Like millions of other people, I watched Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton on Disney+ when it premiered. It was the first time I’d seen the play or listened to the music in its entirety. I know, what planet have I been living on for the last five years!
The show was phenomenal. As I watched it, I was captivated by its inventiveness and spellbinding creativity.
After watching it, I started thinking, “How could Lin-Manuel Miranda be that creative to craft this amazing masterpiece? What is his creative process and how can us mere mortals apply some of his ideas, and other creatives’ ideas, to our work?”
And judging by my Twitter feed, it’s clear that Hamilton brought many grown men and women to tears—me too. It was that emotional.
But the emotion in the words, the music and the performances doesn’t come from someone working under the promise of a paycheck.
Here are three lessons on how to be more creative that I gleaned from Lin-Manuel Miranda and another great artist, Neil Diamond.
1. Fall in love. The desire for money can drive certain behaviors, but creativity is not one of them. In this 2015 quote from The Atlantic, Miranda shared where the emotional genesis of Hamilton came from.
Here’s the thing about artists—their job is to fall in love for a living. Like, you could commission me to go write a historical fiction, a historical musical. If I’m not in love with it and I don’t know how to get myself into the characters, you’re going to be bored to tears by whatever the fuck I write. You can’t assign falling in love, because it takes falling in love to write a musical. I’ve been writing this thing for seven years. That’s longer than pretty much every relationship I’ve ever been in, except for my wife. And that’s what it takes—waking up and knowing you’ve still got challenges within it, and how are you going to crack this problem, and how are you going to compress this section? You’ve got to be able to go into that work lovingly, willingly.
Do you wake up each morning in love with the work you do?
Based on my conversations with advisors over the past 30 years, I’d say many of you don’t.
I find it ironic that the value proposition of many of the coaching programs out there is they will help you “work less and make more money.” They’re focused on helping you put systems and people in place so the business will run mostly without you while you work an average of just two or three days a week.
The idea in those programs is, “We’ll help you work less in your business so you can spend more time doing what you really want to do outside of your business.”
Hmm. My question is, why not find a way to fall in love all over again with being an advisor?
That’s what Miranda is saying. You’ve got to wake up in love every morning with the work you do.
Neil Diamond said something similar as he described making his 2014 album, “Melody Road.”