Before I start: I just wanted to finally let you know that I’m so excited to have the best-selling author of two of my favourite books of all time on Draw Me Anything. The special guest is none other than
an I talking about Mason’s excellent books on our episode this week. If you missed that one, you can see the replay here. I’ll be speaking with Mason on Substack Live on Tuesday, 17th June @ 1pm EDT. Add it to your calendar now!
Okay, on with the show…
Five years ago, I was sprawled on my couch at 3am, completely absorbed in Mason Currey's Daily Rituals: How Artists Work—scribbling marginalia like some deranged graduate student. When I finally looked up from the last page, the streetlights outside were flickering, and the sun was rising over the city. Tell me the last time you had an experience like that with a book?
The sequel is even better than the original.
On my second reading, I went through and highlighted something I found as a very interesting correlation across 400 years of the greatest writers, artists, poets, composers and other creative minds detailed in the book.
The people I’ve excerpted below are from just the first book, and they aren’t just a random collection of artists and thinkers; they’re some of the most influential minds who ever lived.1 Everyone from Stephen King, to Albert Einstein, Ernest Hemingway, Charles Darwin, Beethoven, Mozart, Truman Capote, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, George Orwell, Voltaire, Benjamin Franklin, Jean-Paul Sartre, Murakami, Yeats, Stravinsky, Charles Dickens, David Foster Wallace, Jung, Arthur Miller, and dozens of others.
I've always had this delusional notion that real artists chain themselves to their desks for 8-10 hours daily, grinding through to-do lists with mad hustle! (Yes, I actually used that phrase unironically.) It's completely unnatural—like trying to force creativity through a meat grinder. Thankfully, other artists have also figured out this approach is bullshit. The pattern that emerges from actually successful people is much simpler.
So, there are a few variations on the theme, but the very distinct pattern is this:
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