Sometimes, people ask me why I wrote a book about creativity. Short answer: it’s because I experienced a creative block. (Long answer here!) I spent many years looking for the answer to this creative block, and I put the most useful information I found into my book Creative Doing.

I still often find myself experiencing creative blocks. Writing a book didn’t free me from this experience. However, because I understand it better, I also know what to do with it better.

The same goes for my next book, about the journey from self-doubt to confidence. Sometimes, I want to give up on it, because I feel so unqualified. 

Then, I remember, the whole reason I started writing about this book was because I experienced self-doubt in the first place. If I didn’t experience it—say, if I were born and nurtured with a superhuman dose of confidence—I wouldn’t need to learn all of this for myself, or to write a book about it. You could say—it’s precisely because I experience self-doubt, and I wanted to shape that experience, that I am very well-suited to write about it. 

“You can’t grow lotus flowers on marble,” Thich Nhat Hanh writes. “Without mud, there can be no lotus.” The creative block was the mud for Creative Doing. The doubt will be the mud for my next book.

Thanks to Visakan Veerasamy for the reminder, and for the interview. Thanks to Robert Greene for the motto, “It’s all material.”