This story originally appeared on the Gents Cafe Newsletter. You can subscribe here.
For most of my life, I never considered myself a creative person. I wasn’t drawn to painting, didn’t play an instrument, and never made anything that felt like “art.” So I labeled myself as an analytical, math person and left creativity to the artists. The painters and movie directors. The people who always seemed to have brilliant ideas and thought in a different way.
Then I read Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act: A Way of Being, and something shifted.
One of Rubin’s central ideas is that creativity isn’t a talent reserved for a select few — instead it’s the natural state of being human. Every choice you make, every preference you express, every habit you build is a form of self-expression. You are always creating. The question is just whether you’re doing it consciously.
The way you dress in the morning. The words and tone you choose in conversation. The problems you solve. Everything you do is an act of creation. The creation of who you are. Most of us just aren’t paying close enough attention.
Once I reframed my view of creativity and started seeing myself as someone who can create, things began to unlock. I’d always enjoyed writing, it came naturally in school, but I never thought of it as something that belonged to me outside of an assignment, as I wasn’t an “author.” That changed. Writing for this newsletter became one of the clearest expressions of that shift: a way to take ideas that matter to me and shape them into something worth sharing. Not because I suddenly became a writer, but because I stopped constricting myself by self-imposed labels.
That’s the power in Rubin’s idea. Creativity isn’t a skill you develop, it’s an approach to life. Once you begin to make the shift, you start noticing it in everything: a meal you cook without a recipe, a trip you plan, a new move in a workout class. These moments remind you of the power you hold. You are the creator of your life. All you need to do to unlock this is begin paying attention.
So lean into your ideas and trust your instincts. The life you’re building is your greatest work.
Cover image: ©Mykhaylo Kopyt via Unsplash
