How to Access Your Creativity | Rick Rubin

Huberman opens by framing Rick Rubin as "somewhat of an enigma": a producer "credited with being one of the most creative and prolific music producers of all time," whose "staggering" roster ranges from LL Cool J, Public Enemy and the Beastie Boys to Johnny Cash, Metallica and Adele. The stated puzzle is how "one individual is able to extract the best creative artistry from so many different people in so many different genres of music." The conversation's stated ambition is deliberately broader than music: it moves into writing, film, science and "essentially all domains in which new original thought, ideas, and production of anything becomes important," from abstract questions about "what is creativity and where does it stem from" to "concrete, everyday tool-based approaches."

The disciplinary hook is Huberman's confession that "of all the topics in science, and in particular in neuroscience, ... creativity is the most difficult one to capture." He concedes that papers exist on convergent versus divergent thinking and that a strict definition would say creativity involves "either rearranging existing elements or coming up with new elements," yet argues that neuroscientists and scientists generally "have never actually captured a way to even talk about creativity." Reading Rubin's book twice convinced him "there may not actually be an internal source of creativity ... that exists on its own."

I think language is insufficient to drill down on creativity. It's closer to magic than it is science.

Huberman imports an analogy from a Lex Fridman / Balaji Srinivasan episode: a rat or a human can be trained to expect reward on every even, odd or fifth lever press, "But a human and a rat can't do that for prime number presses." He uses this to argue that the schedules by which we live may not be optimal and that "there may not even be a language for this thing that we call accessing creativity" - that words relate to the process "a little bit like trying to use even numbers to try and access prime numbers." He doubts any language can say "Do this, then this, then this, then this, and you'll have something of creative value." Rubin's replies are terse agreement: "Yes," and then the magic-not-science line above.

Huberman names the book's cloud image his "anchor": ideas and creativity are "a little bit like a cloud" that at one moment "looks like one thing, or it has a certain shape and texture," a moment later "could be quite a bit different," and an hour later "it very well could be gone." He ties its force to a Joe Strummer interview in which Strummer, "off on different tangents," suddenly blurted out the advice quoted below, and says it led him to build "a whole system that I use to try and capture ideas."

if you have an idea, you have to write it down. And you may end up throwing it away, but if you wait, it will be gone.

Rubin's answer reframes ideas as dreams: "they don't necessarily make sense," on waking "you might remember part, but not the whole thing," writing them down brings them back as "a series of abstract images," and only "maybe someday in the future" will you understand them, "and maybe not." Art-making becomes "we're making things, and we're looking for a feeling in ourselves" - "excitement or enthusiasm," "interest," "curiosity," "a feeling of leaning forward" - and "following that energy in our body." His crucial qualification is that "it's not an intellectual process. It's a different thing," which is why it is "so elusive" and "hard even to talk about."

Huberman pushes the body claim: verbal thought is "near infinite" while bodily signals are coarse ("oh, my stomach hurts ... It feels warm. It feels cold"), and "most of us aren't trained in understanding how to interpret those signals." He asks whether Rubin feels a creative thread in the body. Rubin is unambiguous - "It's a feeling in my body" - and denies localization ("No. It's a feeling of, I would say it's like a surge of energy"). His earliest instance is "Probably hearing The Beatles when I was three or four years old," a detail Huberman repeats back in disbelief.

A clean disagreement surfaces over "there are no new ideas." Huberman says "I sort of disagree, because every once in a while I'll see or hear something that at least seems different enough." Rubin's counter-thesis: "I think it's a new combination of existing ideas presented in a new way," adding the hedge "I don't know," but observing that the things most interesting to him have "a series of familiar elements joined together in a way that it's creating something that I've never seen before." The disagreement is about whether novelty is genuine or recombinatory, and Rubin explicitly declines certainty.

Asked whether children have better access to the creative process, Rubin answers "Yes. Kids are 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." Adults, by contrast, "select from an endless number of data points" for survival ("that we don't die, and to procreate, and to feed ourselves"), then learn "what's right and what's wrong" and imitate admired makers - all of which "undermine the purity of the creative process."

Rubin does allow imitation as a tool: "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," and "when you make something, you're making it based on not knowing." He credits his own career to "starting making music without any experience, which was helpful because I didn't know what rules I was breaking" - "not intentional breaking of rules," just doing "what seemed right to me."

