Creativity is life.

Without it, we would not be here. Creativity is essential to humanity’s ability to adapt, innovate, overcome challenges, solve problems and brainstorm solutions. Creativity is a direct connection from our inner selves to the outer world; it is the way we express our selves, our thoughts, our ideas, our dreams and our wishes onto others. It’s not something that some people magically possess and others lack; it is one of the foundational characteristics of mankind, like having two arms, a beating heart and walking on two legs. Creativity is the muscle that connects our ideas to our hands, our bodies to our spirituality and our brings our thoughts into reality. Every single person is a creative being, but creativity is a muscle that, like every other muscle in the human body, must be routinely exercised to function properly.

"Creativity is a full-time job with its own daily patterns,” writes Twyla Tharp, a renowned choreographer and artist in her book The Creative Habit: Learn it and Use it for Life.. “The routine is as much a part of the creative process as the lightning bolt of inspiration, maybe more."

Unfortunately, many of our daily lives do not inherently focus on developing and growing creative muscles. In the hustle and bustle of life, people are pushed to focus more on physical needs than mental and emotional ones, including creativity. We must work to put food on the table and shelter over our heads, and most jobs do little to encourage creativity or recognize its role in our successes. In fact, most of us were taught from a young age that “the arts” are “extracurriculars” — extra, as in, not as fundamental or as central to our lives as the “core” curriculum taught in math, English and science. This couldn’t be farther from the truth, and refusing to recognize the significant intrinsic drive humans have to make and to create has resulted in a society and culture where mental illnesses are rampant and drug addiction destroys lives. It also keeps societies from fulfilling its potential by blocking our ability to see solutions to humanity’s global challenges and share our visions of the future with each other.

Of course, creativity isn’t just important at the macro and micro levels of humanity’s existence. Everyday, our lives improve through the use of our creative muscles and the skills developed with and through creative thinking strategies.

"Creativity is not just for artists. It's for business people looking for a new way to close a sale; it's for engineers trying to solve a problem; it's for parents who want their children to see the world in more than one way,” Tharp writes. "Everything that happens in my day is a transaction between the external world and my internal world. Everything is raw material. Everything is relevant. Everything is useable."

But those strategies aren’t a gift we are born with. They are a skill we develop that takes focus, time and dedication — which at times can feel and seem a lot like work. Decades of experimentation with different tools, thousands of hours spent following along with tutorials, resources and money spent on equipment and materials are all necessary no matter how a person chooses to exercise their creative muscles or which form their creativity takes. Whether a person has a passion for painting or for cooking or for building cars, creativity is at the forefront of that desire to learn more, to be better, to go further — but no one starts off 10 steps in. In the beginning, everyone is a beginner.

"If art is the bridge between what you see in your mind and what the world sees, then skill is how you build that bridge,” Tharp writes, adding that creative success and flow isn’t something that can be achieved in an hour a day, but rather, something that is achieved through a lifetime of learning, curiosity, exploration and experimentation. “You can never spend enough time on the basics.”

““There is no one ideal condition for creativity. What works for one person is useless for another. The only criterion is this: Make it easy on yourself.””

— TWYLA SHARP, artist and choreographer

With so many daily stresses and distractions, and so many commitments to family, friends and other passions, it may be hard to find time to be a beginner in anything. But starting a creativity-based daily ritual is one of the best ways to start carving out that time. Starting a daily creativity-based ritual — one that exercises the hands and the brain — helps teach the mind and soul to function together and gets the creative wheels turning so that, over time, they become a self-powered machine, a fountain of resiliency and support that can be counted on in good times and in bad, instead of one that’s been rusted out, neglected and blocked by self-doubt and fears of failure. Some of the world’s most creative people start each day by writing a morning journal entry, as is recommended in Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, a set of beliefs and exercises that have been helping people unlock their creative potential since 1992. Others might choose to start their day off with a new dance move, or by gardening, playing an instrument or doing yoga.

“A lot of habitually creative people have preparation rituals linked to the setting in which they choose to start their day. By putting themselves into that environment, they begin their creative day,” Tharp writes in The Creative Habit, adding that there is no magic silver-bullet ritual. Cameron’s “morning pages” may help some people work through creative blockages and fears, while others wake up each morning suffering from writer’s block. The important thing is that the ritual gets done, every day, and gives the person performing it time to devote to their own creative spirit and potential. Dedicating time each day to a creative routine is a way of telling yourself that your creativity is important to you, is a priority for you and IS, in fact, part of who you are.

"There is no one ideal condition for creativity. What works for one person is useless for another. The only criterion is this: Make it easy on yourself,” Tharp recommends. “Moving inside each of these routines gives you no choice but to do something. It's Pavlovian: follow the routine, get a creative payoff."

Though I can and do often spend hours each day after work developing my creative muscles — whether through tutorials (CreativeLive, Lynda, Udemy, SkillShare, YouTube…), exercises (prompts, journals, reading) or actually executing on an idea for an illustration, painting or other creative pursuit — that time can vary wildly day by day and isn’t necessarily ritualized as part of a daily routine that can’t be missed. Except for one thing: Every day, I leave my house to take a photograph. Nothing fancy, nothing complicated: I just go out into the world on a treasure hunt, cell phone camera in hand, in search of something that catches my eye and makes me happy. And while I walk the same streets most days, while I see the same buildings, the same plants, the same city day in and day out, this search has become proof that it’s always possible to see something old in a new light, with new perspective, from a different angle. Though the search may last for one minute or for thirty, it’s enough to get those creative thinking muscles spinning. It’s enough to block out the blockages that keep creativity from flowing.

Once those muscles are working, creativity challenges and exercises become less daunting and more exciting. Creative fears and blockages become dimmer and less significant. Words flow onto paper, ideas gain form and shape and color and texture and grow into something tangible, something seeable, something shareable. A blank canvas goes from being just another piece of unfinished business becoming a manifestation of kinetic energy waiting to be unleashed. It gets me past the toughest part of the creative process: the beginning. For most people, it’s the beginning of a creative project in which fears and self-doubt loom the largest, in which the responsibility and vulnerability involved with making something from your self and gifting it to the world in the hopes of creating connection is most terrifying.

“The task of starting with nothing and working our way toward creating something whole and beautiful and satisfying… some people find this moment — the moment before creativity begins — so painful that they simply cannot deal with it,” Tharp writes. “In its most extreme form, this terror totally paralyzes people.”

By helping people take the first step toward creativity every day, simple rituals help bring those fears down to a manageable size and learn how to confront them in a logical and dedicated way. Whether you’re worried about people laughing your work, the uniqueness of your voice, or how something might be interpreted, fears surrounding creativity are natural and nearly universal — which is why they shouldn’t be taken so seriously as to let them stop you from getting started. Masterpieces happen over lifetimes, not in one sitting. You must start at zero to get to 100. The road to greatness is paved with beginner work and newbie mistakes. There is absolutely nothing in this world that hasn’t been said before, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have the right to say what you want to say in exactly the way you want to say it, or that uniqueness can’t be found in the depths between the lines. Those are the lessons you learn through ritual — one day (one photograph) at a time.