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If you’re a creative person, you weren’t meant to live a “normal” life—the world needs you for something different.

There’s more inside you.

A hidden genius.

A highly driven, high performing impassioned artist.

Someone who has the power to change lives in incredible and meaningful ways.

Maybe you know this. Maybe you can feel it tucked away in there…

But you can’t access it.

You can’t wake up that inner genius.

You’re not bursting with a passion for life, even though you know it’s in you.

And you can’t help but feel like you’re wasting your life.

If this is you, you’re not alone.

Many creatives are living someone else’s life.

Our fears, beliefs, and the structures containing us stifle our true value and expression.

We get sucked into ‘the standard life’—a life where we can’t use our gifts to the fullest extent.

So, we lose motivation. We lose that fire for life.

We procrastinate and distract ourselves, slowly curling up and withering away.

And although we have this never-ending nagging feeling that we could be more…

We can’t seem to do anything about it.

Or we don’t know how to do anything about it.

Well, you were meant for more.

And you can do something about it.

You have a higher purpose. A unique path to create. An impact to make.

Creative people advance and enrich the world.

Living ‘the standard life’ just isn’t enough.

And if you feel stuck in that, like you’re wasting your life or living someone else’s, that nagging feeling won’t go away until you make a change.

It’s time to start living.

To fully embody the artist of life. To solve bigger problems. To make the world more beautiful.

You are much more than you know.

So, today I want to give you 5 practical steps you can take to stop wasting your life as a creative person and start truly living.

Let’s do it.

#1: GET BRUTALLY HONEST—SHED YOUR FALSE REALITY.

The first step in your pursuit to a better, more creative and purposeful life is to shed the false layer(s) of reality around you.

There are two parts to this:

PART 1: Who you really are and what you truly want might not be right.

Throughout your life, you may have created an identity based largely on the ideas and beliefs of others.

You might want what everyone else wants you to want, instead of what you really want.

And you might not even know who you really are.

Beyond what people have made you into, there’s a real you.

Someone completely authentic and alive with a certain energy and purpose.

And that’s who we want to find.

So, time to drop the fake stuff.

Take some time to sit and uncover your true wants, interests, and feelings.

I highly recommend a writing exercise here.

Start with the things you used to value when you were younger—before everyone got their hooks into you. This could be anything:

• Creative hobbies or interests
• Acting, being, or expressing yourself in a certain way
• Anything.

Then list out the things you care about and focus on now and the way you are.

Then trace the path from then to now.

What’s changed? How and when did things change?

See if you can find moments along the way that changed your direction.

And ask how you feel about that.

Do you like the path you’re on now? Or no?

Does who you are now really feel like the real you? Or no?

It’s critical to be completely open, honest, and non-judgemental here.

If you secretly love a lame band that you could never admit you liked at school because it wasn’t cool, admit it now.

Own it.

Own your lameness. Your weirdness. Everything that excites the shit out of you.

If you secretly wish you were more playful, but life has hardened you up too much because of the shit you’ve been through, let it bubble up.

We want to bring back the real you.

The more open and honest with yourself you are here, the more clearly you’ll be able to ask yourself what you truly want and care about.

And who you truly are.

No more wanting what other people want just because they want it.

No more blindly believing things because other people believe them.

If you’re not living for and as you, you’re wasting your life.

Be completely real with yourself.

Expose yourself to yourself.

It might feel weird. But it’s important.

You may need to do this exercise multiple times.

Do what you’ve gotta do until you start to see things more clearly.

Until you start to understand how close or far you are from your true path—even if you don’t know exactly what that is yet.

This is an important first step in how to stop wasting your life.

PART 2: Full acceptance of reality.

The next part of shedding the fake stuff is fully accepting where you’re at.

You need to ground yourself in reality, so you have an accurate understanding of where to go from here.

Another writing exercise is helpful here.

Non-judgmentally admit your flaws that you haven’t been able to admit because it’s embarrassing, or because it hurts.

If you’re not really as far along as you thought in some ways, accept it.

