When Scott Belsky talks about creativity, he uses words like “output” and “production.” “Creativity is the source, with the problem of mining,” says the founder, author, and early stage investor. “It requires machinery and practice and discipline and whatever else.”
Belsky joined A24 as the head of A24 Labs in early 2025. Before that, he founded Behance, a global portfolio site that he sold to Adobe in late 2012. He had a long run at Adobe, serving as its chief product officer and later chief strategy officer. This month he became the newest member of the Cornell Tech Council, and has written books like The Messy Middle and Making Ideas Happen. Belsky sits at the intersection of ideas and infrastructure, with the keen ability to frame the creative process in a way that’s both practical and magic.
Still, Belsky doesn’t romanticize any of this. “I’m always thinking about the inputs in my life and trying to make sure I don’t get too stagnant and boring,” says Belsky. “All of the things you’re exposed to act as outputs.” Belsky has worked for years building his own “creative system of production” and the nuggets he shares here are a result of the fact that his “system” is equally rooted in two worlds: “I have always straddled one foot in the creative world and one foot in the business world. When I get too businessy it compromises the ingenuity that I can bring to the product and the things I’m trying to create or write. It is a tension to constantly maintain in order to ensure you’re not just basking in the stuff you’ve done before.”
I’m constantly, constantly capturing stuff. It takes a little bit of the romanticism out of it, but I’ve come to believe a lot of creativity is simply capturing things the moment they hit, and then tending to them with such consistency that you start to connect little pieces into a bigger thing. And then when you connect little things to big things and then bigger things into each other, then you end up with something amazing. It can be a book or a screenplay or some sort of business strategy or a new business. If I look at myself over the last couple of decades, it’s all about capturing things and then servicing them with the right moment and in the right way.
Another thing that comes to mind is the role of others. Sometimes they have the missing pieces to the thing you’re building. Sometimes I’ll meet somebody who has an idea or has a skill that captures something I had thought of years ago and suddenly I realize they are part of this project or puzzle. I work to graft them onto it in such a way that makes it come to life. That wouldn’t have been possible had it not been for the discipline of going back and tending to the pieces that seemed dormant and irrelevant until suddenly they weren’t.
I pick places to go and I sometimes say yes to things I’d ordinarily say no to just get a fresh dose of surprise and exposure to something different. It can come in the form of a speaking engagement somewhere super inconvenient that’s not even paying me, but I’ll do it because I have a sense this will take me out of my comfort zone in some way. I also try to listen to new music and read things that are from new sources. I have a bit of a paranoia that somehow my input could get stale and my output would then become uninteresting to me and others. There is something to extract from everywhere if you have the skeleton key for it—which is usually the right dose of curiosity.
The ultimate test is when I go to a dinner I was dragged into. I’ll say to myself this is going to be completely uninteresting. I try to find the skeleton key to the person or topic—it will usually be me mining curiosity, like how does that work or why is that the way it is? I’ll go deep into some backstory and it unlocks a door of intrigue and new material that is input, again. It’s like squeezing water from air. If you have the technology, water is everywhere; you don’t have to look for the well.
I’ve also been impacted as a parent. When you have a kid, their inputs are just what you expose them to. It’s a closed room experiment. Only for a short period of time, before they go out in the world and start watching TV—before they start getting inundated with inputs that cannot be traced, you have this previous zone where everything they do you can trace back to the input they were exposed to. It’s this fascinating laboratory of understanding creativity. Suddenly you can see the whole system and you can extrapolate how it impacts you and others because they are in the world.
Texture and friction are how we remember time. The hardest, hardest vacations to remember are beach vacations; they all kind of blend together. You just remember sitting on the beach. I love the beach, but there’s no friction in sitting and relaxing all day. Therefore, it’s hard to discern between the beaches you sat on in your vacations. Juxtapose that with getting lost on some street in rural Italy or arduously climbing some mountaintop or something like that. You remember those vividly because they were friction-filled. Time with friction is what makes us remember it.
I have these two realizations: One is that at the end of your life, you will have felt like you lived longer based on how much time had texture and how much time you remember. In that essence, texture and time is what makes life longer. The other is that maybe it’s the inputs that have texture and friction that impact us the most. I definitely believe that pain is a source of creativity. I hate to say it but it’s true. You look at Billy Joel. His greatest albums came out of a divorce or his addiction. Everyone suffering is rife with texture and friction. It also probably rife with inputs and emotion, struggle, insight, realization. Whenever I struggle, there’s a part of me that’s grateful I still have kindling. I learn to appreciate the troughs of life. Let’s do something with this.
I’ve become very purposeful with my time. I’m in a startup environment building something new. I run product, design, and development teams. I have a sacred three hours every week that we call concepting. It is a block of time when we review product and have a more product and design driven controlled meeting, as opposed to an engineering one. It’s not a meeting to talk about the cost of doing something. It’s a meeting about, “What’s the best product?” That’s a mistake a lot of teams make. They’ll include engineers in that first product design meeting. And if you have engineers, it’s okay. But they can’t be thinking, “How am I going to implement this and is that going to be too expensive in time or money?” They have to be thinking, “What’s possible? How do we solve this problem?” That’s a really sacred time. Every team I’ve ever managed, I have these concepting blocks.
My team, we are very empowered. We have a standup every Monday. Every Friday, everyone gives an update on every project they lead. Everyone is entrusted to use their time and energy to make the greatest impact. It’s important to have a team that can be trusted.
Full transparency. Everyone does it. Including me. I am one that always looks ahead. I have to make choices. I have a list in Notion of the things that are most important to me and I try to look at it every few days to pressure check myself against my calendar on how I’m using my time. What’s important to me right now? One of them might be a project that has many short-term deliverables. I have one for work, one for the companies I’m investing in and supporting, and I have one for my personal life—my health and fitness, my relationships with my family. I just think that a quick glance over it is a recalibration of your brain that helps you make better decisions every day.
Writing is my craft of processing and testing things myself and then testing things with others. I’m tending to these fragments and these ideas. Both books I wrote were the result of lots of different pieces I captured. The Messy Middle was seven years of just capturing stuff and finally seeing the way they come together. I find writing a great form of getting ideas out there. I have forced myself to write this thing called Implications, which is one way I test ideas on the technology side and I learn what people engage with or disengage with. I do the same thing with social media. I don’t consume a lot of social media but everything I do, I share on X. It’s an instant way of engagement and testing ideas. It’s an amazing tool. It helps me triangulate where I should put my focus and energy.
I try to run three to five miles every morning. It’s a principled period of time where I’m forced to unplug. I listen to music but I never look at my phone. I just think and it’s also a great part of my chemistry and how my brain works. I swear by it. Do I even listen to the music? For some reason the music makes it easier to run. Do I love running? Or, do I just love everything that happens because of the running?
When I’m running I force myself to complete the run and almost always the idea has become much better. It taught me to wait and not capture and move on from the idea so fast, to sit with something. Should we be careful not to capture actions so quickly and stick with a creative process long enough so ideas build? This is the art and science of creativity.
By capturing something so quickly we’re making ourselves at ease with the fact that we’ve captured it. When I tend to something over time, is that the equivalent of running and having to think about it more? The best practice would be to have both. Don’t let something go. Capture it when it hits and tend to it over time so the pieces fit together. Let yourself keep going. Force yourself not to capture it so quickly.
