What Rick Rubin Taught Me About Running a Business

A summer departure from the usual playbook.

Most business content sounds the same. Process frameworks. Step-by-step systems. Optimization tactics. All useful. All necessary. But I've noticed that very little time gets spent on the thing that actually separates good businesses from great ones: creativity.

Not creativity in the artistic sense. Creativity in the way you think about your business. The ability to step back, change your perspective, and see something that's been sitting right in front of you the whole time.

This summer I listened to a conversation between Andrew Huberman and Rick Rubin. If you don't know Rubin, he's produced some of the most iconic albums in music history — Johnny Cash, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Jay-Z, Metallica, Tom Petty, the list goes on. License to Ill by the Beastie Boys might be my favorite, and you even get to hear Rubin playing guitar on the album. He's not a musician. He's someone who knows how to help other people find what's best in their work. I've listened to him enough to know he has a lot to teach people outside the music industry, including business owners.

Here's what stuck with me.

The Four Phases of Any Creative Project

Rubin breaks the creative process into four phases, and the more I think about it, the more I think this maps perfectly to how the best businesses are built.

Phase one is seed collecting. No deadlines, no deliverables. You're just paying attention and gathering raw material. Noticing problems. Asking questions. Exploring without the pressure of having to produce anything yet.

Phase two is experimentation. You're not building the thing yet. You're setting the stage for something to happen. As Rubin puts it: you plant a seed, you can water it and give it sunlight, but you can't actually make it grow. This is the part most business owners skip because they're too impatient to get to execution.

Phase three is crafting. Now you have something. You're shaping it, refining it, maybe combining it with something else entirely. This is where the real work happens.

Phase four is completion. Getting to a version you can share with the world. Rubin makes an interesting point here: a deadline at this stage can actually help the project. It forces decisions. It ends the endless refinement loop that kills momentum.

Most businesses operate almost entirely in phases three and four. They skip the collecting and experimenting because it doesn't feel productive. But those first two phases are exactly where the best ideas come from.

The Conveyor Belt

This is the image from the conversation that I haven't been able to shake.

Rubin describes life as a conveyor belt that's always moving past you, carrying small gifts. Ideas, observations, phrases you overhear, things you read. The belt is always running. The gifts are always there.

The problem is most people never notice the belt exists. And if they do notice it, they don't feel empowered to reach out and grab something from it.

For a business owner, the conveyor belt is your market, your customers, your team, your competitors. The signals are everywhere. The owner who notices them, and does something with them, is the one who builds something worth owning.

The Advice Problem

One more thing Rubin said that I think about a lot, especially in my work with business owners.

When someone with more experience gives you advice, they're giving you advice based on their life and their data points. Those data points are very different from yours. Maybe it's good advice. Maybe it's only good advice for them.

He put it better than I could: it's hard enough to figure out what's right for yourself. If you do crack the code, be grateful for it. And then still ask yourself: is this the only way? Maybe there's a better way you haven't thought of yet.

This applies directly to how most business owners run their companies. They've done it a certain way for fifteen years. It works. But working is not the same as optimal. The assumption that the way you've always done it is the best way is, as Rubin calls it, a trap. A comfortable one, but a trap.

The Aperture

What I took away from all of this is something I try to bring into every business I work with.

The best insights aren't complicated. They're usually obvious once someone points them out. The problem is that when you're inside a business every day, your aperture narrows. You stop seeing the whole picture. You see your version of it, shaped by habit and history and the way things have always been done.

Changing that aperture is where the real value lives. Not in the spreadsheets or the org charts, but in the willingness to look at your business the way someone from the outside would. To ask the questions that feel almost too simple to ask. To notice what's on the conveyor belt that's been passing by for years.

That's creativity in business. And most owners don't do nearly enough of it.

At this point in the blog, I normally give processes to help you solve a problem. This time I won't do that. Build your own creativity. Dedicate some time to figure out how to build creativity in yourself.

Instead, I'll leave you with one of my favorite interviews on the Internet. The conversation between Rick Rubin and one of my favorite music YouTubers, Rick Beato. It's over two hours, but I promise you'll be glued to your seat. If you watch it, please send me a note and let me know what you think. Enjoy!