Creative Stimulus - Note taking, finding the creative source and the reality of making things
Inside Rick Rubin’s notebooks, tuning into the creative source, and Anthony Bourdain on the reality of making things
Welcome to another Creative Stimulus! Happy to have you here. Whether you have been here for a while or you are one of the newer subscribers, I hope that your time here stimulates your creativity.
Lately, I’ve been focusing a lot on the raw mechanics of the creative process. I’ve been spending time with my pocket notebooks, keeping my hands busy, and pushing past the urge to overthink my drawings before the ink even hits the paper. It is a constant battle to keep the focus on the actual act of making things rather than worrying about the final outcome, but it is the only way to stay sane.
The pieces of stimulus I ran into this week speak directly to that mindset. They are reminders to stop creating for an audience, to tune out the noise, and to find satisfaction in the work itself.
1. The Secret Life of Notebooks
I watched a short clip of music producer Rick Rubin discussing creativity this week, and his opening thoughts on keeping notes hit home immediately.
Rubin says: “Most of my notes are not for anyone else’s use. I learn things with the idea of ‘this is what I want to know,’ and then often those things find their way into other projects just because they do.”
This is the exact reason to carry a pocket notebook with you everywhere. The moment you stop sketching or writing for an imaginary audience, or trying to please an algorithm, the creative pressure completely vanishes. You capture a thought, a phrase, or a quick ink drawing purely because it catches your attention in that exact moment. You aren’t executing a commercial strategy. You are just gathering raw fuel for your subconscious. Years down the line, those completely unrelated fragments have a strange way of colliding to form a brand new project.
2. Being an Antenna to the Source
The second takeaway from that same Rick Rubin clip completely reframes where our ideas actually come from. He challenges the standard, ego driven belief that creativity originates entirely inside our own skulls. Instead, he views the universe as a massive organizing principle called “Source.”
To him, every piece of art, design, or music is already out there, floating around. Our only real job as creators is to act as the antenna.
If you are paying attention, the clues are everywhere. The universe is either whispering or screaming them at you all day long through a passing conversation, a strange texture on a concrete wall, or a recurring coincidence. If your antenna is up and tuned in, the idea passes through you and into the physical world. If you switch off or get buried in digital noise, you miss the signal. It just passes on to someone else who is actually listening.
3. Anthony Bourdain finds satisfaction in the dirt
Since we are talking about the mechanics of the creative process, this video on Anthony Bourdain popped up in my feed, and it describes a feeling I think every maker understands.
Bourdain talks about his time as a chef and how cooking conditioned him to appreciate the temporary, fleeting nature of making things. He describes a very private moment that happens every night in a kitchen. It is that tiny golden second when a plate of food sits in the service window before the waiter takes it away to be eaten and ruined. You look at it, you know you did it well, and then it is gone.
He carried that exact mindset into his writing and his television shows. He was never interested in repeating what worked last week just to please a network or an audience. He just wanted to make things, focus on what interested him, and push the technical limits of the craft.
As creators, we often get caught up in the finish line. We worry about who will see the final product, how it will be received, or how much money it will make. But the real satisfaction is always in the dirt of the process. It is that private, quiet moment where you look at a freshly bound notebook, a finished zine, or a clean ink drawing and realize you made something real.
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