Rubin, Rogan, Allen, and Hemingway.

About a year ago, Rick Rubin was making his rounds on all the major podcasts.

The producer behind your favorite artists—Johnny Cash, Kanye West, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Black Sabbath, Public Enemy—has a view on the creative spirit worth listening to.

When you do a podcast tour, it’s usually to promote something. For him, it was his new book: The Creative Act: A Way of Being. Judging by the reviews, it looks like it’s been well received and, perhaps, worth adding to the laundry list of books I’ve been meaning to get to.

The reason for these words? One of his appearances resurfaced in my mind. On The Joe Rogan Experience, Rubin dives into how to produce creative work, the best way to become an artist, and even standup comedy—a podcast every creative should listen to.

The most invaluable part of the three-hour talk comes at the 30-minute mark.

On the subject of whether to imitate other artists for their blueprint on getting famous or to follow your own path, never knowing if you’re on the path toward fame, Rubin states:

“Everything I do is just personal taste, and what the book’s about is really for people to trust—artists to trust in themselves. Make something that speaks to them, and hopefully, someone else will like it. But you can't second-guess your own taste for what someone else is gonna like—it won’t be good. We're not smart enough to know what someone else is going to like, you know?

To make something like, ‘Well, I don't really like it, but I think this group of people will like it’—it's a bad way to play the game of music or art. You have to do what’s personal to you, take it as far as you can go, really push the boundaries, and people will resonate with it if they’re supposed to resonate with it. But you can't get there the other way—you know, the other way is a dead end.”

Rogan continues the thought, touching on imitation and fame; Rubin adds his last point:

“What makes it great is the personal—its imperfections, its quirkiness. That's what makes it great. You know, the way you see the world is different from how everyone else sees it. That’s why you're an artist—that's your purpose in sharing your work with the world.”

I find his take wise, refreshing and true.

It was often—especially years ago, when I first started writing, and now with photography—that I created with the thought: Will they like this? What will they think? Little did I know, this was like trying to push a car uphill while it’s in reverse.

What amazes me is the timeliness—or coincidence—of when and where themes like creating for the personal arise, even in art forms completely unrelated to one another.

Aaand action!

In the film Midnight in Paris, written and directed by Woody Allen, the lead character, time traveling to the past from 2010, walks into a bar with F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. As they leave for another party, they introduce him to a friend of theirs, drinking red wine, alone at a table—Ernest Hemingway.

During this small scene, the lead—ecstatic to be speaking to his idol—voices his internal doubt: Is my novel any good? Will others like it? Is it going in the direction that it should be?

Hemingway says:

“No subject is terrible if the story is true, the prose is clean and honest, and it affirms courage and grace under pressure.”

Minus the latter three-quarters of that Hemingway-esque sentence, the beginning caught my ears.

“No subject is terrible if the story is true…”

Not true in the autobiographical or historical sense, but true in the personal sense—true to the author, to his view of the world.

Exactly as Rubin was saying: create what’s personal and true to you.

For it’s the personal—in all its imperfections—that makes it art.

Or so I think,

George