Timeless Advice for Creatives — Mark C. Samples

Mark C. Samples

How to Live a Fulfilling Life: CWU Music Graduate Commencement Speech, 2025

How to Live a Fulfilling Life: CWU Music Graduate Commencement Speech, 2025

It's graduation season, and in my day job, I teach in the Music Department at Central Washington University. Last night we had a ceremony for the music graduates, and I gave a talk on how to live a fulfilling life. Maybe you need to hear something from this talk as well. Here it is:

How to Live a Fulfilling Life: CWU Music Graduate Commencement Speech, 2025

Dr. Mark Samples

June 9, 2025, 7 p.m.

Welcome to this special evening—to my fellow faculty members, music staff, parents, family, friends, and most of all, the distinguished music graduates of 2025.

It is June 9th, in the year 2025, in the State of Washington, in the city of Ellensburg. On the campus of Central Washington University, in the Jerylin S. McIntyre Music Building, and joined by the virtual presence of all who are with us viewing online, we are gathered in the recital hall to honor and celebrate you, the graduates.

I know what some of you are thinking. You’re looking around at your friends, your loved ones, your professors, and thinking—I should probably be practicing right now.

Creative ProcessMark SamplesJune 10, 2025Comment

What Every Indie Artist Can Learn from Taylor Swift’s Masterstroke

What Every Indie Artist Can Learn from Taylor Swift’s Masterstroke

Whatever you think of her music, you have to respect Taylor Swift as a creative professional.

Last week she pulled off something no one thought was possible.

Back in 2005, Swift signed a six-album deal with Big Machine Records when she was just 15. The deal gave the label ownership of the master recordings for all six albums.

When her contract ended in 2018, she walked—signing with Universal instead. And that’s when things got messy.

She wasn’t even given the chance to bid on her own recordings. Big Machine’s founder Scott Borchetta sold the masters to Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings. Braun then sold them to Shamrock Capital for a reported $300–$405 million.

That’s when Taylor did something no one saw coming.

Instead of rolling over, she got to work.

Creative ProcessMark SamplesJune 3, 2025Taylor Swift, first-principles creativityComment

Be the Most Curious Person in the Room

Be the Most Curious Person in the Room

In the early 1990s, Johnny Cash was a living legend that no one wanted to hear.

The industry had moved on. Nashville had shelved him. Columbia Records had dropped him. Radio wouldn’t play his new music.

To those in the industry, he seemed like a relic.

But Rick Rubin got curious.

Rubin wasn’t a country producer. He had built his reputation on hip-hop and hard rock.

But something in Cash’s voice—a weathered truth—caught his ear. While everyone else asked, “Why bother?” Rubin asked a different question:

Why isn’t anyone listening to Johnny Cash anymore?

Creative ProcessMark SamplesMay 27, 2025Rick Rubin, Johnny Cash, First Principles CreativityComment

First-Principles Creativity

To create something truly original, strip away assumptions and analogies and create from first principles.

We live in a golden age of creative templates.

There’s a swipe file for every format. A prompt for every block. A Notion dashboard for every creator’s dream.

We’ve never had more creative tools at our fingertips—and yet many smart, ambitious creatives feel stuck, derivative, or worse: invisible.

They’re not lazy. They don’t lack talent. They’re just trapped in borrowed thinking.

Creative ProcessMark SamplesMay 21, 2025First Principles CreativityComment

Taylor Swift Sent You a Voice Memo

Taylor Swift Sent You a Voice Memo

It’s March 2020. The world is in lockdown. And Taylor Swift decides it’s the perfect time to shake things up. She sends a message to Aaron Dessner, of The National: “Hey, it’s Taylor. Would you ever be up for writing songs with me?”

Aaron had met Taylor before, but this seemed out of the blue.

Dessner, at the start of the pandemic, had found himself in an unexpected creative surge.

With tours on hold and the world on pause, he immersed himself in producing music from his home studio in Upstate New York, Long Pond Studios.

He was exploring fully produced songscapes that could have been for The National, Big Red Machine, or maybe something entirely new.

When Swift reached out, he was ready.

He put together a folder of tracks and sent them.

Just like that, a creative collaboration was born.

Creative ProcessMark SamplesMay 12, 2025Comment

Be Findable

Be Findable

If you’re working on something good — something real — it’s easy to think that’s enough.

That your music will speak for itself. Your design. Your writing.

That someone will stumble across it, fall in love, and spread the word.

Maybe. But probably not.

As Austin Kleon writes in his book Show Your Work:

“You don’t really find an audience for your work; they find you.

“But it’s not enough to be good. In order to be found, you have to be findable.”

Creative ProcessMark SamplesMay 5, 2025Comment

Great Music Producers Have Both of these Traits

Great Music Producers Have Both of these Traits

So many great music producers are somehow chill and high-agency at the same time.

Here’s a story about benny blanco and Ed Sheeran that shows how it's done.

So, the industry folks say, “Hey benny, you should work with this guy Ed Sheeran.” Benny hears Ed’s track “A-Team” and is like, “I want to work with this guy right away.” But instead of the usual corporate email, benny hits the entire email thread with, “I gotta take a sh*t.”

