Have you read Twyla Tharp’s book The Creative Habit? I quoted a passage in one of my books and she made me pay 250 bucks. It was worth it because the passage was so great. Here it is:

I begin each day of my life with a ritual: I wake up at 5:30 A.M., put on my workout clothes, my leg warmers, my sweatshirts, and my hat. I walk outside my Manhattan home, hail a taxi, and tell the driver to take me to the Pumping Iron gym at 91st Street and First Avenue, where I work out for two hours. The ritual is not the stretching and weight training I put my body through each morning at the gym; the ritual is the cab. The moment I tell the driver where to go I have completed the ritual.

Twyla Tharp is one of the world’s great choreographers. Her day is spent in the dance studio, doing tough, hard physical work. Yet she starts before dawn at the gym. Why? Again, it’s about the Inner Game, the Mental Game.

Twyla Tharp is not so much preparing her body as readying her mind. With each repeated motion—a hamstring stretch, a shoulder press, a Downward Dog pose—she is reinforcing for herself the conviction that “I am a professional, I am a warrior, I am an athlete,” all three of which translate directly to “I am a dancer, I am a choreographer, I am an artist.”

In a way, Ms. Tharp is brainwashing herself. Deliberately. She is using habit and ritual to reinforce her identity as an artist and to power her for the day as a creative force. When she leaves the gym and heads to the dance studio, she can honestly tell herself, “Nothing I’m going to do for the rest of the day will be harder than what I’ve just done.”

That’s power. That’s the mindset of the professional, the warrior, the artist.