The One Sentence From Atomic Habits That Helped Validate My Creative Process

Here’s some creative inspiration for the week

I won’t make you wait to meet the sentence, here it is in all its simple glory — “We need to make our habits attractive because it is the expectation of a rewarding experience that motivates us to act in the first place.”

There is so much to unpack here, but for starters sit with this — “…it is the expectation of a rewarding experience…” James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, underscores throughout his book that our motivation isn’t even limited to actually getting the reward, it’s more about the expectation of the reward. It’s building off the age old saying of the process being more important than the destination.

For a long time, I’ve approached my own creative process with a similar mission in mind. I try my best to create a healthy, pleasurable container for it to exist in so that I keep wanting to come back to it. This doesn’t always prove easy, especially on harder days, which is why I found a lot of comfort in Clear’s sentence. Because even though I’m intentional about making “arriving” to my work pleasurable, once I’m there, I’m still striving for fulfillment to look like a completed essay, a finished book, or a fully edited video.