Quick question. Are you a creative person?
Yes? Great.
No? Well, we gotta talk.
We all tend to have this belief that creativity is innate. That some of us won the genetic lottery and the rest of us can’t do anything about it. It’s a quick and easy way to draw a straight conclusion and ignores the reality that creativity boils down to a process. Conscious or unconscious, it requires effort.
Creativity is connecting ideas. It’s the ability to take discrete pieces of information and weave the threads of thoughts together to create something new and beautiful. Think of it like a spark when two different things collide, and a new idea is born. Like how Archimedes had his Eureka moment. And how Leonardo da Vinci blended his passion for art with his scientific sophistication and blueprinted the ornithopter – a precursor to modern helicopters. And how Galileo, a skilled artist who knew the manipulation of light and shadows to create the illusion of depth and dimension, realized the presence of mountains on the moon! It was one of the groundbreaking moments in history and it happened because an artist within an observer was able to make sense of the data the observer was receiving.
This phenomenon of connecting seemingly unrelated ideas known as “associative thinking”, lies at the heart of creativity. The art of forging diverse concepts together. It’s the art of finding commonalities, and seeking out hidden relationships. It thrives on curiosity, observation, and an open mind. Associative thinking is a mental playground where ideas dance freely, transcending boundaries and traditional constraints that most of us prison ourselves in.
In this dance of wilderness, metaphors, and analogies lead and orchestrate a symphony of insights and inspirations. They are the secret ingredients that sprinkle stardust on our thoughts, unlocking hidden connections and breathing life into stagnant ideas. Take the case of James Dyson, the inventor of the bagless vacuum cleaner. By combining his understanding of industrial cyclones used in sawmills with the concept of suction, Dyson revolutionized the household cleaning industry.
Most creative breakthroughs happen when we shut off the inner critique or stop self-censoring on every line. It happens during moments of solitude, when we’re in the shower, when we’re talking to friends, or running on a treadmill. And when it doesn’t happen is when we’re glued to our screen. It’s extremely unlikely that we have specific time blocks in the day or even in a week which is only for ourselves. I’ll probably read a book, watch a movie or just sit there. But no. We’re checking into our phone the moment boredom hits our radar. Seasoned copywriters hijacked us into believing that every waking hour should be spent working. What their messaging should have been is, to spend every waking hour either working toward your dream or recovering. Believe it or not, recovery is the modern-day status symbol.
Recovery doesn’t mean laying in bed all day and scrolling and dumping your opinion on every stupid argument that would alter the course of the economy or whatever. It could be playing with a LEGO set, it could be cooking something for fun, or it could be chilling full throttle with our buddies. It doesn’t follow any textbook definition. It means time away from work so that your mental muscle can regrow itself. If not done in a controlled environment, constant strain for weeks on end will never lead to a sustained lifestyle and will never foster creativity. One misconception in the air is that we’re most creative when we’re tired. That’s a terrible misinterpretation. What it originally meant is, when we’re recovering from burnout, our brain does weird things within itself and that’s a kind of brainstorming we call creativity.
To put into perspective, our conscious mind, which is responsible for running all the pros and cons analysis, can process information equivalent to about 2 feet. And then we have the unconscious mind or the subconscious mind, which is responsible for all the gut decisions, and can manage information equivalent to 11 acres! Every conversation you had, every song you ever heard, every smell you ever encountered is stored somewhere in the brain. It’s filed somewhere, but we just can’t access it on demand. And just like the Zen, the Stoics, and the Buddhists, you gain access to that information by not trying to gain access to that information aka. take your recovery seriously and meanwhile, your brain will do that job for you.
There are two ways you can look at it, a) devoting all your efforts to one thing, and b) jack of all trades but master of one. If you only know how to do one thing really well, you’re kind of limited in the kinds of ideas you can come up with. But if you’re a generalist, you’ve got a whole bunch of different skills and experiences to draw from, and that can lead to some seriously innovative thinking. Plus, being a generalist is just more fun, right? You get to explore all kinds of different interests and hobbies, and that can make life way more interesting and fulfilling. And who knows – maybe your passion for pottery will inspire a new approach to product design. My approach to life is being the second best at everything rather than the best in one.
One counterintuitive thing about us humans is that we can’t make any perfect copies of anything. It’s our failure to copy things we admire is where we find ourselves. That’s just copying from one source. Imagine copying from 10 sources or 15 or even 25 sources all at once. 25 more places to infill our judgment that will amplify and transform the combination of 25 pieces of great work into our own creative output. As Wilson Mizner once said, “If you copy from one author, it’s plagiarism, but if you copy from many, it’s research.”
When someone says, I’m not a creative person, what they mean is they don’t have enough evidence in their past of remixing things that made them happy. Study great people. Copy from many. Remix unreasonable stuff together and create your original work. In the process of remixing original works, you’d discover the thinking behind the work, where they’re coming from, what they are based on, and many different ways that can be manipulated. You’ll get a glimpse of their mind and their way of thinking. If you execute that process long enough, then at some point you’ll adapt yourself to seeing the world like those great people. It’s not that some people are born with magic lenses. It’s how they trained their eyes that made them creative.