to excel, who have dreams, who want to do things. Talent you have naturally. Skill is only developed by hours and hours and hours of beating on your craft.” — Will Smith

The thing I so naively forgot about inspiration is that no matter how high it reaches at its peaks, it always ebbs and flows. Inspiration is fleeting, inconsistent, transient. Even if you pick something where your inspiration can be maximized, it will always fall as quickly as it rises, like a yo-yo, or a sinusoidal function.

There is an equally important but much less glamorous half of the process: discipline. You need to consistently put yourself in the position to let your work flow into the world. There is nothing worse than sitting there, waiting for inspiration when it isn’t coming. But this is the price of being a creative. To capture the inspiration spurts, you need to be there, waiting for the muse to reveal herself. When your muse does arrive, you need to launch yourself at your creativity in that moment and hang on. You need to stay in the saddle.

staying in the saddle

This brings me to another one of my favourite ideas about creativity: I first heard this notion of “staying in the saddle” from a documentary you’ll probably hear me quote a lot going forward called The Defiant Ones, about the unlikely and outsized success of Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine (the co-founders of Beats). In the early days of Jimmy’s career, he serendipitously landed a gig as Bruce Springsteen’s producer. Bruce required an obscenely demanding recording schedule from his team. Like: back-to-back-all-nighters-never-leaving-the-studio type of demanding. Jimmy was the third or fourth producer that Bruce was working with, because he had burned the others out. Jimmy was about to quit—he was exhausted, uninspired and no longer wanted to be there—when his mentor, Jon Landau, said to him: “Jimmy get back in there. You don’t know what you’re leaving if you walk away now. Stay in the fucking saddle.”

So he did, and the fusion of inspiration and discipline he cultivated on that project launched his creative career up like a rocket ship. He went on to produce and manage the likes of Gwen Stefani, Tom Petty, Stevie Nicks, Lady Gaga, NWA, Tupac, Eminem, and many others. But it all started with that decision to stay in the saddle, to sit there when he most wanted to leave.

Most remarkable things require you to push through the Resistance, even when you really do not feel like it (if it was easy, it probably would have been done already). It’s enjoyable to be in the saddle when your inspiration is high, when you’re vibing, feeling it, when all is going well in the creative process. But creativity requires grit too. If you’re always waiting for inspiration, you won’t be able to capture it, even when it does arrive. You need to sit in the saddle and wait, even when it feels futile, exhausting, mundane.

Like anything else, creativity is a function of the systems sustaining it. There’s that James Clear line: You don’t rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. I think this applies to creativity too, though I’ll make a slight tweak:

You don’t rise to the level of your inspiration, you fall to the level of your discipline.

I drew this out to demonstrate how creative work gets lost in the absence of discipline, how it’s just as important as inspiration. The legend should clarify this, but:

• The blue line represents discipline (which rests at a constant level)

• The red line is your flow of inspiration (which oscillates up and down)

• The purple area underneath the graph is the creative work captured

• The grey area is the potential creativity that goes uncaptured

• Each quadrant is a combination of discipline and inspiration

• The top right quadrant is the “zone of genius”

Discipline, when optimized, lets you capture everything. If inspiration is the lemon, then discipline is the juicer. You don’t know when someone is going to put a lemon on your table, but when it appears you need to be ready to attack it—grab the lemon and squeeze hard. That is what discipline does. It gives you the muscles and the routine to squeeze your creative juice when it presents itself.

It’s worth noting that you don’t just stumble into the top right corner of this diagram by accident. It is a combination of agency and consistency that gets you there. Agency lets you choose to operate in your zone of max inspiration (that top half of the page), but to get to your zone of genius (the top right) you need to maximize your discipline, too. You need consistency. You need to stay in the fucking saddle.

talent vs. genius

“Doing easily what others find difficult is talent; doing what is impossible with talent is genius.” — Henri Frederic Amiel

The word ‘genius’ in this quote feels like a placeholder for “actualizing your potential” so you can ‘do the impossible’, or in other words: “do what hasn’t been done before.”

Discipline is great, but what you can accomplish with discipline, at least creatively, will always be limited by your inspiration. Inspiration is also great, but there are plenty of inspired creatives who never brought their ideas to life, because they do not show up to capture that inspiration. The impossible, or at least the improbable, presents itself to the few who combine both.

Notice how inspiration dips to the same lows on every graph—when it plummets, showing up will feel hard, regardless of whether it soars up right after or not. Meaning: strengthening that ‘showing up muscle’ becomes just as important when you’re doing what inspires you vs. what does not.

This inspiration-discipline dream combination gets you to that top right quadrant. When people say “you can’t beat someone working on something they’re actually interested in,” the corollary is: you can’t beat someone working on something they’re actually interested in, if they are also disciplined. Both are necessary but not sufficient conditions. Inspiration and discipline limit each other.

The people you are in awe of—the ones where you don’t understand how they can produce such high quality, high quantity output—undoubtedly possess both. The discipline brings a sense of consistency to the creative work, despite the volatile inspiration. The inspiration provides material for the discipline to work with.

building discipline outside of inspired zones

Isabel⚡️ @isabelunraveled

one of my hotter takes: studying something you’re not crazy about is an underrated path because 1) you develop discipline doing work you don’t want to do 2) unlikely to learn it independently 3) when you finish it’ll feel like you were running with weights on and now you can fly

I spent a lot of time doing things I wasn’t necessarily inspired by (I only realize upon reflection how uninspired I really was). But this phase of being uninspired but needing to show up every day trained my discipline muscles well enough to perform in any environment. And going from something you’re not crazy about to something you’re so inspired by it spills out of you (when you’re inspired!) feels like taking weights off of your ankles and watching yourself sprint down a race track with nothing but wind behind you.

Despite my discipline muscle memory, I still face the Resistance. There will always be moments where it feels like you’re walking around with ankle weights on, even in that inspired arena. Overcoming it each time is like doing a repetition, and each repetition strengthens that muscle even more.

Now, whenever I’m feeling ineffective, I ask myself: do I need more discipline, or do I need to be more inspired? Both can be solved for. To solve for inspiration, we can put ourselves in particular environments, consume content, and meet people that whet our creative appetite. Solving for discipline boils down to structure, systems, and negotiating with yourself.

Even though it seems like creativity should always be flowing out of you, your muse will tease you, taunt you, force you to sit there when nothing is happening. It will feel like trying to open a jar when the cap just won’t twist off. Despite the frustration, the most important part of creativity is to stay there, to keep twisting, to step away and come back the next day, unphased by the temporary dry spell of inspiration. Because inspiration follows no rules. It appears on its own schedule, not yours. So you need to work your schedule around it.

When coupled, inspiration and discipline maximize our creative potential, converting every drop of inspiration into a crisp, cold, condensation-coated glass of creativity that you can package and ship out to others, so they can enjoy it too. Because your gifts deserve to be shared with the world.

With a little agency, you can put yourself in front of your inspiration. Add a little discipline, and you’re equipped do the impossible: to tap into your genius and create something that only you can create.

PS—feel free to say hi on Twitter if this resonated. And you might enjoy another one of my posts: obligation vs. compulsion.