How to be creative
01/06/09 22:10 Filed in: Musing
I wrote this piece for a young
designer who is planning a small publication as a show of support.
While planning it, I was asked to contribute to a management
coaching session at the Central Bank on creativity and decided to
work the two in tandem, using the text as a jumping off point for
discussions with the next generation managers of the bank about the
creative process.
What is creativity?
It isn't a lifestyle or a fashion. It can't be earned or legislated. It's a term that's abused in business when the results don't match the expectations, as in "we need to be more creative."
But being creative isn't that easy. This is why.
The biggest mistake that people make about the creative process is assuming that it's some kind of brilliant instinct or intuition.
It isn't, it's hard work and courage, plain and simple.
Without a doubt, there are people with a spectacular aptitude for a particular task, their muscles and mind work together with awe-inspiring precision to execute work that seems superhuman, but almost without exception, they were not born that way.
They had the good luck to discover two things. That there was something they were very good at that they liked to do and that if they kept working at it, they kept getting better.
There's an old joke that almost everybody over forty knows. Guy is lost in New York and stops to ask a sidewalk musician the way.
"How do you get to Carnegie Hall?" he asks.
"Practice, practice, practice," the musician replies.
Turns out it's no joke at all.
Malcolm Gladwell's new book, the Outliers, describes a common thread that runs through the careers of almost every successful person. Simply put, and without stealing any of the joy of reading the book, Gladwell discovered that it takes 10,000 hours of steadily working at anything to master it.
The things I am good at are the things I have been doing all my life and will probably do until I die.
Here's a bit of advice I can share. I can remember very little of what was drilled into me when I was at school, but I remember, with a startling clarity to this day, the best advice I ever got from a teacher named Archie Edwards. Archie was blind, taught classes with a pronounced indifference to the interest of his students, but was an engaging, brilliant man in simple conversation.
I used to read books onto tape for him and one evening he told me what I was in school to do. "You aren't here to learn things, you are here to learn how to learn."
The same should be said of life. I read more today than I did when I was cramming for exams, and it's because I'm entranced with the work that I do.
At the heart of creativity is input, the quality of what you expose yourself to will, inevitably, determine the quality of the work that you do.
The creative process is one of learning and embracing the new and unfamiliar, synthesising what you find and experimenting with it and then putting it to work in your chosen field.
I have long had an ill-disguised exasperation with the notion of artists and artistry. All too often in fields traditionally considered to be the havens of artistic endeavour, people rush to be described as an "artist" before giving their work a chance to find itself.
Years ago I read a book about screenwriting and found a great quote by Paddy Chayefsky, who wrote the film Network and the immortal line, "I'm mad as hell, and not going to take it anymore."
Chayefsky noted that art was work and that he hoped that everyday he could put in a good day's work. If it turned out to be art that would be great, if it didn't, he would be sure that he had given it his best effort.
Creativity is also about failure.
Failure has a bad reputation and it's undeserved. Failure is a good effort that didn't work out. People who play it safe and do as they are told rarely fail.
Every failure is a learning opportunity, a chance to analyse what went wrong, what worked out and to move forward smarter.
We all have a certain number of failures in us that we need to work through; the successful people we meet are simply those folks who have exhausted theirs.
If you want to be truly creative you must nurture a great curiosity about the world and your place in it.
You must keep learning. Read, view and listen to works that are just outside your experience and range, expand your comfort zone and stretch yourself by exposing your mind to the unfamiliar and unknown.
You must make mistakes and learn from them. If you embrace failure, you are unlikely to experience it more than once. If you aren't failing at something, you aren't trying hard enough.
You must teach and share what you know and open yourself to the review of your audience. I've learned more that was useful to me by fielding questions from students than I have from any planned course of study that was set for me. People who want to learn have inquisitive minds that will in turn stimulate your own thinking.
What is creativity?
It isn't a lifestyle or a fashion. It can't be earned or legislated. It's a term that's abused in business when the results don't match the expectations, as in "we need to be more creative."
But being creative isn't that easy. This is why.
The biggest mistake that people make about the creative process is assuming that it's some kind of brilliant instinct or intuition.
It isn't, it's hard work and courage, plain and simple.
Without a doubt, there are people with a spectacular aptitude for a particular task, their muscles and mind work together with awe-inspiring precision to execute work that seems superhuman, but almost without exception, they were not born that way.
They had the good luck to discover two things. That there was something they were very good at that they liked to do and that if they kept working at it, they kept getting better.
There's an old joke that almost everybody over forty knows. Guy is lost in New York and stops to ask a sidewalk musician the way.
"How do you get to Carnegie Hall?" he asks.
"Practice, practice, practice," the musician replies.
Turns out it's no joke at all.
Malcolm Gladwell's new book, the Outliers, describes a common thread that runs through the careers of almost every successful person. Simply put, and without stealing any of the joy of reading the book, Gladwell discovered that it takes 10,000 hours of steadily working at anything to master it.
The things I am good at are the things I have been doing all my life and will probably do until I die.
Here's a bit of advice I can share. I can remember very little of what was drilled into me when I was at school, but I remember, with a startling clarity to this day, the best advice I ever got from a teacher named Archie Edwards. Archie was blind, taught classes with a pronounced indifference to the interest of his students, but was an engaging, brilliant man in simple conversation.
I used to read books onto tape for him and one evening he told me what I was in school to do. "You aren't here to learn things, you are here to learn how to learn."
The same should be said of life. I read more today than I did when I was cramming for exams, and it's because I'm entranced with the work that I do.
At the heart of creativity is input, the quality of what you expose yourself to will, inevitably, determine the quality of the work that you do.
The creative process is one of learning and embracing the new and unfamiliar, synthesising what you find and experimenting with it and then putting it to work in your chosen field.
I have long had an ill-disguised exasperation with the notion of artists and artistry. All too often in fields traditionally considered to be the havens of artistic endeavour, people rush to be described as an "artist" before giving their work a chance to find itself.
Years ago I read a book about screenwriting and found a great quote by Paddy Chayefsky, who wrote the film Network and the immortal line, "I'm mad as hell, and not going to take it anymore."
Chayefsky noted that art was work and that he hoped that everyday he could put in a good day's work. If it turned out to be art that would be great, if it didn't, he would be sure that he had given it his best effort.
Creativity is also about failure.
Failure has a bad reputation and it's undeserved. Failure is a good effort that didn't work out. People who play it safe and do as they are told rarely fail.
Every failure is a learning opportunity, a chance to analyse what went wrong, what worked out and to move forward smarter.
We all have a certain number of failures in us that we need to work through; the successful people we meet are simply those folks who have exhausted theirs.
If you want to be truly creative you must nurture a great curiosity about the world and your place in it.
You must keep learning. Read, view and listen to works that are just outside your experience and range, expand your comfort zone and stretch yourself by exposing your mind to the unfamiliar and unknown.
You must make mistakes and learn from them. If you embrace failure, you are unlikely to experience it more than once. If you aren't failing at something, you aren't trying hard enough.
You must teach and share what you know and open yourself to the review of your audience. I've learned more that was useful to me by fielding questions from students than I have from any planned course of study that was set for me. People who want to learn have inquisitive minds that will in turn stimulate your own thinking.
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