The Creative Life — with Jim Kroft

While away in the summer, I finally allowed a few areas in my life to catch up. Watching the sun go down one evening on Skye, I asked myself a simple question: How do I feel every day?

Of course, like everyone, I swing depending on what’s happening. But what I was really looking for was a pattern.

I realised the following:

• I rarely get quite enough sleep.• I don’t eat breakfast.• Each morning I’m pumped for life.• In the afternoons, I slump — and things I feel excited about take a darker turn.• Despite being a lifelong runner, exercise had gone onto the back burner.

I decided to radically rip up my routine and start from the ground up.

Today’s newsletter is about the changes we don’t want to make but know would help us.

Love, Jim

1. Back Story

I spent my 20’s living in anarchy, gigging out of vans, feeling lost in London, playing 4 nights a week in Berlin, and taking whatever was being taken around me

Despite choosing an insecure way of life, I craved order.

Even in the most extreme circumstances, I’d be looking for any way to find some type of control to offset how wildly my life would swing from one day to the next.

Music was always my crutch, even if pursuing it was the very thing that thrust me into the dark.

I realised early that I wrote my best work in the morning and for all the years I was a full-time musician, songwriting came first.

First thing in the morning, and too often before people and relationships.

It was both rescuer and executioner — but that is for another post.

My principal lesson was that I burned brightest when I woke up, and, even though my existence was nightbound and vampiric, that was when I wrote.

Creativity.First.Always.

I wrote my best songs often with a cup of tea in bed in the morning, and no matter what would happen in the day, that was a form of shelter.

I have protected my creative self as something holy ever since.

Whether I’ve been editing a documentary, writing an album or writing this Substack — I am religious about putting it first.

Till now.

2. Breaking The Pattern

We all have a sense of our living potential.

And yet all of us get fixed in our patterns and routines. Yes, you must learn and then build upon your knowledge.

But what if there was something right back that you learnt as a survival mechanism? It may be so deeply ingrained that you don’t even think to challenge it.

That’s how comfort zones calcify in us.

On the surface, my daily routine was working great. Yet with it, a shadow was walking with me.

I knew that I was aspiring to live up to my potential, and yet I always felt this lingering feeling — that no matter what I did, something wasn’t quite fitting.

I’d get close to it, but only in fits and starts.

“What”, I asked myself, “would living up to my full potential really look like?”.

I wasn’t quite sure, but what I did know was that unless I was willing to —

experiment

try stuff

shake up my routine

— then nothing would change. Nothing changes if nothing changes, man.

And so, I decided to enter a period of auditioning life.

That meant challenging my own assumptions, opening up to fresh perspectives and, damn, trying new stuff.

3. Does Your Routine Reflect This Life Period?

Looking at my routine, I realised that it was, in part, reactive against two things:

First, Berlin is a noisy city. As a light sleeper, I’d compensated for the fury of lying in bed feeling like I lived in a club by going to bed later and later.

Second, I avoided breakfast because it always made me tired afterwards. For years, I assumed this was just my constitution, not the result of rarely getting more than five or six hours of sleep.

I’d still wake charged enough to do strong creative work in the morning, but by the time I took a late lunch, a shadow would appear.

The biggest motivator for change was recognising the complexion of that shadow — and its existence at all.

The strange thing is, I felt certain it was energy-related and not the lingering echo of some stone left unturned long ago.

I’ve been through a long journey in psychotherapy, and I’m very cognisant when something is breaking out from a deeper layer in my psyche.

What I realised is this:

If my routine was reactive to life — even in small ways — I wanted to shift it to something proactive.

The circumstances that shaped my “classic routine” have changed. I’m older, my life is different, and I want other things.

Simply put: my routine was no longer serving the person I was becoming.

Beyond that, I wondered if it had even become an impediment to who I want to become in the next stage of my life.

That hit me hard:

What if your own routine is your own glass ceiling?

4. Challenging Assumptions

Each of us has a living potential.

For me, working out how to reconcile the paradox between being simultaneously alive, feeling I’m enough and excited within the moment — while equally aspiring, searching and building towards something better, has been a lifelong journey.

It’s all our life’s journey, really:How to reconcile being and doing.

Something most of us experience is the whispering of negativity. We carry a knowledge of what we need to change, and yet too often, never quite seem to arrive there.

It’s helped me to ask myself a blunt question:

What am I willing to live with, and what am I not?

To answer this question, I had to hear it first. That sounds obvious, but when I look around me — whether, in myself, my surroundings or in society itself — I see extraordinary fixity.

Fixity of view.Fixity of politics.Fixity of routine.Fixity that we are right and the rest of the world is blithering idiots.

Most of all, a fixity in believing our problems come from outside us.

I am trying to bring some radical accountability to my own life.