Instant vibe check.

Everyone on benny's team starts freaking out. What did you do? This is a disaster.

But then Ed replies, “Me too.”

Creative ProcessMark SamplesApril 27, 2025benny blanco, ed sheeran, high-agencyComment

Lessons with AI from a Faculty Member

Lessons with AI from a Faculty Member

I was asked to do a panel on AI in my Discipline at Central Washington University. I wrote down 16 micro lessons, and we got to only a couple of them. Reply with a number and I’ll explain what it means.

0/ the things I know vs. the things I don’t know / fellow traveler

1/ the weight-lifting robot

2/ AI as research assistant / My own personal New Yorker staff

3/ the jagged frontier

4/ the technology crisis of my generation

5/ run more experiments / think batting average

TeachingMark SamplesApril 18, 2025Comment

The Creative Flywheel

The Creative Flywheel

Every creative has felt it—the frustration of starting strong on a project, only to fizzle out halfway through. The ideas dry up, the momentum disappears, and you’re left wondering what went wrong.

The truth is, most of us approach creativity the wrong way. We rely on fleeting inspiration or bursts of motivation, hoping they’ll carry us through.

But the creatives who achieve mastery—those who produce consistently for years—don’t rely on chance. They use systems.

Let’s call it a Creative Flywheel.

Creative ProcessMark SamplesJanuary 27, 2025Comment

Go All In—Like Stevie Wonder

Go All In—Like Stevie Wonder

In the early 1970s, Stevie Wonder was already a star.

He was a child prodigy, at that point the youngest artist ever to top the Billboard Hot 100 (“Fingertips Pt. 2”). He had already recorded a string of hits in the Motown style: “Uptight,” “For Once in My Life,” and My Cherie Amour.” He had started taking ownership of his sound by self-producing his record, “Signed, Sealed, Delivered,” in 1970.

In other words, he was twenty years old and already a paragon of the Motown pop sound.

But Wonder didn’t rest on his successes. He was hungry for something more.

He wanted to create music that truly reflected his artistic vision—something groundbreaking.

Enter two unlikely collaborators: Robert Margouleff and Malcolm Cecil, a pair of audio engineers who were tinkering with a hulking, mysterious machine called TONTO (The Original New Timbral Orchestra).

Mark SamplesJanuary 20, 2025Comment

The Perils of Monomania

The Perils of Monomania

Writer Benjamin Nugent, in a 2013 essay for The New York Times, described how he had what seemed like an idyllic writer’s life in graduate school.

No wi-fi. No diversions. Lots of snow. It was like he was a writer from another time.

But he found something surprising.

His complete devotion to his writing at the sacrifice of all other diversions actually poisoned his writing.

Mark SamplesDecember 29, 2024Comment

Now Is the Best Time to Reset Your Focus Skills

Now Is the Best Time to Reset Your Focus Skills

Confused. Dazed. Scatterbrained.

It can often feel frustrating to make up your mind to focus, but to feel unable to do so.

To set down a path of focus—to write a song, practice our instrument, work on a design—only to be offered a gleaming off-ramp in the form of a distraction from our phone.

It even happens to people trying to write a newsletter about focusing. My phone has buzzed 3 times since I started writing this newsletter.

Each notification from our phones is part of a habit-reward loop that promises a potential dopamine release for our brains.

We know that there is a war going on in the marketplace, and that our attention is the ultimate prize. Tech companies, advertising companies, even nonprofits and other creatives. All want to win the next second of our attention.

But I want to invite you to a different path. Now is the best time to disengage from our distracted networks of notifications and reengage your focus on what really matters.

This holiday season, make a plan to practice building the skill of focus in your creative life.

Creative ProcessMark SamplesDecember 2, 2024focus, creative focus, creative deep work, cal newport, Ryan Holiday, William James, Marcus Aurelius, Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious GenerationComment

Everything I Learned Writing Music for a National Ad Campaign

Everything I Learned Writing Music for a National Ad Campaign

I had the opportunity to write music for RealTruck, Inc., the U.S.’s top seller of truck accessories.

The goal of the project was to create a 2-minute brand anthem that can be used across multiple campaigns (TV, web, social, etc.) and multiple years. To create the soundtrack of RealTruck’s brand.

After the project was over, I scribbled down “micro lessons.”

Bite-sized lessons of everything I want to remember for the next time I do a project like this.

Reply with a number and I’ll break it down in an essay or a comment.

Arts and Entrepreneurship, Creative ProcessMark SamplesNovember 22, 2024music production, music promotion, music professionals, realtruck, commercial music, advertising musicComment

How Tolkien Turned Boredom into a Bestseller

How Tolkien Turned Boredom into a Bestseller

Be alert for creativity to strike in the midst of the mundane. Even an unexpected blank page can hold the beginning of your next masterpiece.

You don’t have to be working in a cabin in the woods to have creative insights. You don’t have to be a hermit, or to wake up before sunrise and meditate.

