The Art of Dailiness, by Michael Bierut

Suleika Jaouad’s bestseller, The Book of Alchemy: A Creative Practice for an Inspired Life is her celebration of the power of journaling and other daily expressions of creativity. She credits her own habit of journal-keeping to The 100 Day Project, a class assignment originated by Michael Bierut at the Yale School of Art. “The point of the project,” she says, “is to use discipline as a vehicle for creative inspiration.” In her book, she asks 100 writers, artists, and thinkers to share their own techniques for getting and staying inspired, including Michael himself, whose essay is republished here. Illustrating the essay are excerpts from Bierut’s own project in which he created a drawing a day based on a photograph in The New York Times. They are published here for the first time. 

It was a ritual I continued throughout the entire calendar year. This was before the omnipresence of social media, and it wouldn’t have occurred to me to share these images with anyone – it was just something I was doing privately. However, at the time I was teaching graduate students in the graphic design program at Yale, and program director Sheila de Bretteville somehow learned about this project and suggested I assign something like it to my students. The idea of the class undertaking something together, but picking their own subject matter instead of doing the same thing, appealed to me immediately. The question then was, of what duration?

I looked at my calendar, and saw that year I was scheduled to teach two classes, one in the fall semester and one in the spring, and they happened to be 100 days apart. It was a coincidence, but it felt meaningful, the way a year had felt meaningful with my own project. It was almost as if that round number was telling me exactly what to do. So I wrote up a brief, and at the top, I typed “The 100-Day Project” – capitalising every word to make it feel as if it were official. Then I wrote a simple prompt, very unstructured and open-ended: Starting tomorrow, do one creative act that you can repeat for 100 days.

With something like the 100-day project, there’s no right way to do it, and there’s no wrong way to do it. The reason this project works is the reason anything like this works: you can do it on your own terms, in your own way. It has nothing at all to do with any expertise that I or anyone else would profess to have about it. It’s that old saying: the only way out is through. You somehow have to work your way through the whole thing, and even if you hate 95 percent of the things you did, if you’ve made it to 100 days, congratulations – that’s amazing in and of itself. Of course, not everyone makes it to the end, and that’s okay too. I had students who dropped off quickly, some at two weeks, others a month. Once people got about halfway, they had so much personal investment, and they had internalised the process enough, that there was a good chance they’d make it to the end. But even the ones who dropped out at two weeks would say, “I got so much out of it – even just doing it for 14 days.”

I’m always amused when I get credit for coming up with the 100-Day Project, because part of what makes it interesting is that there’s nothing original about it. It’s what we all do every day. We do routine things, and we do things that require acts of imagination that we’re never going to do again, whether it’s naming a goldfish or responding to a stranger tripping over a curb. Toggling between such routine experiences and unique ones are what, in the aggregate, constitute life.

This is your prompt: Write about a time when you began doing something daily, be it a creative endeavour, a new course of study, or a form of exercise. What prompted you to start it? What obstacles got in your way? When you felt resistance or missed a day, what called you back? Now reflect on what you gained from it and how you might apply that knowledge to a new daily creative practice.