Each Friday, I send advice, ideas, stories and tips to 25K creative people like you. Author of 13 best-selling books on creativity. Founder of Sketchbook Skool w 50k+ students
🥰 Kinda like being in love
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When people undergo what, for lack of a less awkward term, I’ll call a “creative reawakening,” they often experience a surge of synchronicity. Serendipity abounds. Opportunities bounce into their laps. Like-minded people just show up. Connections are forged, sparks fly, light blink on. Life gets spicy. Some attribute this to a greater power: “God loves those who create.” Maybe so. I have a more down-to-earth hypothesis. When you allow yourself to be creative, to make things, to smell roses, see colors, hear symphonies, dance fandangos — your antennas rise. You start to scan through new stations, to retune. Instead of trudging in your rut, you look up and see stars and bluebirds. It’s kinda like being in love. In love with life. With the world. With yourself. The world is always full of opportunity, of beauty, of possibilities, of stimulus, and pots of gold. When you finally start to look around, to see clearly, to live in the Now and dump your baggage, you can’t help but notice. When you notice the world, you notice it notices you. You open up to people who you would normally ignore, and they open up to you, revealing how much they are like you and how much they like you too. You discover new pages of the menu. You hear lyrics to songs you used to fast forward. You read poems carved in monuments. You open your fortune cookies. Small wonder the world suddenly seems to be flowing your way. It always did — but perhaps you were too busy, head down, paddling upstream to notice. Your pal, Danny |
Danny Gregory: I help you make art again
Each Friday, I send advice, ideas, stories and tips to 25K creative people like you. Author of 13 best-selling books on creativity. Founder of Sketchbook Skool w 50k+ students
Hi Reader: I have really enjoyed sharing my sketchbooks with you every month. Every time I take a rumpled sketchbook off the shelf, it’s like meeting up with an old friend. Once again, I have experienced how recording words and pictures in a sketchbook journal creates a time capsule that can take me back whenever I turn the page. The moment floods back to me—not just the images, but the sounds, smells, flavors, and feelings, too, still fresh and zesty. I read recently that three weeks after...
While my wife was still unconscious from the anesthetic, I pulled out my sketchbook and drew her in her hospital bed. I noticed every detail of her face, her lips, the way her nose curved, and a twist of her hair over her ear. My anxiety over her recovery washed away in a wave of love for this beautiful woman lying so still. A month later. The CEO was monopolizing the call, faceless. Resentful and bored, I inched open my sketchbook and began to draw the speaker box on the conference table...
One sketchbook — or many? NOTE TO SUBSCRIBERS: After 152 issues, Studio Notebook will cease publication at the end of this year. Danny's Essays, my free newsletter, will continue each week. You will no longer be charged for your subscription, but I shall continue to send out Studio Notebooks till the end of December. I will fill you in further on this decision in the remaining issues. Thank you so much for being a paid subscriber — your support has meant so much to me! Hi Reader: I used to be...