You don’t even have to be doing something creative.

In fact, creative insights sometimes strike in the midst.

In the midst of cleaning your kitchen. In the midst of driving to work. In the midst of formatting TPS reports.

JRR Tolkien tells a cool story about how he started writing The Hobbit. Tolkien wrote some of the most beloved fantasy novels of the twentieth century. But, like me, in his day job he was a university professor.

In a BBC interview in 1968, he recalls how the first line of his book The Hobbit came to him.

Want to Improve Your Creative Skill Today? Here's How

Want to Improve Your Creative Skill Today? Here's How

When you are trying to develop a creative skill, small improvements every day beat sporadic epic bursts. Every time.

Imagine two creatives, Oliver and Amelia. Both are music producers at the beginning of their careers. Both have visions of really making it—working with interesting artists, producing music they can be proud of, and supporting themselves through their creative work.

In order to have the careers they want, they both know that they need to continuously improve their skills. They need to learn new production techniques, become better songwriters, improve their mixing skills.

The list of improvements seems endless. They feel a deep skill deficit. Like a chasm that stands between them and the career that they want.

Oliver sets out to improve his skills. He works in bursts, but sporadically. Marathon sessions on weekends and late at night. After a session, he feels burnt out, and then it takes days or even a week before he can muster up the energy for another session.

Creative ProcessMark SamplesOctober 28, 2024James clear, atomic habits, creative skill, creative habitComment

Should Creators Focus on Quality or Quantity?

Should Creators Focus on Quality or Quantity?

In creative pursuits, quality will come as a result of quantity. Get intelligent reps in your field and share your work before you think you’re ready.

Writer Ryan Holiday said in an interview that he doesn’t put much stock in the "quality over quantity" excuse when creating.

You know the one. You say you want to line everything up first. To get everything ready so that it’s just right before releasing it to the world.

You say you want to painstakingly get everything right before you release your masterpiece.

🕺How to Meet More Interesting People

🕺How to Meet More Interesting People

Whenever you meet someone interesting, think to yourself—who do I know that this person should be connected to?

Write an email introducing your two friends. Say something about why you think they should be connected. Something like:

“Hey Rob, meet Jessica. Jessica fronts a rad Seattle band called Deep Sea Diver. They just released a new music video. Jessica, this is Rob. Rob has played the violin on probably some of your favorite records, from Sufjan Stevens to Bon Iver and even Taylor Swift. He just played with Sara Bareilles at the Kennedy center in a series of concerts celebrating her career and songbook. Y’all are both awesome, and I thought you should know each other!”

Creative ProcessMark SamplesSeptember 30, 2024Comment

Don't Sit on a Great Idea

Don't Sit on a Great Idea

When you have a creative idea that is a ten out of ten, get it out into the world as fast as humanly possible—because you can bet that someone else in the world just had the same idea as you.

As creatives, we get dozens of ideas. Most are fleeting, average, just okay. We work our creative process knowing that most of our ideas aren’t worth pursuing.

But we pursue these okay ideas anyway because we know that they are the path to the really special ideas.

The ten out of tens.

The ideas that give you a special feeling, like the heavens have either opened up before you or come crashing upon you—or both.

Creative ProcessMark SamplesAugust 19, 2024creative ideas, creative process, Ryan Tedder, OneRepublic, music production, idea urgency, creativity tips, songwriters advice, innovation timing, artistic inspiration, creativity and timing, creative pursuit, music industry insights, idea execution, creativity strategyComment

6 Non-Obvious Creative Principles

6 Non-Obvious Creative Principles

Creativity is by definition non-obvious. It thrives on counterintuitive ideas and unexpected connections. Here are six counterintuitive creative principles to remind yourself of this week as you carve out time to be creative.

Routine breeds creativity. Instead of stifling creativity, developing a creative habit can establish a stable environment for you to do your best work. Establish a daily routine where you can reliably do creative deep work.

Enforcing limits is freeing. If you have every tool at your disposal, every option available to you, there is no need to be creative. Instead of keeping all of your options open, impose artificial limits on your work. Produce a song using only three musical lines. Write a complete story in 500 words. Create a design using only three colors. Having every tool at your disposal absolves you of the need to be creative.

Creative ProcessMark SamplesAugust 5, 2024Comment

Give Credit, Don't Take It

Give Credit, Don't Take It

Always seek to give credit, but never to take it.

Charlie Puth is has written mega pop hits, with multiple billion-streamers. He's worked with superstars of the music industry, and is known as a musician’s musician. He’s a self-proclaimed music nerd. He can sing, he can play, he has perfect pitch. He can write. He can perform.

He’s got every reason to toot his own horn, tout his own skills.

In fact, it was these skills that led Studio.com to create a popular online class on pop production featuring Puth.

But in the course, where Puth is supposed to be the main attraction, the Master, he instead repeatedly gives credit away to others. He names all of the great musicians and producers who taught him.

Creative ProcessMark SamplesJuly 16, 2024Charlie Puth, creativity, credit, mentorship, mentorsComment