Creativity is Natural, Discipline is Not

Video Transcript

It turns out that creativity is not the hard part. I'd like to see a show of hands. How many of you by the time you were five years old just naturally did some creative things, and you made up stories or games or drew things or whatever? How many of you just did before it got beaten out of you, right?

{Laughter}

Now, how many of you by age five woke up and were fanatically disciplined?

{Laughter}

Creativity is natural; discipline is not. Creativity is the human state, infinitely renewable, ever present. The challenge is not how to become creative. The question is how to get rid of the stuff that's in the way of our creativity. If you breathe, you are creative. The really rare skill is the ability to marry discipline to creativity in such a way that the discipline amplifies your creativity rather than destroys it.