Huberman asks the practical question: how do you say "Keep going that way" when the artist may not "even recognize that they did it"? Rubin says "sometimes they don't," and refuses to rely on language. Rather than report thoughts about a playback, "It'd be better for us to wait till we were in a place where we could try things and see where it goes," offering "a suggestion of something that's actionable." "We try it, and then we have more data," and "it's always an experiment."

His reduction of taste is the two-dishes test: "if I gave you two dishes of food and asked you to taste them and tell me which one you like better. Usually, it's pretty straightforward," and "I think most creativity can be boiled down to that." He contrasts it with "I wonder how this is going to perform on certain social media platforms." The refinement is iterative - "which is the one I want to finish eating?" - then "I like this one better, but it needs a little salt," then "maybe I put too much salt," where "you know when you taste it."

To me, it's B.

The point of the quote is the artist's capacity to hold a private judgment when "everyone tells you A, A, A, A, A, A, A." Rubin calls rules "scaffolding to be chipped away as need be," notes that artists "impose our own rules to give something its shape" (a painting limited to green and red), and argues "Sometimes more choices is not better" because "if there's an infinite number of choices, anything can be anything." He extends this to the digital age: where a studio once could not record a guitar or orchestra it did not have, "Now you can just call any of those things up," yet "infinite choices don't necessarily lead to better compositions or better final works."

The chapter's central discipline is stated as "Understanding how you feel in the face of other voices without second-guessing yourself is probably the single most important thing to practice as an artist." Rubin is careful not to universalize: "It's just, I know for me," chosen "to demonstrate this is how I see it," and "If I'm undermining my taste for some commercial idea, it defeats the whole purpose of doing this."

Huberman anchors taste in a mentor, Ben, who "always said, 'The one thing I can't teach is taste, and the one predictor I have of the people who will never develop it are the ones who are perfectionists that filter their perfection through the feedback of others,'" and looked for "a little bit of a middle finger to feedback." Huberman maps this onto "a compulsion to do it their way or to believe in what they were doing" and on "being badly wrong in science," where "You can be wrong for the right reasons, but you can also be wrong for the wrong reasons."

His evidence is autobiographical: in the skateboard scene he and friends "were the first to start doing the baggy, sagging the clothes thing," were "teased endlessly one year in school," and after hip-hop arrived "the very same people who were making fun of us were all doing it." His conclusion: "most people don't actually know what they like," and, more sharply, "They like what they like because of the certainty of the people that they like." He reads this as "a kind of gravitational pull" toward someone genuinely absorbed in their own experience rather than attending to others.

Huberman separates "whoever can create the most convincing story" who "captures a good fraction of audiences" from "what the creative artist needs to do," which "is to actually depart from that." Rubin: "they're just two different things. Coming up with a story with the purpose of pleasing someone else is a skill set, but it's more of a commercial endeavor than an artistic endeavor." Huberman labels the former "tactical."

A useful limitation: taste is personal, not a verdict. When Huberman asks "Is there something wrong with me that The Beatles have never done it for me?", Rubin refuses the premise - "maybe you just weren't exposed at the right time in the right way. There's no right or wrong way," and "I can love The Beatles and you can not, and we're both right." The Ramones ("three chords," "kids from New York, that energy") versus The Beatles exchange ends on "different things for different people, right?" - "Absolutely."

Huberman brings in his lab's obsession: animals accomplishing survival goals "requires a narrow visual focus," in which "the playbook becomes more narrow. The rule set is more narrow," so a new creative idea seems to require "broadening vision is essential in some way, or broadening thinking." Rubin corrects the direction: "it could either be a broadening or a narrowing, but it's changing the aperture from the standard," done "to present something new that maybe you already knew but didn't know you knew it."

The mechanism, for Rubin, is recognition: a comedian's outrageous line works because "you know that it's right, just no one says it that way," and "it's always the truth in it that makes it funny" - "recognizing something that seems really obvious once you see it, but seems like nobody else sees it or no one else points it out." "And I feel like science is like that, too." Both men agree on the "I got it" flash after which "it just seems like, well, we knew that forever. No one knew it," and Rubin repeats "It's so obvious."

Rubin then names "accepting we don't know anything" as "another superpower of artists": "When we think we know things, that also limits our world ... We're mice in this little box. But in reality, who's to say that's the case?" He proposes that one could "take all of what we believe in science now and decide to throw all of that away and start from scratch, and we'd probably create a whole different one."