As I work with artists, innovators, and makers I find that creative disciplines are lacking both among this sector of society AND in the rest of society as well. Both creatives and non-creatives seem to think creative disciplines do not exist.

Which is unfortunate because making a habit – a discipline – of creativity is the one thing we all need most right now. Desperately.

Of course, non-creatives have a pushback for practicing the sort of iteration and “intelligence having fun” (Einstein) and “recovery of innocence on the far end of experience” (Hart) that marks the professional artist:

Art’s impractical and unprofitable, they say.

Indeed.

That’s why I devote my life to it.

I hear about the impracticality and unprofitability of art at least once a month and it’s almost always from someone who has been, is, or will soon be benefitting from something I or a member of one of my teams will be making them. They tend to be CEO or manager types or real estate types who forget how much of civil society (all of it) is predicated on someone who handmakes something. And they tend to want something from me or want to benefit from someone I know.

That kind of crap is what we are up against:

“You’re worthless. Your work is worthless. It’s a waste of time, money, and resources. Hey make this for me for free.”

No, no, no.

Civil society was built not by managers, consumers, or committee. It was built by artisans. Always. The word for “skill” and “craft” and “art” and “power” in Latin are all the word art. To quote a guest post by Dr. Cirilla

The liberal arts curriculum, according to its philosophy, attempts to unlock virtues of primary value in students by having them encounter foundational arts that will be beneficial to the challenge of learning more sophisticated disciplines. Those arts are organized as arts of communication, arts of organization, arts of application, and arts of production. The first three are emphasized in the university because classroom education is geared towards the life of the mind, although the active life ought to be developed as well.

Trivium – the three arts essential to language’s capacity for promoting thought and communication. These are grammar, logic, and rhetoric.

Grammar – This art uses and interprets language correctly (syntax, spelling, speech and essay writing, literary meaning)

Logic – This art uses languages in a valid way that coherently places sound conclusions after premises. It includes argumentation, syllogisms, fallacies, proper relationship of information to interpretation to produce knowledge.

Rhetoric – This art uses language in a persuasive way that moves the audience to find your message important and likely to be true. It involves argumentation, essay and speech writing, literary analysis and literary composition. The features of ethos, pathos, and logos (persuasions of personal character, emotional motivations, and arguments and information) are essential to the art.

Quadrivium – These are the arts of organization, and they include arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music.

Application – Application puts the arts of the trivium and quadrivium into contact with particular, historical institutions, and includes history, politics, economics, law, the sciences, business, and medicine.

Production – Arts of production, ideally, consider the best application of the trivium and quadrivium recommended by the other arts, and includes manufacturing, farming, painting, musical composition, and publishing works of fiction and non-fiction.

Civil society is built by people who first conceive a vision, articulate that vision in language, defend it rhetorically in argumentation (either formally through debate or informally through story and banter) with their community, who organize it into structure, and then who apply and produce works based upon it. Civil society exists because of men and women convicted of true ideas enough to beautifully make them real, often folks way ahead of their time.

It takes creative discipline to build a new or better society:

…disciplined thought manifested in disciplined, iterative making.

The reason Natives talked so often about thinking seven generations out is because efficiency can never consider tomorrow’s generation. Efficiency can never dig us out of our current hole for the same reason that “self help” is an oxymoron: self cannot help self, because if self could help self, self would never have gotten self into this problem in the first place. In the same way Efficiency — and its children Practicality and Profit — cannot get us out of the hole we shoveled ourselves into because more efficient shoveling cannot ever qualitatively change the nature of digging. To get out of our current hole, we need someone who can think generations forward into worlds full of ladders and ropes. If some giant came along and gave us the world’s biggest and most efficient, practical, and profitable shovel, we would be no closer to filling the hole than before. We would only dig ourselves deeper, faster.

Rather, we need the mind of a young boy. We need his magic beans.

The creativity discipline retains both the iteration and poetry of whatever it makes for society while adding the intelligence and experience that come after puberty. Some folks keep their artistic iteration and poetry, but never gain intelligence or experience. Some folks gain intelligence and experience, but never retain the poetry and iteration of childhood.

Very, very few of us become both rational and generative, both intelligent and fun, both experienced and as innocent as poetry: wise.

“Wisdom is the recovery of innocence on the far end of experience.”

— David Bentley Hart

It takes discipline to hang onto iteration and poetry if you’re worried about efficiency. But it’s the most important thing you can do. If you want to solve a political or systemic or familial problem of the past or the present, ask someone who’s worried about efficiency and practicality and profit.

But if you want to solve the problems of the future, you need a visionary.

You need an artist.

You need the creative disciplines.

And we have so many problems, it’s now more important than ever for everyone to regularly make generative work, to regularly touch the keyboard, the brush, the camera lens.

Lately I’ve been rereading The Celebration of Discipline which has this quote:

Emmet Fox writes, “As soon as you resist mentally any undesirable or unwanted circumstance, you thereby endow it with more power — power which it will use against you, and you will have depleted your own resources to that exact extent.” …Will power has no defense against the careless word, the unguarded moment. The will has the same deficiency as the law — it can deal only with externals.

…When the Disciplines degenerate into law, they are used to manipulate and control people…. Pride takes over because we come to believe we are the right kind of people. Fear takes over because we dread losing control.

If we are to progress in the spiritual walk so that the Disciplines are a blessing and not a curse, we must come to the place in our lives where we can lay down the everlasting burden of always needing to manage others.

…A farmer is helpless to grow grain; all he can do is provide the right conditions for the growing of grain. He cultivates the ground, he plants the seed, he waters the plants, and then the natural forces of the earth take over and up comes the grain… By themselves the Spiritual Disciplines can do nothing; they can only get us to the place where something can be done…. In this regard it would be proper to speak of “the path of disciplined grace.”

…Without laws, the Disciplines are primarily an internal work, and it is impossible to control an internal work.

…Our world is hungry for genuinely changed people. Leo Tolstoy observes, “Everybody thinks of changing humanity and nobody thinks of changing himself.” Let us be among those who believe that the inner transformation of our lives is a goal worthy of our best effort.

— from Celebration of Discipline

Creative disciplines work the same way: they must first and foremost change me if they’re to do any good in the world. A flower blooms. A clock chimes. A mind flowers. And an artist reforms himself first.

With that in mind, I’ve made a list of 12 creative disciplines that, if you’re ready, will change you. And if you change, the world is changed irrevocably.