This is one of the greatest displays of the creative process I’ve seen. It perfectly illustrates something many of my favorite artists have described. When you go to the studio, Mayer was asked, what do you do to generate ideas? “Well, I don’t always do it,” he admitted, “because it requires a stupid bravery all the time.” Mayer strums a couple chords without singing. A nice melody begins to form—“you can sit here all day [doing this] and go, ‘Okay, maybe that’s something.’” “But if you don’t go,” and then he starts improvising vocals, “Sunlights beating on the corner of the walls / and I’m a Mr. know-it-all / heaven calls / get yourself right / get yourself right,” he stops, raises his finger to his mouth, and explains, “if you’re not ouija boarding immediately, you’re wasting time.” “You just stare at the corner of the wall,” he says, before improvising some more, “Stare at the corner of the wall / try to get it going on / but I can’t sometimes / you just keep going 'til you get something / maybe I’m a little bit shy / maybe someday I’ll tell you why.” He stops singing to say, “you gotta keep forcing it, forcing it, forcing it. It doesn’t matter [what comes out of your mouth]...You gotta get fearless, fearless, fearless, fearless…It’s hard to do.” Takeaway: When talking about their creative processes, many artists describe something similar to what Mayer refers to as “ouija boarding”—spitting out words and phrases, without worrying if they’re good or even make sense). When asked where his ideas came from, Pablo Picasso said, “As soon as I start to work, [ideas] well up in my pen. To know what you’re going to draw, you have to begin drawing.” Joan Didion famously wrote, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking.” And Judd Apatow said that his movie scripts are all a product of the Down-Up theory: “Get the ideas DOWN then fix them UP.” “Give yourself permission to suck,” Apatow says. “Anything goes. Just get something down.” Make it exist, as they say, then make it good. There’s a neural explanation for this process... I recently shared a clip of Dr. Andrew Huberman explaining what happens in our brain when we sit down to focus. Whether we’re trying to read, write, create a song, or generate ideas—when you sit down and try to focus, Huberman explains, “The brain circuits that turn on first are of the stress system...The agitation and stress that you feel at the beginning of something—when you’re trying to lean into it and you can’t focus: you feel agitated and your mind’s jumping all over the place—that is just a gate. You have to pass through that gate to get to the focus component.” He uses a great analogy: “You have to wade through some sewage before you can swim in clear water. That’s the way I always think about it.” Essentially: you become creative by creating, you get more creative the more you create. At the start of a focused creative session, bad ideas almost always come out first. You just have to wade through the sewage of bad ideas, “just keep going ‘til you get something,” as Mayer sang, ‘til you reach clear water. - - - “You gotta keep forcing it, forcing it, forcing it...You gotta get fearless, fearless, fearless, fearless.” — John Mayer Follow @bpoppenheimer for more content like this!