Essentials: How to Access Your Creativity | Rick Rubin

**Andrew D. Huberman** (0:00)
Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health and performance.
I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. And now for my discussion with Rick Rubin. Great to have you here today, Rick.

**Rick Rubin** (0:21)
Thank you for having me, it's a pleasure.

**Andrew D. Huberman** (0:23)
Oh, all the topics in science and in particular in neuroscience, I confess that creativity is the most difficult one to capture. As I went into your book, the example that you give, this idea that ideas and creativity are a little bit like a cloud. If you look at it at one moment, you might think that it looks like one thing. But then you look at it a moment later, it could be quite a bit different. And if you look at it an hour later, it very well could be gone. How did that come to you? And how does it serve you in trying to, I don't want to say extract, in trying to access creativity?

**Rick Rubin** (0:57)
I think the best way to think about it is like a dream. It's like if you think about your dreams, they don't necessarily make sense.
When you wake up, you might remember part, but not the whole thing. Then if you start writing them down, they'll come back. And they may not make sense to you. Maybe someday in the future, you'll be able to look back and understand what they mean, and maybe not. And that's sort of how the art-making process works. It's like we're making things, and we're looking for feeling in ourselves. It could be a feeling of excitement or enthusiasm, a feeling of interest, a feeling of curiosity. I want to know more. It's not an intellectual process. It's a different thing. I think language is insufficient to drill down on creativity.
It's closer to magic than it is science.

**Andrew D. Huberman** (1:53)
Do you think kids are more, are just by definition and by design, more creative than adults?

**Rick Rubin** (1:57)
Yes. Kids are, they're open and they have no baggage. They don't have any belief system. They don't know how things are supposed to work. They just see what is. Most of us select from an endless number of data points available to us to, well, as a species, to make sure that we don't die and to procreate and to feed ourselves are probably the primary functions first. And then we learn things about what's right and what's wrong. And we learn things about how to do certain things.
Or we're inspired by someone who makes something we love and we want to do it the way they do it.
And all of those things undermine the purity of the creative process. They can be tools to build your skill set to be able to do it yourself. Like if you're a singer, you might imitate a singer you really like for a while to get good at it and then eventually come to find your own voice. But if you're three years old or five years old and you try singing, you're not singing like anyone else. You're singing with your own voice. When you make something, you're making it based on not knowing. I think I had the advantage early in my career of starting making music without any experience, which was helpful because I didn't know what rules I was breaking. I was doing things that other people wouldn't do.

**Andrew D. Huberman** (3:29)
When something feels creatively right, let's say in the studio or maybe even you're listening to something that somebody sent you. Again, this could be about writing or comedy, or science, or podcasting, for that matter. How do you say, keep going that way, when they might not even recognize that they did it? I'm guessing a lot of times they don't.

**Rick Rubin** (3:50)
I'll try to be in a setting where as we're talking about it, we can engage with it in that moment. Let's say I was producing your new record and you played me something and I had some thoughts about it.
It wouldn't be so helpful for me to tell you what those were. It'd be better for us to wait till we were in a place where we could try things and see where it goes. I wouldn't rely on language to do it. It would be more of making a suggestion of something that's actionable. We try it and then we have more data. It's that simple. So much of when we go to school, it's to get us to follow the rules.