30 Days of Creativity: A Free Guide to Building Creative Practice
At the start of 2022, I set myself a creative constraint: one idea about creativity, every day, for a month. It failed after six days. This is what came from it
30 Days of Creativity: A Free Guide to Building Creative Practice
Creativity doesn't arrive on demand. It shows up when you do.
How this guide began
At the start of January 2022, I set myself a small creative constraint: publish one short idea about creativity every day for a month, as a pop-up newsletter on LinkedIn.
It failed on day six.
The platform refused to post. Drafts vanished. Some subscribers could not turn the notifications off. It was a technical disaster — and an early, very literal demonstration of the creative lesson at the heart of the guide: failure is always a possibility. So too is the pivot.
Instead of thirty days of LinkedIn posts, this became a free eBook. Then it was expanded, updated, and published as a proper guide. It took four months from idea to reality and ran to over 14,000 words — not far off a decent-sized book.
The ideas inside it came to me on a train, rattled into a Black and Red notebook on the way back from London. Thirty reflections on creativity as lived experience — at work, at home, on paper, on foot, and over time.
What the guide is
30 Days of Creativity is a short, practical guide made up of thirty reflections on the practice of creativity — how it starts, where it stalls, and what keeps it moving. Each idea stands alone. Together they make a quiet case for creativity as something built deliberately rather than waited for.
There are no prompts to "be more creative." No hacks. No heroic myths.
Just observations, practices, and honest field notes from someone who has been writing, teaching, speaking, and making things for twenty years — and who still finds it hard.
The guide covers: creativity as attention rather than output; why movement matters for thinking; the role of routine, habit, and constraint; noticing as a trainable skill; the difference between shipping and creating; building a body of work over time; and why a small audience is often better than a large one when the goal is genuine creativity rather than performance.
Read it free
The guide is free and always will be. Two formats:
From the Cultivated library — take this further
From Idea to Sustainable Work
Guide · PDF download
The thirty ideas in this guide are about the conditions for creativity. This guide is about what to do with what emerges — how to move from creative practice to a body of work that compounds and sustains over time.
£5.99
Get the guide →The Creativity of Constraints
Interactive workshop · Co-facilitated
This guide began as a creative constraint — one idea a day for thirty days. The Creativity of Constraints workshop, co-led with a Sunday Times bestselling novelist, lets you experience what constraints actually do to creative thinking. In person. Through doing.
2–3 hour interactive session
Explore the workshop →
