Already Creators

The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin
Penguin, January 17, 2023

What educator doesn’t wonder if they are creative enough in their classroom, especially in the age of AI? Into this shadowed moment of doubt, Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act: A Way of Being sheds a beam of light that truly comforts. His advice to readers in this unique collection of short chapters and poems is plentiful, much of it salient for both teachers and students. Rubin argues that without doing anything special, through our engagement, we are more than enough. “Through the ordinary state of being,” Rubin writes, “we’re already creators in the most profound way, creating our experience of reality and composing the world we perceive.” With our everyday gestures, “we are all living as artists,” creating new things all the time. Rubin therefore advises us to be discerning: “because there’s an endless amount of data available to us and we have a limited bandwidth to conserve, we might consider carefully curating the quality of what we allow in” – including what we read, what we think about, and those with whom we surround ourselves. There is likely no work more important today than helping the next generation to be sifters of the seemingly infinite source material in their world in order to consciously create and contribute.