💫 Unblock Your Creativity: 10 Lessons from Rick Rubin (and How I Use Them)

How principles from "Creative Act" by Rick Rubin shift my work and life.

I used to have clear answers to most questions I asked myself:

• What do I want to be when I grow up?

• How do I identify myself professionally?

• Where am I from?

• Who am I?…

Clarity, structure, and predictability — these were my best friends. But something started changing in the last few years.

I get confused to say, “I’m from Russia,” as I have lived in Amsterdam for the last 3.5 years. I don’t have the straightforward introduction as “Head of Growth Design at Miro” I used to have. So, who am I? Many things, and still discovering.

As I stepped into my pathless path, I had these types of “blue Mondays” when I woke up with the anxiety of not having this crystal clarity anymore, and dancing with uncertainty is not always fun.

This process takes time, and in Jungian analytical psychology, it’s called individuation:

The aim of individuation, equated with the extension of consciousness and the development of personality, is to divest the self of its false wrappings of the persona, the mask the personality uses to confront the world, and the suggestive power of numinous unconscious contents. Source →

Individuation is the lifelong psychological process of differentiating the self from the collective norms — opening your mind for that can be quite challenging.

In this journey, the persona — the socially adapted mask or role one plays in society — must be recognized and stripped away to uncover deeper layers of the psyche. The Self is the totality of the psyche, uniting both conscious and unconscious parts, the true center of personality.

The goal of individuation is wholeness, not perfection — becoming who one truly is, rather than who one thinks you should be.

• I launched the new course because of the inner calling to share accumulated knowledge with more people;

• I started the podcast season “In the Company of Women” to bring a fresh meaning to professional content where I started losing my sense of purpose.

• I keep building Growthmates, changing and evolving my positioning because my definition of value and meaning keeps changing.

So, now I’m on this search that led me to my sleeping creative nature.

Getting back to the question, “What do I want to be when I grow up?” — I clearly remember how I was passionate about creating things, artwork, and stories and dreaming about incorporating them into my profession as an interior designer. Beauty was my passion, but in the business world, I saw more dashboards with metrics and docs with KPIs than anything else.

My ongoing creative discovery led me to many sources, but today I want to focus on one that keeps unfolding something very important deep inside — “Creative Act: A Way of Being” by Rich Rubin.

Even if you have already read this book, I invite you to rediscover it.

Here are my 10 highlights from the book 📕 (and how I use them in work and life).