I’m at the in the process of creating something and I feel like author Don Miller’s most recent posts on creators speak directly to what I’ve been thinking about this year, most notably that “A Creator Must Believe He Has the Authority to Create.”

A Creator Doesn’t Just Talk About Their Work, They Work

A guy I met once ran into Norman Mailer at an airport and asked him what he was working on. Mailer politely declined to answer the question, saying that when he talks about a book too much, it steals his motivation to write it.

A Creator Must Believe He Has the Authority to Create

Made in the image of God, able to speak something into nothing, able to create solutions to the worlds problems, we stammer about in disbelief, waiting for somebody else to take responsibility for our lives and for the lives we have been given to care for. We are all creators, but too many reject the God-given right to create and instead become consumers, hiding in the safety of some government, some corporation, some self-help philosophy to take care of us. And so why should we be surprised when we turn around and somebody is sitting in our chair, dictating how our marriage will go, how our career will go, whether or not we can have peace with our neighbors? We shouldn’t be surprised. We handed them our authority.

A Creator is Ready When Luck Strikes

Every successful creator has friends who think he or she is lucky. They met that one curator at a coffee shop, or Oprah’s housekeeper accidentally left that book behind in the kitchen. And the truth is their friends are right. They did get lucky. Everybody gets lucky. Luck is like the weather, it comes and goes, it makes crazy things happen randomly. But unless you actually spend the hours painting those paintings, meeting the curator amounts to nothing. And unless you put in the year to write the book, it can’t get left behind on Oprah’s counter.