Rick Rubin: Treat Your Work as an Offering to God and Sales Stop Mattering

Source: Diary of a CEO | Published: 2026-09-21T05:00:16Z

Rick Rubin argues that AI lacks a grounded worldview — it's merely an aggregate of existing human perspectives. True creativity, he says, always comes down to the creator's unique point of view.

This scene baffled Rick Rubin for years. He'd worked with countless rappers, every one of them writing lyrics down, revising repeatedly. Jay-Z's process happened somewhere Rubin couldn't see.

That Word: Indefensible

Rick Rubin has been thinking about a word lately: indefensible.

In ordinary usage it's a harsh condemnation — something so wrong it cannot be justified. But in the context of creation, he thinks it's actually a good thing. Maybe a necessary one.

What he means is: you do something you can't explain, something you cannot rationally justify, but you feel a calling toward it.

He offered a concrete example. About a year ago, someone named Andrej Karpathy coined the term "vibe coding" on Twitter. The same day, someone paired the phrase with a photo of Rubin wearing headphones, eyes closed, hand on a mouse — and it spread quickly online. The photo had nothing to do with vibe coding, but over the next few days, friends sent him hundreds of related posts.

He had no idea what vibe coding was. But he felt energy converging on him from different directions. "In the past, I would have smiled and moved on. But writing The Creative Act taught me that the universe is always sending us invitations. The question is whether you choose to respond."

His response was a throwaway tweet: "Tools will come, tools will go, only the vibe coder remains."

His tweets typically get ten or twenty thousand impressions. The next day, that one had 1.5 million.

He then decided to write a book about vibe coding — dropping everything else. "I can't explain it. I can't tell you it was a good idea. I just felt invited to participate in something that was happening."

Labels Make You Smaller

Someone asked how he identifies himself: music producer? Creative consultant? Artistic coach?

His answer: any label you put on yourself makes you smaller. "None of them fit. We are beyond labels."

Labels are useful shortcuts at cocktail parties. They're also walls — defining what you "should" and "shouldn't" do. The more successful you become, the narrower you often get, because success gives you every reason to stay inside your label and ignore all the invitations that aren't "your business."

He mentioned his identity as co-founder of Def Jam. He started the label at twenty-one, then left. When he brought 99 Problems to Def Jam, the label's president — president of the label he had founded — told him: "This is a great song, but it will never be a single. It doesn't sound like anything else on radio."

That song became one of the most recognizable hip-hop singles in history.

Creativity Gets Beaten Out of You

He believes everyone is born creative — and that it gets beaten out of them.

School teaches us to repeat what teachers say, sit in chairs, follow rules. "Rules aren't there to help you. Rules are there to control you." We are not taught to think freely or creatively.

So most people fall into a different trap: using creativity as an instrument toward some end — a promotion, a raise, capital, a title. The work becomes a means, never an end in itself.

When someone tells you "you can't sing" or "you're a bad cook," that assessment gets embedded in you and becomes an identity you accept as true. But "we're not good" is usually just wrong information, not reality.

He uses a simple analogy: give someone two slices of pizza and ask which tastes better. They won't say "I think the other people might prefer this one" — they'll say "this one tastes better to me." He wants to help people recover that capacity for honest self-perception.

System of a Down

In the late 1990s, a band from California was playing underground clubs in Los Angeles — about two hundred people a night. Rick Rubin believed in them.

He took their music to Kevin Weatherly, the program director of KROQ, the most important alternative rock station in California. The song was Sugar.

Weatherly listened and said: "Not only will we not play this song, we will never play this band on this station." The reason: it sounded too crazy, too unlike anything else on air.

A year later, that song was the station's most requested track.

Two weeks ago, Rick Rubin watched System of a Down play to roughly eighty thousand people per night across two shows at a stadium in Paris.

He applied the same logic to Linkin Park. The band was among the last representatives of the rap-rock wave — already enormously successful. When they began working together, two paths were available: keep doing what their fans expected, or find the next sound the band actually wanted to make. They chose the latter. Half the existing fans didn't like it. But the other half did, and new listeners arrived. "More importantly, they set themselves up for a longer career. If they'd kept doing rap-rock, that genre was dying."

