When you are trying to create something personal, aspirational, universal, you are trying to see something akin to what Plato called the Ideal Forms, something beyond metaphysics, something magical, really. When you are creating, what you do everyday is often what hinders your progress.

Think about your fire alarm. An alarm makes you alert immediately when it sounds because it’s not there everyday in the background.

If you do everything the way you always did them, if you are using the same techniques, the same posture, the same starting ideas, then you won’t be alert.

You’ve got to ring the alarm.

If you’re banging your head against the door because your project is not moving forward,

 

Change Everything.

Turn it upside down, go against the manual, try it with your eyes closed, do it backwards. Give Your Creativity as many wake-up signals as possible. Changes trigger creative reactions. If you live in 10-story apartment building with cheap walls and you hear the flush of the toilet next door at 4 am in the morning, you will roll over and fall back asleep. But if you hear the Alarm, you’ll get up, and run 15 miles per hour down the stairs because holy crap you live in a cheap 10-story building! You need to get out.  You will react and be inspired to act.  That is artful.That is extraordinary.

That is because of the Alarm.

Change Everything.