6 Creativity Lessons From Prince

Summer Camp Week 11: Let's go to Paisley Park for camp, and reinvigorate our creative jam.

Sep 05, 2024

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We’re on our penultimate week of Summer Camp, our adventure into re-imagining how we Rest, Relax, Recreate, Recuperate—and any other R we want to throw into the mix.

Hi hi hi Beautiful Friends and Summer Campers!

This week, we’ll turn to the creative genius of Prince for a few lessons to live by—putting our own spin on them, of course. Thanks to Beauty Hunter Tia Ho for surfacing this gem.

First off: No comparing! This is Prince we’re talking about, one of the most prolific artists of our time. What we can do, is take in these lessons and see how one or more can add a bit of magic and shape to our own creative/professional/personal endeavors.

Watch the following video, and let yourself be awed by Prince’s work ethic and his unbelievably fast turnover of songs. See if something here stirs you, in a “hey, yeah, I could try that” kind of way. And if not, sit back and enjoy a journey inside the artist’s process.

Ready? The video is just under 10 minutes. Take a break and watch this. Below, I’ve dropped in each of the six lessons for you.

6 lessons from Prince’s creative process

1.⁠ ⁠Work fast

Prince recorded a song a day for five years!

On the same note, Ray Bradbury advocated writing a short story a week as the best way to hone your craft. I did this for six weeks many years ago, and it did rather cast a spell on me, putting me in a low-pant state of euphoria as I moved from one fictive dream to another, not able to spend much time over-thinking and second-guessing. I fell hard for the practice of high-speed, high-adrenaline writing, which became my thesis class for my MFA.

See where a Work Fast practice could be applied to an area of your life/creative practice/work, and experiment with sprint cycles for a designated period of time.

2.⁠ ⁠⁠Becoming a finisher

It’s a great habit to build, and foundation to lay before you start making left turns away from projects. It’s made easier if you follow #1 ☝🏼
Also helped along by #3👇🏼

3.⁠ ⁠⁠Don’t be a perfectionist

Or put another way: don’t overthink things, get out of your head and create, keep it moving, and let yourself “fail” if that’s what it takes to stay in the game. There is no “failing”other than refusing to play when you know better

The habit of “perfectionism” doesn’t fall away just like that, but if you’re willing to stare it down, get curious about it, and create/write/produce/live through it at the same time, you might be surprised. “Perfectionism” might simply be a fancy way of saying something else. In my case: unfocused, uncommitted, buying the hiss of the mind’s unreliable narrator (“who do you think you are”), etc.

4.⁠ ⁠⁠Make art every day

FWIW: I see no difference between art and general creation. Well, there are differences but why not call it all ART? Let’s consider Life and Living as an art form: duking out a spreadsheet, painting a landscape, fixing a busted pipe, parenting, loving—all of it a form of art, an expression of living. In other words:

Engage in life every day
Use your “genius” daily, or as much as possible.
Do what you love
And if you are an artist, see what your version of “make art every day” looks like, and find a process you love.

5.⁠ ⁠⁠SLEEP

Sleep is how Prince avoided burnout. He was so serious about sleep, he had a bed installed in all his recording studios. And remember, this was PRINCE. His life was: write song, record song, publish song, go on tour, perform, go to studio, sleep here and there, repeat.

Sleep can be such a challenging topic (hell I was awake from 12:30 - 4 am last night!). But if you take one page from this lesson, let it be: give yourself rest, recovery, and quiet time. Even if it comes in snippets.

If you feel “guilty” taking a rest, remember that it’s so necessary to your art of living that a creative genius had a bed in all his “offices.”

6.⁠ ⁠⁠Vault mentality — be output driven.

I don’t know what to say about this one. Perhaps you, like me, have a vault of work, and it lives in a cloud or a hard drive, and there’s so much in there, (especially if you once wrote a lot of poetry), you only wish you had someone to organize it for you.

Maybe it’s another way of saying: sometimes we need a good audit of everything we’ve done, just to remind ourselves, to see our beautiful little footprints in the giant galaxy of things.

I do like this as a natural conclusion of earlier lessons, 1 - 4.

What do you think of the video and these six lessons? I loved the behind the scenes of this artist’s process, his relentlessness, and how, in order to really crank out the songs, he ended up working more with women, because they were able to meet him where he wanted to go!

Beauty Hunter