He brought up Radiohead's Kid A. He didn't like the album when it came out. He loved The Bends and OK Computer — Kid A was entirely foreign to him. Today it might be his favorite Radiohead record.

He Never Sets Goals

He has no five-year plan, no career roadmap, and has never made a New Year's resolution. "I can't imagine that. It sounds like a terrible limitation."

Someone offered the navigation analogy: you get in the car, set a destination, then drive. His approach sounds more like just driving — no destination.

"Yes. I've always been that way." He recalled an intense period in Los Angeles, sometimes producing eight albums simultaneously in a single year. On his one day off each weekend, he made no plans — just drove, music loud, drifting down the road, maybe ending up somewhere, maybe turning around two hours later.

"You might get lost." "That's fine."

He said that if he'd had goals in advance, he could never have anticipated the moments when the impossible became possible. He's grown comfortable with this state. "I'm on this journey. Accepting the unknown is part of it."

Forty Years of Meditation

He began practicing Transcendental Meditation at fourteen. His teacher gave him a mantra, and from that day forward he has never spoken the sound aloud or shared it with anyone.

He stopped practicing in college. After moving to California, he started again. The first time he sat back down to meditate, he realized: "This is part of me. Even after five years away, it's still mine — it's part of how I see the world."

He has meditated with Tom Petty, Johnny Cash, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers before recording sessions. He considers it "the most practically actionable thing I can name — something that genuinely changed me."

Someone pointed out that his fiancée meditates twenty minutes every morning and asked why he doesn't try it with her. He paused for a long time and said: "That's a good question. I don't have a good answer."

He describes the mechanism of meditation like this: it lets you set down all the ordinary worries, and you start to see what's beneath the surface. "For me, surface things aren't that interesting. I'm interested in what's underneath."

Age Thirty-Three

He grew up with the wind at his back — supportive parents, never a challenge to what he was doing. Music moved from hobby to business, and it kept working.

At thirty-three, he had an important professional relationship — one of the mentors he respected most in the music industry. That person was forced out due to internal politics. The person who took over called him and said: "I read your contract. I don't like it. We'll talk when you're back in California."

That was it. Just that sentence.

For most people, this would be a business problem to manage. For him, the foundation gave way. He started having panic attacks, couldn't sleep, was ill for a long time. Even after everything resolved — he left the company, started a new partnership — the sense of collapse persisted for years.

"Like a balloon being punctured. I was no longer that balloon."

He said that before this, he could not genuinely understand what artists going through personal crises were feeling. After it, he could. "I know what it feels like when the bottom drops out."

He would not press a button to erase the experience. "Everything that happened brought me to where I am. I wouldn't change any of it."

The Work as a Gift

He was sitting in a lifeguard chair in Hawaii when it suddenly became clear what he had been doing for forty years.

"We are making a gift. For God."

He means this literally. The work is not for numbers, not for the market, not for chart positions — it's this: using everything you have, making the best thing you can, as an expression of love and gratitude, offered up to something greater.

"When you see it that way, sales and streams become trivial. This is the best we can do, as an act of devotion. No metric competes with that."

This explains why, whenever an artist says in the studio "this sounds like a single," he always changes the subject. "We have one job: make the best thing we're capable of. We're going after greatness — timeless greatness."

It's also his creative standard: when he loves a piece of work enough to put it in front of the world, he's done. Everything that comes after — how people respond, how it performs commercially — is not his concern.

"Any thought beyond that point completely destroys the creative process. The moment you're thinking 'what happens next,' the house of cards collapses."

The Universe Fills the Vacuum

For years, Jay-Z made Cristal champagne a symbol of hip-hop culture — namechecked in songs, ordered in clubs. Then Cristal's owner made dismissive remarks about the hip-hop community, essentially saying he couldn't stop them from drinking his product.

Jay-Z heard it, and decided: starting today, the brand disappears. Out of his music, out of all his venues.

The decision was based on principle, not calculation. He had no plan for what came next.

"And then, almost immediately, someone came to him and said: I'm thinking about starting this brand — do you want to be involved? They had one bottle design. Gold. Beautiful shape."

Jay-Z joined. The brand became Ace of Spades. LVMH bought a half stake at a valuation exceeding $600 million. Jay-Z cashed out approximately $315 million and retained the other half.

