I Shelved This Book for Ten Years. Here's Why I Finally Finished It.

What if the project you abandoned years ago wasn’t dead? What if it was just waiting for the right moment to come back? I wrote the first version of We Are All Creative almost ten years ago. I was running a blog and podcast for artists and creatives at the time. Then life happened, the way it does, and the manuscript sat untouched on my hard drive for most of a decade. This year, I finally brought it back. My friend Stephanie Graham, host of the noseyAF podcast, sat down with me to talk through the whole thing. Not just the book. The decision to leave corporate tech after seventeen years. The move to Costa Rica. What creativity actually means once you stop treating it like something only artists get to claim. If you pre-order before October 29th, you’ll get the Reflection Companion and an invite to a future Creativity Party, both exclusive to people who get in early. Highlights Note: Some quotes below have been lightly edited for clarity and readability. Creativity was never just about making art. I think a lot of people hear the word “creative” and picture painting, writing, photography. Something you’re either born with or you’re not. I don’t think that’s right. “Creativity is also used in all sorts of aspects of life. Like in government, I’m sure there’s creativity happening all the time in different ways in architecture and science. In any specific place you can think, could use creativity. I think there’s the possibility for it to exist.” If you’ve ever solved a problem at work, found a new way to organize your day, or adapted when your life changed without asking your permission first, you’ve already practiced creativity. You just didn’t call it that. I didn’t need a new idea. I needed the old one back. For a while, I thought my creative project was supposed to be my memoir. I was working on it inside a community program I’m part of, run by my friend Amelia Hruby. A few months in, I realized the memoir was going to take way longer than the program allowed. “I actually decided to just shift what I was doing completely to the book because it was quicker than finishing a memoir, which I don’t think I was gonna be able to do again.” I already had a finished draft. It just needed me to come back to it. So instead of starting from nothing, I asked a smaller question. What needs to change about the thing I already built? That turned out to be a lot more useful than staring at a blank page. I had to go back and fix who I used to admire. One of the harder parts of revisiting a decade-old project is finding out some of your examples didn’t age well. J.K. Rowling, Kanye West, and a few other people I respected at the time. People whose personal stances I don’t stand behind anymore. “Over time, many of your idols will show not to be your idols. So I went through and changed all the ones that I thought, in my personal opinion, needed to change.” Going back through your own work and asking what no longer fits is not a fun task. But if the book is supposed to reflect what I believe, it had to change and reflect who I am right now. The book doesn’t tell you where to start. On purpose. We Are All Creative is 52 weeks worth of quotes with a story and a piece of original art. I didn’t write it to be read start to finish, in order, like a novel. “I don’t think there’s necessarily a specific order that you need to go through. So whatever resonates with you in this stage in your life, does it make sense to look at this? And if it doesn’t, you can ignore it.” Open to any week. See what meets you where you are. That felt more honest than pretending there’s one correct path through fifty-two different lessons. Questioner, transitioner, builder. I’m still figuring out which one I am. On the book’s website, I built out three creative seasons people tend to move through, each one carrying its own question. The Questioner asks, “Is this all there is?” The Transitioner asks, “How do I live in the gap?” The Builder asks, “Can I do it without burning out?” People ask me which one is hardest to admit you’re in. For instance, I’m still in the transitioner stage. “It’s hard to make change, right? Like in my particular instance, it was extremely difficult in hindsight. You don’t believe you can do it until you start to do it.” A year and a half into Costa Rica, I’m still learning Spanish, still figuring out how to build community from scratch. I put myself here. Being in a transition phase isn’t failure. It’s just where I am. I’ve stopped pretending otherwise. Moving to Costa Rica was never one decision. It was a hundred small ones. My wife and I decided to leave Florida on Valentine’s Day last year. Costa Rica had always been a someday-retirement idea. The 2024 election is what turned someday into now. “We made a list of all the stuff that we wanted to do or needed to do in order to make the move. And there were a lot of things. I mean it was just like a whirlwind. We have no idea how we did it, but it just happened because we had the intention.” Residency paperwork had a strict six-month window. We drove four hours to the state capital twice after a document got lost in the mail. We got an offer on our house on my birthday, standing in line at Space Mountain, during our farewell trip to Disney. None of it went the way I pictured it. But all of it was necessary to get us here. I used to think failure meant something was over. Now I think it’s just information. I used to believe that if a podcast or a project ended, it meant I’d failed at it. I don’t believe that anymore. “If it’s the wrong time. It’s the wrong space. I didn’t find the right people. There’s all these circumstances that are completely out of our control. Everything that we do, regardless of if it’s a success or failure, can teach us and help us grow into what we want to be.” This book is proof of that shift. It wasn’t a failure sitting on my hard drive for ten years. It was waiting for the right timing, the right tools, and a version of me who was finally ready to finish it. I built a companion piece instead of cramming more into the book. I didn’t want someone to read a chapter, feel inspired for five minutes, and then move on with their day. I wanted something that actually pushed them to act. So I built the Reflection Companion. A question, an action, and space for notes for every single week. “I didn’t want to insert it into the book itself because I would need to do a bunch of more editing. I thought this is better as a side piece. It’s really an optional sort of thing.” Anyone who pre-orders before October 29th gets it included, along with an invite to a future Creativity Party. Closing Reflection This book sat quiet for ten years before I finally picked it back up, rebuilt it, moved countries, and got honest about which parts of it no longer matched who I’d become. None of that happened on a clean timeline. It happened because I said the intention out loud, broke it into pieces, and let people hold me to it. “If we don’t know what we’re looking for, we’re never going to find it.” That’s the first quote in the book. It’s the one I keep coming back to. I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for when I started revisiting this project. I just knew I wasn’t done with it yet. You don’t have a creativity problem. You have a permission problem. That’s the whole book, really, if I had to say it in one sentence. Pre-order We Are All Creative for $20, and you’ll get it delivered launch day, October 29th, along with the Reflection Companion and an invite to a future Creativity Party. You can also read a free sample before you decide. I’m hosting a free virtual launch party on October 29th at 3pm ET (1pm Costa Rica), live on Zoom. Registration is open now. Come celebrate, bring whatever you’re stuck on, and we’ll untangle it together. If you’re a creative questioner, transitioner, or builder, leave a comment and tell us about what you’re working on.