You’ll ultimately get further this way.

But also accept the truth about your strengths.

Be brutally honest about the ways in which you’re much more capable than you let yourself believe.

Admit where you’re holding yourself back.

Where you’re burying your true value due to fears.

Let yourself rediscover reality.

Don’t hide from anything.

Again, it’ll be uncomfortable. That’s ok.

Because once you do this, you’ll be in a much better position to take the next steps.

You’ll be starting from a real place.

And you’ll be a big step closer to your true path.

Before you move on, make sure you’ve got some clear answers from your writing exercises.

On a separate page or document, write out some of the revelations you’ve had and what you think you might actually want vs what you’ve been made to believe you want.

If you want to stop wasting your life and start living it properly, you need to know:

• Who you really are
• Where you’re really at
• And what you really want.

#2: FIND YOUR GROOVE.

Your next step is to find your groove.

If you want to stop wasting your life as a creative person, you need to stop spending so much time working against yourself.

Here’s what I mean:

Think of a record and record player.

In order for the music to play and sound the way it should, the stylus needs to sit in the groove of the record.

If it doesn’t, you will instead hear all kinds of horrible, scratchy noises.

And if you don’t quickly fix it, it won’t be long before that record is ruined.

It’s the same with your life.

If you’re living out of alignment with your true strengths, what truly drives you, what means something to you…

You’ll feel off.

You’ll feel stifled.

You won’t have the fire to be the artist of your own life.

As a creative person, you have an insane power inside you.

But if you can’t find your groove, no one will ever hear how truly beautiful your song is.

So, how do you find it?

Optimise for drive.

Put simply, you want to remove as much stuff from your life that drains you and replace it with stuff that motivates you. 

Think about it like this:

The more stuff you have in your life that drains you, the less fire you’ll have for life, and the more you’ll be wasting it.

You won’t be able to take advantage of the awesome power of stacking things that motivate you because you’re always being pulled back down by the draining stuff.

^This is being totally ‘out of your groove’.

On the other side, the more stuff you have in your life that gets you driven—the more you stack those things up—the more fire you’ll have for life, and the less you’ll waste it.

As you stack up things in your life that you love and that motivate you, your fire rises.

You slide effortlessly into your groove and live as your highest creative self.

You become an unstoppable force of passion and productivity.

You don’t seem to ever run out of energy.

And your progress compounds.

Once you slide into your groove, you see life in a completely different light.

It feels expansive, limitless, incredibly exciting.

You will be able to create art and opportunities you never thought possible.

We need to get you here, right?

So, what can you do about it?

In an ideal world, you could click your fingers and completely change your situation.

You could make it so that everything in your life fuels your fire instead of starving it.

But we have responsibilities.

We have bills to pay.

People to take care of.

We can’t all just be quitting our jobs on the spot if they’re not perfect for us.

We can’t all just easily take the time to ‘go find our groove’.

So, as amazing as it would be to spend a day optimising your life for drive and then you’re good…

In reality, this will probably be a gradual process.

You’ll need to identify things in your life that don’t align with your true self and make incremental changes towards settling into your groove.

Here are some questions you can ask yourself to start doing that:

#1: Start with your main creative practise: What parts of that slow you down and drain you?

• Is it the marketing? If so, which parts?
• Is it that you’re always tired by the time you get a chance to work on it?
• Is there a physical barrier that slows you down? Maybe you don’t have a dedicated space to easily get into the zone often enough.
• Or maybe—for whatever reason—you’re not making the art you truly want to make.

Once you’ve identified the specific issues, start making small changes to your approach to increase your drive and move closer to your groove.

Maybe that means you look for alternative marketing methods.

Or that you make a little adjustment to your day around work to accommodate your creative practise.

Maybe you clean up your space and make it more accessible.

Or you decide to start making stuff you actually want to make.

Here’s another question you can ask:

#2: Where else is your energy being drained in life?

