How to Read This

In 2023, Rick Rubin published a book called The Creative Act: A Way of Being. It's organized around 78 short, titled reflections — not chapters exactly, more like pauses. Each one takes up a single idea about creativity and holds it up to the light. Some are a few paragraphs. Some go on a bit. None of them overstay.

The first time through, I read it slowly. Then, I read it again. As this page is being produced, I've read through this book at least a dozen times. After sitting with it for two years, I started to notice how naturally its ideas mapped onto the particular world I've spent the last two decades working in — the world of independent bike shops. Not because bike retail is art, exactly. But because building and running a shop requires exactly the kind of attention, patience, and honest self-examination that Rubin describes. It asks you to create something. Every single day.

This collection is my attempt to work through that territory. One piece for each of Rubin's 78 sections. The same titles. A completely different world.

Rubin's book is not about music, though he made a lot of it. It's not about any particular craft. It's about the conditions under which good work happens — how you notice things, how you stay open, how you keep going when the work turns difficult, how you know when something is done. The language is philosophical but the instincts are practical. That combination appealed to me.

I want to be clear about what I've done here. These pieces are not summaries or translations of Rubin's ideas. They're responses to them. I took the title of each section as a prompt and asked myself: what does this mean in a bike shop? Not as metaphor. Not as analogy. As a real, direct, operational question. What does Beginner's Mind look like behind a service counter? What does Self-Doubt cost a shop owner who's been at it for fifteen years? What is The Ecstatic in the context of fitting a customer on a bike that is genuinely, unmistakably right for them?

Sometimes the answer surprised me. That's usually a sign you're onto something.

The bike shop owners I've worked with over the years are a particular kind of person. Most of them didn't start a shop to run a business. They started one because they cared about something — the bikes themselves, the riding, the community around both — and the shop was how that caring took a shape they could sustain. Over time the business part grew real and demanding, and some of them lost the thread. Some held onto it. The ones who held onto it are interesting to me, and I've tried to create pieces that are useful to all of them — the ones still finding their footing, the ones mid-journey, the ones staring at a decision they're not sure how to make.

But I didn't create this only for shop owners. These pieces are for anyone building something in the bicycle business. Floor staff who are starting to wonder what they actually want. Service managers trying to hold a team together. People thinking about opening a shop. People thinking about closing one. People who haven't opened anything yet but know they will.

The underlying questions — What are we making here? Is it what we meant to make? How do we keep going when it gets hard? How do we know when something is done? — don't require a particular title or a particular number of years. They just require that you're building something, and that you care about what it becomes.

The pieces follow Rubin's sequence, and if you read them in order they build on each other in a way that feels intentional — because it is. The first cluster moves through awareness and attention, the kind of noticing that any good work depends on. Then comes the making itself: how ideas form, how craft develops, how momentum is both found and lost. Later sections move into harder territory — doubt, collaboration, what we tell ourselves, why we're really doing this. The final pieces deal with completion, release, and what comes next.

That said, you don't have to start at the beginning. If you're in a particular moment — opening week, a staff crisis, a slow January, the conversation you haven't had yet — find the title that fits where you are. These are short pieces. You can read one in ten minutes. You can sit with one for a week.

There's no quiz at the end. Nothing to complete. The work the pieces ask of you is internal, which means it happens on its own schedule, in its own time, whenever you're ready to bring your actual attention to it.

I've been in and around bike shops my whole adult life. The work has changed over that time — the bikes have changed, the customers have changed, the economics have changed — but the shops that I find worth talking about have one thing in common. The people who built them are paying attention. Not just to inventory or margins or the service queue, but to the experience they're creating. The feeling of the place. Whether it's becoming what they meant it to become.

That attentiveness is a creative act. It doesn't always go by that name in a bike shop. But that's what it is.

These pieces are an invitation to take that act seriously. To recognize that what you're building is not just a business. It's a place. And places, when they work, are made on purpose.