On Being Creative
Creativity is the part of being human I'm least willing to outsource.
Y Combinator drilled a simple lesson into me that still impacts me: you can just build things. If you want a thing to exist, there's usually no referee stopping you. There are constraints, sure. Time, money, skill, taste. But the larger constraint is often psychological. People assume the world is mostly fixed. It isn't. A lot of it is just somebody's decision, plus the willingness to follow through.
That mindset is useful in making great products. It's also useful as a way to live.
In the age of AI, it's easy to treat creativity like a nice to have. I think it's the opposite. Creativity is the core. Everything else is secondary.
Rick Rubin puts it better than I can:
"Creativity is a fundamental aspect of being human. It's our birthright. And it's for all of us."
I like that framing because it expands what counts. Creativity isn't just painting or music. It's how you solve problems, how you notice things, how you connect ideas that have never met before. It's how you decide what to build, and why. It's how you stay awake while life tries to put you on rails.
When my wife and I had our first child, a bunch of parents warned us about what was coming. The "terrible twos." The endless questions. The repetitive "why." Some of them said the questions get stupid. I get what they meant, but I don't agree with the conclusion.
The questions are the whole point.
A kid asking "why" is not being annoying. They're doing the most human thing there is: trying to model reality from scratch. They're running small experiments in language. They're looking for edges, inconsistencies, hidden rules. If you treat that as noise, you teach them to stop listening to their own curiosity.
So we try to embrace it. And we try not to answer questions in only one way.
Sometimes we look it up in a book we already own. Sometimes we search together. Sometimes we ask Winston, which is what we call ChatGPT.
The tool doesn't matter that much. What matters is that we don't rush to close the loop.
The goal is to keep the question open long enough for it to sharpen, to branch, to challenge the first assumption. Long enough to change how you see.
The older I get, the more I notice how many adults slowly trade that posture away. Not because they do it on purpose. But because life is loud, repetitive, and efficient at draining attention.
You get good at doing the same tasks. You learn the paths of least resistance. You build routines. Some routines are great. But there's a failure mode where routine becomes a cage you can't see.
One of my antidotes is change, on purpose. Not a big dramatic change. Small changes that force a new angle. A different approach, a different tool, a different starting point. Anything that breaks the feeling that today is just yesterday, again.
People love the phrase "think outside the box." The first step is admitting you're in a box.
The way out is questions. Not performative questions. Real ones. The kind that create discomfort because they point at an assumption you've been leaning on.
In Walter Isaacson's introduction to his biography on Leonardo da Vinci, he includes a line from Leonardo's notebook where Leonardo asks, "Why is the fish in the water swifter than the bird in the air?" even though water is heavier than air.
It's a small question, but it contains a whole worldview. Leonardo is noticing something that doesn't fit his first model of reality. He's not asking to sound smart. He's asking because he wants the model to be true.
That's a useful contrast to how most of us live now. We don't lack information. We're drowning in it. The scarcity is attention, and the willingness to sit with a question long enough to let it reshape your thinking.
This is where AI becomes interesting to me.
Most people talk about AI in two modes: utopia or doomsday. I get why. New general-purpose technology always has sharp edges. There are real risks: misinformation at scale, incentives that push toward low-effort content, job displacement that lands unevenly, and a world where "good enough" becomes the default output.
I'm cautiously optimistic anyway, mostly because I think AI can give us back something we've been steadily losing: creative energy.
A lot of modern work is not hard in a deep way. It's hard in a draining way. It's the small repetitive tasks that are "on autopilot," but still soak up attention. The kind of work that leaves you tired without feeling accomplished.
If AI helps reduce that tax, it creates space. Not automatically, but potentially. Space to read more, to experiment, to build small things, to chase questions, to make art badly at first, to become a beginner again.
And that matters, because creativity isn't just having ideas. Creativity is having enough energy left to do something with them.
There's another angle here that I think people miss. AI doesn't only accelerate execution. It can accelerate perspective.
If something used to take you weeks of fiddling and false starts before you could even see the shape of it, AI can often compress that into an afternoon. You can get a map of the topic, find the arguments, find the counterarguments, prototype a few directions, and decide what you actually think.
The value isn't the model's conclusion. The value is how quickly you can reach your own conclusion.
That only works if you stay intellectually honest. You still have to verify things, read primary sources when it matters, and notice when you're being pulled toward the average take. But when you use it well, you can move from "I'm intimidated by the blank canvas" to "I have a starting point."
That's true in writing. It's true in design. It's true in code.
"Creativity is just connecting things." —Steve Jobs
AI can help you gather more things to connect. More examples. More counterexamples. More metaphors. More drafts. More ways to look at the same problem. That's not the same as creativity, but it's fuel for it.
There's a related effect that surprised me—AI can lower the intimidation barrier on artistic creativity. A blank canvas can feel like a test. A prompt feels like a conversation. Tools like ChatGPT, Claude Code, Midjourney and others can help you build confidence by iterating quickly, learning what you like, and developing taste through reps. The output isn't the point. The reps are.
The danger is also obvious. If AI makes it easy to generate output, you can start confusing output with craft.
Creativity is not the act of producing something. It's the act of noticing something, and then making choices that express what you noticed. It's taste. It's judgment. It's knowing what to leave out. It's deciding what's worth doing in the first place.
So how do you stay creative while using tools that can make you lazy?
I don't have a perfect answer. But a few practices have helped me.
First, keep a list of questions you don't want to lose.
When something catches your attention, don't let it slip away. Write it down. Keep a running list of questions that feel naïve or slightly embarrassing. Those are often the best ones, because they point at gaps you're still willing to admit.
Second, answer questions sideways.
With kids, we'll sometimes respond with "What do you think?" or "How could we find out?" or "Let's look up three different explanations and see which one holds up." The point is not to stall. It's to model curiosity as a process.
You can do the same thing with yourself. If you feel stuck, change the angle instead of forcing the same mental motion. Change the medium. Explain it out loud. Sketch it. Ask the question in a way that makes your assumptions visible.
Third, ship small creative acts.
YC is right about shipping, and not just for companies. If you only "do creativity" when you have a perfect plan, you will never do it. The real unlock is making small things continuously: a sketch, a prototype, a paragraph, a tiny tool, a weird experiment.
It's hard to stay trapped in autopilot if you keep making small, original moves.
That's why I'm optimistic about AI when it's used with intent. It can make it easier to build, to explore, to ask, to test, to iterate. It can lower the cost of being curious.
But it won't do the most important part for you.
It won't decide what you care about. It won't decide what's worth making. It won't decide what your voice is. That's still human work.
And I think that's how it should be.
If creativity really is a birthright, then the goal is not to protect it like a scarce resource. The goal is to practice it like something alive.
The simplest way I know to do that is to stay unquenchable about learning. Keep asking questions. Keep changing your perspective on purpose. Keep building things that didn't exist yesterday, even if they're small.