• What do you spend a lot of time on that’s demotivating or exhausting you?
• What habits are slowing you down or wearing you out?
• Which thoughts are draining you?
• Are you trying to force yourself to do a lot of things you don’t want to?

Again, aim for small changes to begin with.

Can you remove even just one draining activity?

Work on reframing one limiting thought?

Let go of one thing you’ve pressured yourself to do that you don’t really need to do?

Ok, next question:

#3: How is your environment holding you back?

• How are the people around affecting your fire for life?
• How is your physical space doing the same?
• What kind of media are you consuming and how is that impacting you?

Even subtle changes to these can move you closer to your groove.

Consider setting more boundaries you need to.

Maybe reorganise your physical space and set up visual cues to help you stay focused on the right stuff.

And maybe try a “digital diet” where you limit consumption of certain media.

This helps me so much.

And one more question you can ask:

#4: Where are you not leaning into your strengths?

• Are there areas in your life where you’re not fully utilising your skills?
• Are you holding back in your creative work out of fear of rejection?
• Is your work undervaluing you or not giving you the opportunity to excel?
• What do you know you’d be good at, that you’d love to do, but you’re not?

Consult the vision of your ideal life, what you truly want:

What changes that are in your control could get you closer to that?

The more little changes you make, the better life will slowly start to become.

Your day-to-day will start to feel like a life more aligned with who you really are.

And once you slide into your groove, you’ll experience this woosh of passion, productivity, and unstoppable drive.

If you want to stop wasting your life as a creative person, don’t settle for an unintentional design.

Take back control.

Do whatever you can to find your groove.

#3: LEARN HOW TO SELL YOURSELF

To get the most of out of your life as a creative person, you need to learn how to sell yourself.

I know this doesn’t come naturally to a lot of us.

But without knowing how to stand out and get your way in life, you’ll feel constantly overlooked, underappreciated, and like no one cares about the work you do.

You’ll work and work and work, hoping that someone will notice you and all the amazing things you can offer the world…

But it’ll never come.

People will continue to pay attention to the people who do know how to get their way.

And you’ll feel like the artist path—the path you most want to take in life—is a waste of time because you can’t make it work.

Decide to take responsibility for being seen.

It’s the only way you’ll make this work.

There are three big things you’ll need to work on here:

#1: Get used to asking for what you want.

You want to train yourself to regularly ask for things.

Never assume people in life will just know or give you what you want. Because they won’t.

It’ll probably be super uncomfortable in the beginning.

But you need to learn how to ask.

• If you want people to check out your art—ask.
• If you want to get an opportunity—ask.
• If you want to get help so you can level up in some way—ask for it.

This might be hard if you lack confidence or have limiting beliefs that make you feel unworthy of what you want.

But start small.

Ask for easy things and build up to bigger things.

Slowly get familiar with the act of asking and seeing that…

• Not only is it not the end of the world when people say no
• But also, people say yes more often than you expect

Don’t skip this. It’s incredibly important and will help you more than you know.

That’s the first part of learning to sell yourself.

The next is to find your edge.

#2: Find your edge.

As you work on stacking up things that get you driven and finding your groove, you’ll start to see how much more you’re capable of as a creative person.

This will build your confidence and illuminate—to you—why you’re worth paying attention to.

But you still need to learn how to communicate that to others.

Whether you’re trying to get your way online or in the real world, you need to know how to make your true value obvious to others.

A classic example of this is the musician who makes amazing music but needs to learn how to market it.

But it also could be making yourself the obvious choice for an opportunity.

Or being able to successfully pitch a project or idea.

Whatever it is, you need to show others why you or your work is different than all the other great people and work out there.

You need to find your differentiator, your edge.

So, how can you do this?

Here are 3 things you can do to start:

#1: Experiment relentlessly.

Whether it’s…

• Sharing your art online or IRL in a variety of ways
• Talking to more people
• Or practising a skill

…don’t rely on only thinking your way to an answer.

Action will give you potent information you can learn from.

The more you experiment, the more you’ll uncover potential advantages you have.

