Deya spent a year reading eight books on creativity because she thinks it is the one edge left when everyone has the same AI tools: your way of thinking and putting things together is the thing that sets you apart. What follows is not a book-by-book summary but the handful of ideas that kept recurring across every author.
Creativity is a skill you practice, not a trait you’re born with
The single biggest reframe, and the through-line of the whole year, is that creativity is learned rather than innate. Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way dismantles the idea that you either “are” or “aren’t” creative: you are inherently creative, the seed is already in you, and the muscle grows the more you show up, even on the days you don’t feel like it. Roger von Oech’s A Whack on the Side of the Head explains why so many adults feel uncreative in the first place: schooling trains us to hunt for the one correct answer, so we lose the childlike willingness to say a black dot on a whiteboard could be a ladybug, an eye, or the sun. His practical antidote is to keep going past the obvious first answer and deliberately look for the second, third, and fourth right answer, because “the first option tends to be the most obvious and least creative.” Deya’s own case study is that once she started seeing business itself as an art, product ideas, marketing, and new ways of talking to an audience all opened up, and she is genuinely surprised more entrepreneurs don’t treat creativity as a core skill.
Clearing the clutter so new ideas have room to arrive
Several books converge on the same mechanic: your mind is too full of accumulated noise for good ideas to land, so the work is to empty it. Cameron’s two flagship practices do exactly this. Morning pages are three handwritten pages (Deya types roughly one page instead) of unfiltered, unedited, stream-of-consciousness brain dump each day, typed as fast as possible with no backspacing so that things surface you didn’t consciously know you thought. The pattern she notices is a reliable three-stage descent: surface-level worries first, then the deeper questions she’s been avoiding, and only then the actual ideas, because the mind is finally clear enough to make space for them. This is not abstract for her: the phrase “cozy entrepreneurship,” her team values deck, and her pop-culture content line all first appeared in morning pages, and it costs only 5 to 10 minutes a day. Artist dates are the companion practice, one or two hours a week of solo quality time (matcha, a walk, the bookstore, thrifting) with no one else invited, on the logic that you can’t have a deep creative relationship with a self you never spend time with. David Lynch’s Catching the Big Fish frames the same idea through meditation: the small fish (small ideas) swim near the surface, but the big fish live deep, and a cluttered, noisy mind can’t reach them, so stillness is how you receive your best work.
Resistance and fear are signals, so lower the bar to start
Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art reframes fear as information rather than a stop sign: “Are you paralyzed with fear? That’s a good sign.” The fear in question is ego-based, not survival-based (fear of failure, rejection, looking stupid), and Pressfield’s rule is that the more important the work, the more resistance you’ll feel, so resistance roughly maps to impact. Resistance is sneaky and often disguises itself as “I’ll do it later, when I’m ready,” and everyone’s version sounds identical: not smart/young/old/experienced enough, imposter syndrome, they’re too far ahead. A useful tell that you actually care about something is envy: getting petty and jealous when you see others doing the thing is a sign you’re in denial about wanting it yourself. The point isn’t to delete resistance but to work alongside it, and Deya pairs two tactics for that. Pressfield’s own advice is to lower the bar so you actually begin (her business started on a strict 15 minutes a day of work while freelancing, and shipped a six-figure product four months later) and to build the routine before worrying about quality. Her personal add-on is gaslighting herself past the fear: with her first YouTube video she told herself they were only outlining it for fun, then only filming it for fun, then never publishing it, right up until she did.
Ship messy: clarity comes from action, not before it
For a self-described type-A person who wants the plan before she starts, the hardest lesson was that creativity is not a straight, measurable line but a messy loop of trying, failing, and learning, where every attempt is just data. Austin Kleon’s Keep Going is the source of the counterintuitive move: “clarity only comes from the action.” When her YouTube channel stalled despite following all the rules, the fix wasn’t waiting for a clear new strategy but running messy experiments (thumbnails, titles, ideation) until a direction emerged that felt right and performed better. This pairs with focusing on the process rather than the outcome, because you can control your effort, research, and craft but never the results, so the goal is to fall in love with the process and “make the most beautiful thing you can” each day. Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act reinforces that flaws are necessary: the artist is a vessel or antenna receiving ideas, not a dictator executing a perfect predefined plan, so the trial and error is the work, not a detour from it. Seth Godin’s The Practice closes the loop by insisting the work only counts once it’s out: “We don’t ship the work because we’re creative. We’re creative because we ship the work,” and you ship because it’s time, not because it’s perfect (her team’s rule of thumb is 80% complete, treating the rest as invisible over-optimization).
Create for yourself, not for the algorithm
Rubin’s other core idea is that creativity should start as a personal act: you’re creating to surprise yourself, not to serve the audience, and true fulfillment comes from executing your vision rather than from views, likes, and followers. His line that “success occurs in the privacy of the soul… the moment you decide to release the work before exposure to a single opinion” is Deya’s antidote to letting a video’s performance retroactively change her own opinion of work she was proud of. Success, on this view, is being brave enough to hit publish; everything after that is out of your control. For anyone earning a living from their work, she doesn’t take this as license to ignore the market but as a case for a sweet spot: what genuinely lights you up overlapped with what an audience wants, since what’s fun and interesting to you is usually fun and interesting to other broadly similar humans. Her proof is that her million-view video existed only because she wanted to talk about creativity for its own sake and didn’t care if no one watched.
Ideas are alive and time-sensitive, so let curiosity lead
Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic supplies the year’s most motivating image: an idea is its own entity looking for someone to bring it to life, and if you’re too stuck to act, it will leave and find someone else to birth it (the folklore version being Prince rushing to record a song before it defected to Michael Jackson). That reframing carries both honor and urgency, and it’s why “that was my idea years ago” so often precedes watching someone else ship it. Gilbert’s second contribution is that creativity should be driven by curiosity, not fear: instead of endlessly asking “is this good?”, chase what genuinely interests you rather than what you logically calculate will work. Deya keeps confirming this the hard way, since the strategically “correct” choices underperformed and the personally curious ones (again, the creativity video) worked, because genuine interest brings more love and, in her words, more magic. The practical instruction is simply to act fast, because creativity favors people who move quickly on their ideas.
Key takeaways
- Creativity is a trainable skill, not a fixed trait; showing up consistently builds the muscle.
- Empty the mind before expecting ideas: morning pages (fast, unedited, daily) and weekly solo artist dates clear space for the deeper “big fish” to surface.
- Push past the first, most obvious answer; deliberately generate a second, third, and fourth.
- Treat fear and resistance as signal, not stop sign; the more it resists, the more it probably matters.
- Beat resistance by lowering the bar (15 minutes a day, routine before quality) rather than waiting for readiness or clarity.
- Clarity comes from action, so ship messy: aim for ~80% done, favor process over outcome, and let the results be uncontrollable.
- Create first to surprise yourself; success is defined at the moment you hit publish, then aim for the overlap between what excites you and what the audience wants.
- Ideas are time-sensitive; let curiosity lead over fear and act fast before the idea moves on.
Sources
- Watch the video: youtube.com/watch?v=qITpEEGskck
- Full transcript: studied-creativity-for-365-days