What I’ve Learned in 28 Years Working with Creativity

Productivity Cycles for Artists

Throughout my 28-year journey working with creativity, I have learned valuable lessons. There have been phases in which I felt immensely inspired, producing for up to 10 hours a day, not even wanting to stop for a meal. I became consumed with exploration and constantly striving to improve, only to realize that the final result still didn’t meet my expectations. Frustration would set in, followed by a phase of procrastination. I would enter a state where I knew I should be working, but daily I would self-sabotage, engaging in activities that didn’t align with my life’s purpose of creating art. As artists, we are often led by our emotions, which can take us to places where we don’t want to be.

During the first five years of my career, I was driven by emotions, and it worked incredibly well for me back in 1999. I became one of the most prominent DJs in my city, releasing original tracks that gained recognition nationally and playing on a renowned radio station every Sunday. However, with the advent of MP3 and the rise of piracy, the music industry underwent significant changes, and I started experiencing professional difficulties. That’s when I began seeking new ways to evolve.

The Emergence of Piracy in the Music Industry

After buying my first car with the money from a single song, the piracy market exploded, with Napster taking over. My income plummeted, prompting me to decide to pursue a college education. Administration seemed like the logical choice because I knew it could help me establish a nightclub, a record label, a festival, or any project involving electronic music. Embracing a more systematic and pragmatic perspective of the business world, I learned that strict processes are essential for success. I realized that I needed to adapt better and be more strategic in the face of the challenges posed by the new job market, dominated by MP3s and piracy, where anyone could become a DJ.

The Ineffectiveness of the Growth Mindset

I delved into dozens and dozens of books on productivity, decision-making, goal planning, discipline, and overcoming procrastination. As I reached my twentieth book on these topics, I noticed that although I had learned a lot, each book seemed to repeat the same information, albeit with slight variations. Essentially, all productivity books of the past decade echoed what had been previously said, with minor tweaks. The irony was that despite reading all these books, my productivity and creativity didn’t improve.

Undoubtedly, developing a growth mindset helped me get to where I am today. However, the techniques outlined in books and YouTube videos don’t provide a precise step-by-step guide to achieve our goals. They say, “Have a growth mindset, and your life will prosper.” But how do we develop that mindset? I began to realize that I needed to create a specific path to change the way my brain functions. I have many friends who work in large companies or the financial market, and I notice that they think differently from me. They are more practical, less perfectionistic, and more straightforward. On the other hand, my artist friends often get lost in their own dreams and ideals. I needed to develop a method that would enable artists like us to change the internal workings of our minds.

A Fresh Start with My Life’s Purpose

After opening a DJ agency and attempting various event projects, going through cycles of continuously striving for improvement without making progress, I realized that I needed to rediscover the path that had brought me so much success when I was only 17 years old. At that time, I was already 28, and with the help of my friend and partner Marcelo, I understood that I needed to focus on what I did best: making music, creating art. It wasn’t about working as an agent, making client calls, or filling out financial spreadsheets for events. I decided to concentrate on my life’s purpose. Ten years ago, we started our project called Bruce Leroys.

A New Approach to Working with Creativity

Bruce Leroys has been a tremendous success. We have reached the top 10 of Beatport’s sales charts and consistently feature among the top thousand highlighted artists on Beatstats. We collaborate with renowned names in the scene, such as Ricardo Villalobos, Art of Tones, and Felipe Gordon. We have released music on some of the world’s biggest labels, including Armada, Get Physical, and Kittball, and have performed at major festivals like Rock in Rio. Today, I can confidently say that I have learned to navigate my own mind and combine everything I’ve learned from books in a way that truly works.

THE 4 Steps for Working with Creativity

1. Pause. I never paid attention to the need for meditation. I always thought it was nonsense, and I believed I was too restless for it to work for me. When I started experiencing increasingly worse sleep problems, struggling to organize my thoughts during the day, noticing no improvement in decision-making, and experiencing a decline in memory, I began to realize that I needed to explore new paths. There are various types of pauses that we need to practice, which I explain in more detail in my guide Creativity Excellence.
2. Creative Planning: In all YouTube tutorials and self-help books, they emphasize the importance of planning before taking action. The problem is that when I tried to plan, I would spend three days writing the plan, and six months later, I would be doing everything completely differently. The issue isn’t the absence of a plan; the problem lies in HOW to follow the plan. That’s when I started structuring time-tracking apps for deliberate habit improvement. I can’t go into detail about everything in this post; otherwise, it would become too lengthy.
3. Execution in Small Time Blocks: I’ve always tried to use the Pomodoro technique, but I also discovered that for those working with creativity, just 25 minutes is not enough to develop our thoughts. We need to create a checklist of the step-by-step tasks required for our project and then divide these processes into two-hour blocks. I developed a method called 2-Balance that explains in detail how creatives need to organize themselves to stay on track (in my Productivity Rebellion guide, I teach how to plan and organize your tasks for effective execution).
4. Analyze Mistakes and Correct the Process: You won’t get this checklist right on the first try. You’ll find that what you thought would take one hour ended up consuming an entire day. What you wrote down as a task actually needed to be done in a different order, or there were unnecessary steps. Here, you’ll practice working with processes, but you’ll continue to improve over time. It’s important to understand that these four steps are like training for elite athletes. You need to achieve increasingly shorter time targets.