Not only will it help you actually improve at your ‘thing’…

But some things only appear after you take the step.

It’s like making a song.

You might have an idea of what you want to make, but it’s not until you actually dive into making it that you find the real gold.

You have to develop it, right?

Every time you take a step toward the fog, it clears a little.

So, experimenting relentlessly is non-negotiable.

#2: Use your creative capital.

The second thing you can do to find your edge is take advantage of your “creative capital.”

This means using the skills you’ve got already as a springboard for developing an edge in this noisy world.

We’re in an age where stacking multiple creative skills can be a huge advantage.

Even if you’re not amazing at any of them, combining them amplifies the value of all of them.

For example:

• A musician who knows how to make great videos will achieve more with their marketing than a musician who doesn’t.
• A painter who can also write will typically have more opportunities for growth than one who can’t.
• A designer who properly understands branding will stand out from designers who don’t.

Don’t assume any of your skills are useless.

And this includes skills that aren’t necessarily considered creative.

Stacking your unique combination of skills and experience can help you carve out a path that’s harder for others to replicate.

#3: Listen and reflect.

The third thing you can do to find your edge is to pay attention to the feedback you get in life from others.

Every day people are telling you things about yourself, if you know how to listen.

In your daily interactions with others, start looking for bits of info that show you how people feel about you.

• Do people often come to you with secrets? Maybe you feel very trustworthy.
• Are they always opening up to you? Maybe your presence helps them feel relaxed.
• Are they always asking you about certain things? Maybe they see you as knowledgeable or they appreciate the way you think.

You can find your superpower through this.

Things that might feel like second nature to you aren’t necessarily second nature to others.

If you notice others are always asking you about things that you think are incredibly obvious… maybe that’s a strength of yours.

Do not underestimate the power of listening.

You could also directly ask people what they think is great about you—if you’re willing to hear their honest and potentially uncomfortable answers.

And make sure to reflect on what you learn.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from working with creative people, it’s that many of us underestimate our value.

By putting aside time to reflect on your interactions, you can help yourself see that value more clearly.

So, three action steps for finding your edge:

• Experiment relentlessly in a way that makes sense for you.
• Write out a list of all your skills (creative and otherwise), then see how you could stack them up to help you get an advantage.
• After each day this week, reflect on the interactions you had with others and note anything that gives you info about yourself and your potential edge.

Ok, let’s move on.

#3: Learn marketing, sales, persuasion.

The third big thing you can do to help you sell yourself is to learn at least the fundamentals of marketing, sales, and persuasion.

These skills are essential for creatives nowadays, basically no matter what you do.

I know you might not like the idea of this.

But none of these have to be cold, unethical, or sleazy.

All through your life, through your days, you’re selling and marketing and persuading.

Whether it’s…

• Convincing someone to watch a TV show
• Making a good impression on your girlfriend’s parents
• Or trying to actually get a girlfriend

You’re trying to get a result you want.

These skills are a big part of the human experience.

We need to learn how to persuade to survive at least, and to flourish and elevate others at best.

Without these skills, you’ll struggle to feel like you have agency in your life.

You’ll be ignored, unheard, and misunderstood.

So, if you have an aversion to learning about his stuff, try reframing it.

Understand that these skills are not supposed to be used for…

• Taking advantage of others
• Being excessively selfish
• Or being manipulative.

Instead, see them as fundamental life skills that help yourself and others have a better life.

Because if you learn how to sell yourself and get what you want, you’re in a much better position to contribute more to the world.

To learn about marketing, sales, and persuasion as they relate to your creative life:

• Start by getting a broad understanding of each of them—read, watch, and listen to people who can teach you the fundamentals. Start with YouTube if you want.
• Once you understand those basics, start looking at how they apply to your specific field.

Take a course or talk to people who have experience in your field so you can see how those fundamentals translate.

For example, let’s say you’re a musician trying to market your music.

Maybe as you’re exploring the fundamentals of marketing or sales, you learn that people act on emotion first and then use logic to justify their decisions.

