Successful Creative-types have a healthy routine. Do you?

No self respecting artist is bound by the daily grind of a 9–5 are they? Their ideas come to them in a bolt of inspiration after:

• a late night of drug induced debauchery,
• a week long meditation retreat,
• they have conquered their umpteenth sexual partner,
• cruising the Caribbean for several weeks.

The word ‘routine’ itself seems to instinctively conjure up feelings of strict repression and endless boredom. Why? Because the first routines that we encounter in our lives are imposed by some external agent: parents, then teachers, then employers…

Have you ever created a routine for yourself?

Probably.

You joined a football team who practices on Tuesdays and plays matches on Sundays. You go for a run three mornings a week, shopping every Saturday, Game of Thrones every Sunday night. These are routines that you never complain about. Why?

When you impose a routine or structure upon yourself, of course you decide upon the content of your routine, but more importantly, you understand that the routine helps you. If you create a football routine, you get better at it. If you go jogging regularly, you become fit. If you go shopping on Saturdays, you save money by not having to eat out all week. If you watch Game of Thrones…. well… you get good at politics!

The other cool thing about the above routines is that by simply declaring the routine, you more or less guarantee it’s occurrence.

So why don’t artists have routines? Why is creative talent considered magic? Why do artists shun the idea of routine?

Well, it turns out that the good ones don’t. Hundreds of prominent artists throughout history had a routine. Charles Darwin, Andy Warhol, John Updike, Twyla Tharp, Benjamin Franklin, William Faulkner, Jane Austen, Anne Rice, Picasso and Igor Stravinsky… just to name a few. Some of the routines are bizarre. The most interesting one I read was about a writer (I won’t spoil it by telling you which one) who built a routine for himself that mirrored the rest of working class New York. He woke early, had breakfast, put on a suit and tie, travelled down the elevator with all the other ‘suits’ at 8:30am. But instead of getting out at the ground floor, he travelled to the basement where he wrote for exactly 8 hours (with a lunch break), then travelled back up the elevator to his wife and kids in the afternoon at 5pm.

This is a successful author.

The most popular question successful authors are asked: How do you become a successful author? This is their unanimous answer:

“Get started now, don’t procrastinate.”

Don’t wait for inspiration, don’t expect everything you write to be gold, quantity will produce quality. Successful artists have closets full of art that nobody cared about until they made their masterpiece. The closets are sometimes also masterpieces waiting to be discovered. Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist took over ten years to be discovered as a bestseller. By then he had written dozens more books.

When did you last complete a creative product?

It could be a book, a painting, an article, a sculpture, a song… anything. If the answer is never, why? Are you waiting for inspiration to come along at the perfect moment and whisk you away into fame and fortune? Have you just not found the time? Setup a routine and you will finish it.

The more frequently you work, the more likely it is that inspiration will touch you. It will also help you to plough through the troughs of inspiration and keep an even keel.

A routine is what distinguishes a professional artist from a struggling one.