When Building Hijacks Creating

Learning to Nurture the Creative Impulse

“I’ve been to countless film screenings in the city for three years,” Olivia told me on our Zoom call, passion and frustration in her voice. “I have notebooks full of ideas, I know what it takes to develop a short film, I’ve even connected with producers and financiers.” Her shoulders dropped slightly and she paused. “But I’ve never actually made anything.”

“You mentioned your husband’s support. What does he say when you talk about this?” I asked

“He asks me all the time what would bring me the most joy in this next chapter.”

“Sounds like you have a supportive partner. So what do you say?”

“I just want to be on a film set. I just want to be part of the storytelling process.” Her longing was palpable…and so was the gap between knowing exactly what she wanted and taking action.

I asked what was stopping her.

She looked down, her voice dropping so softly I almost missed it: “I would do it, and the quality of the film I would create would just be so low. I would just embarrass myself and everyone around me.”

There it was—her creative impulse suffocating under the weight of imagined failure.

I could see her frustration in the way her body seemed to shrink as we dove deeper into her paralysis. She desperately wanted to create something, but she was trapped by everything she thought it needed to become. She worried it would be a wrong career move and lead to financial ruin.

“What’s one thing you could create this weekend?” I asked. “Just to see what happens?”

She closed her eyes, taking a few deeper breaths to let the question settle. When she opened them again, something had shifted. Her voice became clearer, more animated. Her shoulders relaxed.

“I keep thinking about this one scene from my notebook,” Olivia said, leaning forward. “What if I just brought that to life somehow?”

Suddenly we weren’t talking about careers or film industry success anymore. We were talking about making one small thing, something that wanted to exist for its own sake.

—

I immediately recognized her struggle, though mine played out differently.

The creative impulse for Downshift—the program I founded to help ambitious professionals slow down during seasons of transition—came on a frigid Saturday morning while I was washing dishes. It occurred as a question: Why do we only have accelerators? And then the statement: We should also have decelerators.

There was no thought behind it. This sequence emerged from somewhere deeper than reason. In an instant, I knew something like a decelerator needed to exist in the world.

Within days, that pure creative impulse got hijacked. Instead of asking, “What wants to be expressed here?” I started asking, “How do I scale this?” and “How do I turn it into a business?” Instead of letting it be a workshop, a book, or just an idea that lived in my journal, I immediately thought: This has to be a brand, something big.

Before I knew it, I was working with a Trademark attorney, touring retreat centers, developing a curriculum, analyzing pricing models, crafting positioning messages, and building a landing page. All this occurred before I’d even talked with prospective participants. I wanted to make Downshift as notable as other cohort-based courses like Write of Passage, AltMBA, and The Hoffman Process. I visioned impacting thousands of professionals and building a business that would spit off cash.

—

Eighteen months later, as our Spring ‘25 application deadline loomed, I was working at my kitchen table at midnight, teeth clenched and jaw sore. I was crafting my fifth marketing email in seven days for a program about slowing down—I was far from practicing what we preached. My wife and daughters were long asleep upstairs. My neck and shoulders ached from being glued to my laptop for hours.

I spent the day in four coaching sessions, a team meeting trying to figure out how to drum up more applications, and two applicant interviews. My phone had buzzed with Slack notifications about marketing ideas and curriculum updates. On top of that I was coordinating our team offsite which was in less than a week.

We had more than 150 people on the waitlist, but with three days until the deadline, only six had actually applied. I kept refreshing the application dashboard, hoping six would magically become twenty.

This isn’t why I started this, I thought, exhausted. This isn’t the work that feeds me. I had built this whole machine, piece by piece, thinking it would give me more freedom and aliveness. Instead, it had become exactly the kind of work I’d left startups and venture capital to avoid.

I see this all the time. The coach who has an insight but immediately thinks of scaling an audience on Substack before they’ve even written one word. The entrepreneur who feels called to solve a problem but jumps straight to pitch decks and investor meetings before they’ve built or shipped anything. The creative who longs to have meaningful conversations but gets stuck writing a podcast brief, researching equipment and platforms, and planning growth hacks before recording the first episode.

So many of us suffocate the creative urge before it has a chance to blossom. I built Downshift—the thing I wanted to create—but lost that creative spark in the process of building. What if I’d treated it differently from the start? What if I’d approached it as a creative project rather than a business to scale?

—

On a recent call with my friend and mentor, Jerry, I was describing how I wanted to show up in this next chapter of my career. “Steve,” he said, his voice carrying that sage wisdom I’ve come to trust, “You’re no longer in a season of building. You want to focus on your family, your coaching practice, your writing, your health. And I get it—you still want to create.”