The funny thing is, you can’t become accountable without first breaking that fixity of view — and to do that, you must break your own approach.

So I asked myself:

What one change could I make that would break open my own lens?

I decided to make one shift in particular, and, curiously, it’s had a domino effect on other areas.

5. Quitting Alcohol?

I’m reticent to write about this, but there’s no way to be transparent about the choices you are making without exploring exactly how you are making them.

About a month ago, I woke up one day and thought:

That’s it, I’m done.

I wasn’t hungover; I hadn’t even been drinking much. More than that, I probably love drinking more than I should.

But I’d heard this voice for years, and I’d never listened to it.

It’s so recent that I don’t feel quite ready to write about it. What I do know, though, is this — that one decision has acted as a catalyst on every other area of my life.

I want to say clearly that this is first and foremost not to do with productivity.

It’s about how I feel as a human being in the world.

Effects so far:

I’m sleeping earlier and better

I wake up naturally at 6.30 am

Waking earlier made me feel like going back to the gym

Going back to the gym made me feel like eating breakfast again

I feel more present

I’m hearing my own thoughts clearly

I’m more interested in daytime activities

I’ve been trying new stuff

I feel I have more time

I’m less willing to repress internal questions that are bugging me

I am not sure yet if I have given up alcohol, but what I do know is that this is a hard stop, and that I’ll follow this period to where it leads.

Why?

Because I feel cumulatively happier.

Happier in feeling alive within the details…

In witnessing the gradient of the leaves, different today than yesterday; the crows’ caw as they dart through the blue haze of dawn; the slow symphony of sounds that unfurl as you walk through the city waking up.

Oh, and energy.

I’ve had more energy in the last month than I’ve felt for years.

If you’re reading and thinking about taking a break from drinking, that’s the biggest kick back for me.

And yes, energy is life.

Beyond all this, I want to serve my creative energy in the best way I can — for myself, my clients, and the people I love, too.

We live in a spirit of negation — addicted to screens, series, and social media; to caffeine and comparison, outrage and validation; scrolling for meaning and mistaking distraction for rest.

It’s a trap I’ve fallen into myself many times.

I’ve been trying to tackle these questions for years, but I feel that in the last months something significant has shifted in me.

As if all the questioning, experimenting and researching were coming to a head.

I’m a bit superstitious about sharing good periods — but this is what is working for me, and I want to share it in case someone out there benefits.

6. Earn Your Feelings

While trying to understand my relationship with alcohol, I watched a YouTube video by someone reflecting a few years after quitting.

One line hit me:

Without alcohol, you have to earn your feelings.

The paradox is that by giving up alcohol, you feel more like doing the things that actually earn you those positive feelings.

With more energy and time, you want to express it — and that creates a feedback loop.

Walking in nature, exercising, eating better, drilling stuff, taking time to be and listen to what’s stirring inside you — all of it helps you earn back good feelings.

It reminded me of a comment beneath the same video:

“With alcohol you give up the world for one thing, but by giving up alcohol you give up one thing and get back the world.”

There have been evenings when I’ve missed having a drink. But each morning it’s been replaced by one undeniable feeling we’re all searching for: excitement for life.

I’m not sure anything is worth compromising that — at least not at this stage of mine.

7. Final Thoughts

Many of us feel a little dread on Monday morning. I know it myself — as a freelancer and creative:

God, I’ve got to do it all again…

It’s not always easy to motivate yourself for your own life.

Sometimes you resist the very thing you love most.Sometimes for years.

Then the pattern becomes you — you’re no longer the person who does those things you dream about.

I’ve been lucky to live many of my dreams, but there are many more I’ve yet to touch.

Should I assume they’re behind a wall — for another life, or someone else’s?

That assumption doesn’t live out in the world — it lives in you, and only you can take accountability for it.

Accountability means making choices — usually the ones you could make, but don’t, because you’re too damn unwilling to break the pattern.

So break the bloody pattern.

Your story isn’t written.You are in its most important chapter.

What I’m writing about has nothing to do with alcohol; it’s about attitude.

When we’re stuck, we free ourselves by having the guts and the gumption to make a change — and to make it with our whole damn hearts.

It’s okay to fuck up.It’s okay to fail.It’s okay if the world peers in and passes judgment.

They can’t live your life — only you can.

For God’s sake, take the reins.

If that means giving up one thing to get back the world, that might be a choice worth making.

This newsletter is my attempt to decode the habits that help us reach a deeper sense of creative potential.

It’s early days for me, but this is what’s working.

What a thing life is.

Here’s to living it with our whole hearts — as best we can.

Love,Jim

📸 Photos are from this week’s shoot in the Delphi Theatre in Berlin

This week’s video is about the creative principle that guides my workday.