You're Already Ready

In our creative work, we’re all waiting for the Muse to come and inspire us. But often, we’re looking in the wrong direction. Here’s where to reliably find her and coax her into helping you out, no matter what your creative project is. 

Sometimes you think you have to make something GOOD, and it fries your brain and stops you in your track. Try a list instead. Here's how.

How do you allow yourself to rest when you don't feel worthy of it? Make it your job! Here's how.

The planning fallacy is a phenomenon first proposed by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in 1979. Put simply, it says that people have too much optimism about the time it will take to complete something. Interestingly, this bias only affects your own tasks, not those of others. You know it’ll take your husband four months to build the new deck, not the weekend he somehow thinks it will. But you? You think you can thumbnail your entire comic book by the end of the week. Instead, it takes you three weeks to get four pages done, and you feel like an abject failure because of it. Honey, no!Pick those goalposts up and move those suckers!

Why wait for tomorrow to feel like you're good enough? My friend, you've already got that covered. Have a listen and find out why.

I can freely admit I don’t deserve to spend quiet time at a beach house. Yesterday, I sat on the edge of the world in my sparkle boots and thought exactly that. The storm was whipping up the waves, sending spray twenty feet into the air. The sound was deafening.  I didn’t fit in—I was so small, on a rock, on the edge of a country I don’t really understand. How did I deserve to sit right there, just when, when so many are… are not able to do the same thing.  The truth is: I don’t deserve it.  And at the same time, I do. 

The other day, I painted my old black Frye boots silver. They’d come slightly sparkly when I’d bought them, actually. They were the gated-community version of silver. They glinted in the light, but only politely, only if you took the time to look. LISTEN FOR MORE.

“Swimming is an antidote for the existential anxiety from which I suffer.” - Bonnie Tsui, Why We SwimIn this episode, Rachael searches for flow while in the pool (and on the page).