He paused, letting that silence land. “There’s building, and there’s creating. Two completely different orientations.”

Creating starts with an internal knowing, a restlessness that pulls at you from somewhere deep. It asks: “What’s wanting to emerge through me?” And then the response: “This wants to be expressed—I can feel it stirring.” No predetermined shape, no business plan, no guarantee it will become anything beyond what it is right now.

But here’s what happens: When that creative impulse arrives, your thinking mind immediately wants to solve for the uncertainty. It wants to turn the impulse into a plan, the spark into a strategy. That’s when building mode hijacks the creative impulse.

Building mode responds with the thought: “This has to become something”—a business, a career, a scalable system that justifies your time through growth and metrics. It immediately jumps to questions like: How do I scale this? What’s my business model? How do I turn this into my new identity? It either takes over completely—like I experienced with Downshift, leaving me asking “How did I even get here?“—or it suffocates the creative impulse before it has a chance to be expressed.

Take Olivia. Her creative impulse was hijacked into anxiety about building a filmmaking career, when what was actually stirring was much simpler: to be on a film set, to be in the story-making process, to bring one of her stories to life. She doesn’t need to become “a filmmaker” right now. She just needs to honor what’s alive in her.

—

The creative impulse shows up differently for all of us, but here are a few ways I’ve heard it described: a felt sense of expansion, a surge of energy in your hands or chest, a current moving through your body, sometimes rising up through your torso and out through your chest. There’s an immediate knowing—this matters, this resonates.

These impulses arrive at a different frequency than thoughts. Where thinking feels analytical and effortful, they feel like something you recognize rather than something you figure out.

One of my new clients described it beautifully last week: “It feels like something hits you, but it’s coming out of you simultaneously.” He told me about sitting in a coffee shop in the West Village on a fall afternoon several years ago. “A man walked in reading an old novel. Jazz was playing outside, maybe it wasn’t live, but it felt like a movie. In that moment,” he said, “I felt like I could go home and write a novel or create a piece of art or build a company. It was intoxicating.”

That’s the signal. When your chest opens rather than contracts, when you feel energized rather than tight, when the work pulls you forward instead of you dragging it along.

Sometimes it’s triggered by a place, a conversation, a piece of music. Sometimes it just emerges from deep within.

The timing is often brutal. Just as the impulse arrives, your day job is calling or you have to put your kids to bed. “Those moments are fleeting,” my client continued. “As soon as it went away, I tried to journal about it and get back into it, but it was just gone. I was left with a kind of creative longing. I know I touched something real but couldn’t quite get back to it.”

This is where most of us lose it. The impulse arrives, and within seconds we talk ourselves out of it. I don’t have time for this right now. I’m not talented enough. This can’t become anything meaningful. There are more important things to do. We let it pass by entirely, telling ourselves we’re not ready or we’ll come back to it later. We rarely do.

—

It doesn’t have to be this way. When you feel that stirring—that pull toward something you can’t quite name—you have a choice in how you respond. Pause and ask yourself: What wants to be expressed right now?

Not “What could this become?” or “How would I scale this?” Just: What wants to be expressed?

This question gives you permission to shift your focus from outcomes toward what’s stirring. From this place, curiosity comes online and anxiety begins to soften. Instead of dismissing the impulse or immediately strategizing how to build it, you’re simply witnessing what’s alive in you.

Then take one small step. Voice-record the idea on your way to pick up your kids. Sketch something in your notebook before the meeting starts. Text a friend about the conversation you want to have. Write the first paragraph on your lunch break. Film thirty seconds on your phone.

The step doesn’t need to be huge or profound. It doesn’t need to lead anywhere. It just needs to honor what’s alive in you right now. You might be surprised.

Since walking away from Downshift, this question has become my practice. Over the last month, I’ve sketched ideas that I haven’t acted on—a course outline on self-awareness that sits in my notebook, a fund concept focused on consciousness that I drafted and filed away. I let each one exist without needing to become something more. This week, I became enamored with the distinction between creating and building. Something was stirring. My body felt open, curious. So I asked: What wants to be expressed? This essay wanted to come. So I followed it.

The creative impulse has no guarantees. It asks you to honor something you can’t yet name, to take the next step without seeing the entire staircase.

Your mind will want to relieve that uncertainty by turning the impulse into a plan or letting it slip away entirely. But there’s another way to respond.

What wants to be expressed through you today?

Ask the question. Take whatever small step feels right. That’s all the impulse needs from you right now.