When I invited author David W Litwin Litwin to join me on the Substack Writers Salon, I set a very specific benchmark for our conversation: I wanted to leave inspired and liberated (well, at least that’s what he promises in his bio). Good news, I did. David is a designer, writer, speaker, and the author of multiple books, including Creative Success and The Blueprint. He runs a creative agency called Pure Fusion Media, which he’s been managing for 30 years, and he has this quiet, almost unnerving confidence about him that comes not from ego, but from something else entirely. Something he calls flow. Not a flow state. A flow life. “I’m in flow all day.” When David said this, I stopped him. Because for me, flow is that rare, glorious thing that happens when I’m writing and no one can pull me out of it. Or when I’m deep into a violin practice, and I forget that my children exist. But David is talking about something different, an entire life designed around what you love, what you’re wired for, and what you’re here to do. His day: up at 4 am (like George Washington Carver, he noted, and if it worked for the man who found 400 uses for a peanut, who are we to argue?), straight into writing, then design work, a workout somewhere in the afternoon, and bed at 8:30. Every single thing he does in a day is something he loves. “I play all day,” he told me. “When I get off work, I'd better start working, at my family, at my relationships.” He’s describing a life he built by first understanding who he is. Know Yourself Before You Try to Change the World David’s first piece of advice for unleashing creativity isn’t a morning routine or a journaling practice. It’s a question: Do you actually know who you are? He recommends personality profiling tools — Myers-Briggs, DISC, StrengthsFinder — not as labels to hide behind, but as mirrors. When he took an exhaustive six-hour career and personality assessment back in 2008, the results pointed to exactly two paths: managing a creative agency, or writing inspirational truth. Those are the two things he’s been doing ever since. “When you understand who you are,” he said, “you start sailing with the wind. Because it’s inherently in you, it’s the very nature of who you are, desperately trying to get out.” I pushed back on this, as any good journalist should. Because I’ve seen how labels like "I’m not athletic" or "I’m not a numbers person" can become cages. I didn’t start working out until my late 30s because I’d decided I was a book nerd, not a sports person. The minute I stopped telling myself that story, I started lifting weights five days a week. David agreed more than I expected. “Anyone can do anything,” he said. “The threshold for what’s possible now is way up there.” The negative voice that says you can’t — that’s not you, he argued. That’s resistance. (Steven Pressfield fans, you already know.) His linguistic trick: never say I am before a negative. Say I feel like instead. Reserve I am for the things you want to claim. I am strong. I am capable. I am a writer. Try it. It’s a small shift that lands differently than you’d expect. Ego Is the Enemy of Flow Here’s the idea I keep turning over since our conversation: ego doesn’t just make you arrogant. It makes you static. David’s point is that ego constantly pulls you inward — into self-protection, self-comparison, past grievances, future anxieties. Flow, by contrast, requires you to be outward-facing. Curious. Focused on what you’re creating for others rather than how you’re being perceived. “If you’re constantly focused on how you’re looking, how you’re sounding, what’s happening with the people around you — you’re never going to be in flow,” he said. “It’s stagnated by ego.” This is, incidentally, one of the things he loves about Substack. The writer’s journey — dealing with the person who says your article sucked, looking at a Note that didn’t land, and doing better next time — is ego-crushing in the best possible way. We also talked about Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way and her concept of “crossing to the other side” through morning pages. David sees creativity itself as something that lives on the other side of our own resistance. Capital-C Creativity, he called it — the kind you can’t fake, can’t perform your way into. You have to clear a path for it. “Be as curious as you possibly can,” he said. “Don’t be the biggest fish in the tank, because the biggest fish is the least flexible. Be the most mobile fish in the most influential tank you can find.” The Idea That Could Change the World David’s latest book, The Blueprint, is built around a single statement that he believes can reshape how we see almost everything: The world doesn’t spin on society's actions, beliefs, or statements. It spins on the outcomes. Actions and beliefs are personal, subjective, and endlessly debatable. Outcomes just are; they don’t have a worldview attached to them. If we focused on outcomes rather than endlessly arguing about actions and intentions, we could make real inroads in science, medicine, law, and education. He’s giving the book away for free because he doesn’t want money to get in the way of the message. I respect that enormously. He also wrote MLK 2.0, which argues that every human being has been given a world-shaping idea, and that most of us never access it because we haven’t done the inner work, haven’t gotten quiet enough, haven’t gotten curious enough to receive it. “Some people will never go there because they don’t like the silence,” he said. “If you can’t sit in silence for five minutes, maybe that silence is exactly where your idea is waiting.” One Line I’ll Never Forget There’s a quote often attributed to Rumi — though its true origin is debated — that goes something like: When I was young, I wanted to change the world. Now that I am older, I know I can only change myself. I brought this up expecting David to agree. He did — but he flipped it in a way that stayed with me. Rather than choosing between changing yourself and changing the world, he asked: What if the gift you give back isn’t your list of accomplishments, but what’s been imprinted on your soul by how you’ve lived? “Here’s my little micro soul when I started,” he said, “and here’s what it became.” Not status. Soul. Where to Find David You can explore David’s work — his writing, art, AI radio station Flare AI Radio, and more — at davidwlitwin.com. He also has a custom AI version of himself built on Delphi.ai, trained on over a million of his words. You can ask him anything and get his perspective back. (He told me he sometimes goes there to ask himself questions. I found this delightful.) Read and Write with Natasha is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber, and you will get lifetime access to some of my courses and paid masterclasses (worth over $300).. Thank you Kathy Small, Roja, and many others for tuning into my live video with David W Litwin! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit natashatynes.substack.com/subscribe