You can then talk to someone who has experience in music marketing, and they can help you understand how to tap into emotion in music content specifically.

• Then, as you continue to learn, read, watch, listen, and experiment, keep piecing things together until you have a clear idea of what you’re doing.

The idea of having to sell yourself might initially feel confronting.

Or it might feel uncomfortably selfish.

But the more you dive into this stuff, the more you realise how essential they are to your flourishing.

And also how they give you the ability to better help others.

Ok, let’s move on.

#4: CREATE NON-NEGOTIABLE TIME FOR YOUR ‘REAL LIFE’

If you want to stop wasting your life and start living in alignment with your highest self:

You need to prioritise your “real” life.

The only way to wind up with a life you love is to start living it.

I know you’re busy.

I know you’ve got responsibilities.

Struggles.

Disadvantages.

Blocks.

But don’t let it get away from you.

Don’t let yourself get to the end of each day and realise you’ve skipped working on your higher life.

Or that you’ve run out of energy.

Or don’t have the time.

Make it work.

Try to block out at least 20 minutes in your calendar—every day if you can—to work on your dream.

Even if it has to be less. Even if it starts with one minute a day.

Put it in your calendar and follow through.

Do whatever you can to step into that world as often as possible.

Because if you start doing that, even if it’s only for a couple of minutes a day, it will get you curious.

That curiosity will drive you to create a little more time to explore it.

And then that spark of curiosity will start to turn into the fire of passion.

The world will pull you in.

Pursuing your dreams is addictive.

And you’ll start to find more time for them, somehow.

Even if you can’t see how right now.

Even if you have 10 kids and 6 jobs and all kinds of responsibilities…

The passion will expand your world and help you find a way.

As you stack these small daily wins, you’ll start to find more space and energy for the dream.

That 5 minutes you put aside becomes 10.

Then 20.

Then an hour.

Then a day.

Keep building momentum.

Keep stacking wins.

Do your very best not to let it slip, even if some days you can only do it for a second.

And soon you won’t feel like you’re wasting your life.

You’ll be able to look back at the last 3 months and realise just how much progress you’ve made.

And the dream will start to look less like a dream and more like a reality.

Ok, one more thing.

#5: FIND AND FIX YOUR BLOCKS.

One of the single most important things you can do if you want to stop wasting your life is to identify and work on the hidden emotional stuff that’s holding you back.

If you struggle to…

• Take action
• Be consistent
• Believe in yourself
• Commit to things
• Or make progress in general

You might have some blocks.

And you might not be able to see them right now.

These blocks will make things harder than they “should” be.

They’ll drain your confidence and energy.

They’ll sneakily pull you back to square one over and over again without you noticing.

Maybe it’s through bad habits that are hard to detect.

Or thought patterns that always lead you to bad places.

Or maybe you find ways to put obstacles in your way so you “can’t” get to what you want.

Whatever they are for you, if you don’t address them, all the stuff we’ve talked about today will feel infinitely harder.

They might even feel impossible.

You’ll always have this feeling that—even though you’re genuinely trying your best—you’re stuck running on the spot…

…and maybe that ‘you’ll never actually make it’.

The only way you’ll unleash your full potential and truly stop wasting your life is if you become aware of these blocks and finally face them.

You catch them and work on them, repeatedly.

You catch them in the moment, as they’re actively f*cking up your life.

You catch them through reflection and put things in place to make sure you don’t let it f*ck up your life in future.

Just keep catching them and working on them.

Do it so much that it starts to feel unfamiliar to let them control you.

This is something so many of us don’t pay enough attention to, but it’s probably the biggest reason creative people feel like they waste their lives.

Do not ignore what’s going on under the surface for you.

Because it can, and probably will, ultimately be what makes or breaks you.

If you’d like to dive into this topic a little more and continue down the path of living a better life as a creative, I have the perfect video for you.

It’s right here, and you can—and should—watch it right now 😊

Hope this one helped! See you again soon.

—Alex