Rubin sees a pattern here: when you do the right thing, you create a vacuum, and the universe comes to fill it. "Jay wasn't looking for something good to happen. But he acted on principle, gave up something he'd been synonymous with, and the universe responded: fine, you can represent something that's actually yours."

He extends this logic to every life decision. A relationship that no longer fits, but you hesitate to end it — "what if I meet someone better in the meantime?" He doesn't think that logic works. He believes that when you recognize something is wrong, actively close it out, and create space, that's when something genuinely good can enter.

AI Has No Point of View

He thinks AI is an extraordinarily powerful tool that can be used for good or ill. Like the internet. Like the printing press — the Catholic Church tried to ban it because they didn't want information to spread.

But he's skeptical about whether AI can be a true creative agent.

"Everything we've talked about today regarding creativity is about a unique perspective — how you see the world. AI doesn't have that. AI is the aggregation of all existing human perspectives. It's not looking at the world from a specific position."

Ask it the same question on three different days and you might get three different answers. That's not a stable worldview. That's an aggregate.

He compares AI to crate digging in the record era: producers used to flip through old vinyl searching for a few seconds of drums worth sampling. AI might be an infinite music generator, occasionally producing a fragment worth sampling. But end-to-end replacement of artists — he doesn't see it happening, because what we want from artists is their point of view.

He mentioned a personal experience: he'd loved a song for two months before discovering it was AI-generated. "The song immediately changed for me." Knowing that singer didn't exist, the song lost something.

But he also acknowledged the paradox: you loved it when you didn't know. "Are you against it because of how it was made? That doesn't quite hold up. You either like it or you don't."

He points to Andy Warhol: the most famous silkscreen works were never touched by Warhol himself. He simply said "use this photo of Marilyn Monroe, process it this way" — the studio did the printing. Creation has always been in the conception, not the execution.

"The creativity is in the prompt. Warhol's prompt. Hitchcock's storyboard. That's where the art is. Not who put paint on canvas."

Johnny Cash and Tom Petty

When he first worked with Johnny Cash, they recorded in Rubin's living room — not to make an album, but to get to know each other. He asked Cash to sing songs he loved, songs he'd memorized as a child, songs that meant something to him.

They tested a hundred songs. The plan was to choose ten, then go into a proper studio with a band and record them. They did. They found excellent musicians — but nothing they recorded sounded better than the living room versions. They tried another band. Same result.

"Eventually we realized those living room recordings — the ones we never intended for anyone to hear — had something in them that no produced version could match."

Those recordings were released as they were, and became some of the most important work of Johnny Cash's career.

Tom Petty taught him something different: about being in time, in tune, every word audible. Petty would stop during a playback and say: "That word should be plural, but you can't hear the 's.' We need to re-record it."

Their first album together, Wildflowers, took nearly two years. "No one was pushing. Just — there's still progress, so keep going."

That's the distinction between perfectionism and procrastination. Procrastination is rooted in fear of releasing work into the world — the longer you wait, the more pressure builds. The perfectionist's delay comes from somewhere else: an honest perception that the work isn't ready yet.

The Rhythm of Making Things

In his book, he describes four phases of creative work: seeding, experimentation, refinement, and completion.

The seed phase requires trying many things — it takes as long as it takes. Experimentation is watching what the seed wants to become. Refinement is when you see its shape and begin to edit. Setting a deadline before those three phases are complete is meaningless, because you don't yet know what you're making.

Only when a project is roughly ninety percent finished does he set a final deadline — because by then you know what it is. The last ten percent won't make or break it.

He used a Neil Young album as an example: they recorded for an entire week, the band performing so poorly he thought "they can't finish these songs — they might never finish these songs." At the end of that week, Neil Young told him: "Don't worry. Next week will be better."

The following week, they started playing back the first week's recordings — and found that many takes everyone had written off as failures contained something. Most of the album used material from that week: the week everyone considered a disaster.

This is another version of what he calls "the miracle": between the perception of failure and what actually happened, there is sometimes a gap. You don't always know immediately.

At the end, he said: the main thing is not to listen to anyone, be honest with yourself, work hard, never give up, and don't put unnecessary pressure on the work. Find a way of living that leaves you completely free when you create.

Then, if you're lucky, that dream version takes over your entire life — not just the part you're passionate about.