The Art of Creativity
When the creative spirit stirs, it animates a
style of being: a lifetime filled with the desire to innovate, to explore new
ways of doing things, to bring dreams of reality.
Has this ever happened to you? You're out for a jog, completely
relaxed, your mind a pleasant blank. Then all of a sudden the solution to a
problem you've been mulling over for weeks pops into your head. You can't help
but wonder why you didn't think of it before.
In such moments you've made contact with the creative spirit, that
elusive muse of good—and sometimes great—ideas. Yet it is more than an
occasional insight. When the creative spirit stirs, it animates a style of
being: a lifetime filled with the desire to innovate, to explore new ways of
doing things, to bring dreams of reality.
That flash of inspiration is the final moment of a process marked by
distinctive stages—the basic steps in creative problem-solving. The first stage
is preparation, when you search out any information that might be relevant.
It's when you let your imagination roam free. Being receptive, being able to
listen openly and well, is a crucial skill here.
That's easier said than done. We are used to our mundane way of
thinking about solutions. Psychologists call this "functional
fixedness." We see only the obvious way of looking at a problem—the same
comfortable way we always think about it. Another barrier is self-censorship,
that inner voice of judgment that confines our creative spirit within the
boundaries of what we deem acceptable. It's the voice that whispers to you,
"They'll think I'm foolish," or "That will never work." But
we can learn to recognize this voice or judgment and have the courage to
discount its destructive advice.
Once you have mulled over all
the relevant pieces and pushed your rational mind to the limits, you can let
the problem simmer. This is the incubation stage, when you digest all you have
gathered. It's a stage when much of what goes on occurs outside your focused
awareness, in the unconscious. As the saying goes, "You sleep on it."
The unconscious mind is far more suited to
creative insight than the conscious mind. Ideas are free to recombine with
other ideas in novel patterns and unpredictable associations. It is also the
storehouse of everything you know, including things you can't readily call into
awareness. Further, the unconscious speaks to us in ways that go beyond words,
including the rich feelings and deep imagery of the senses.
We are more open to insights from the
unconscious mind when we are not thinking of anything in particular. That is
why daydreams are so useful in the quest for creativity. Anytime you can just daydream
and relax is useful in the creative process: a shower, long drives, a quiet
walk. For example, Nolan Bushnell, the founder of the Atari company, got the
inspiration for what became a best-selling video game while idly flicking sand
on a beach.
With luck, immersion and daydreaming lead
to illumination, when all of a sudden the answer comes to you as if from
nowhere. This is the popular stage—the one that usually gets all the glory and
attention, the moment that people sweat and long for, the feeling "This is
it!" But the thought alone is still not a creative act. The final stage is
translation, when you take your insight and transform it into action; it
becomes useful to you and others.
Inside Creativity
"The horse is here to stay, but the
automobile is only a fad."— President
of the Michigan Savings Bank advising Henry Ford's lawyer not to invest in the
Ford Motor Company.
Our lives can be filled with creative
moments, whatever we do, as long as we're flexible and open to new
possibilities—willing to push beyond routine. The everyday expression of
creativity often takes the form of trying out a new approach to a familiar
dilemma. Yet half the world still thinks of creativity as a mysterious quality
that the other half has. A good deal of research suggests, however, that
everyone is capable of tapping into his or her creative spirit. We don't just
mean getting better ideas; we're talking about a kind of general awareness that
leads to greater enjoyment of your work and the people in your life: a spirit
that can improve collaboration and communication with others.
Many of us do not see ourselves as being
creative, because we don't have much of an audience for what we do. In fact, we
focus too much on "Big C" creativity—the glamorous achievements of
geniuses—and overlook the ways each of us displays flair and imagination in our
own lives.
"We've become narrow in the way we
think about creativity," observes Teresa Amabile, a psychologist at
Brandeis University. "We tend to think of it as rarefied: artists,
musicians, poets. But the cook in her kitchen is showing creativity when she
invents a variation on a recipe."
Howard Gardner, a developmental
psychologist at Harvard, believes that what is true about Big C creators holds
for the rest of us. "Every person has certain areas in which he or she has
a special interest," he says. "It could be the way they teach a
lesson or sell something. After a while they get to be as good as
anybody."
There are others, however, for whom simply
being good at something is not enough—they feel a need to be creative. "So
what they do," Gardner explains, "is set small challenges for
themselves, like making a meal a little differently from the way they've made
it until now. This isn't going to get you into the encyclopedia. You're not
going to change the way cooking will be done in the future. But you're going
beyond the routine and conventional, and it gives you a kind of pleasure that
is quite analogous to what the Big C creative individuals get."
The more you can experience your own
originality, the more confidence you get, the greater the probability that
you'll be creative in the future. The idea is to develop the habit of paying
attention to your own creativity. Eventually, you will come to place greater
trust in it and instinctively turn to it when you are confronted with problems.
The ability to see things in a fresh way is
vital to the creative process, and that ability rests on the willingness to
question any and all assumptions. This is personified by Paul MacCready, one of
America's most prolific inventors. His best-known accomplishment is the
invention of the Gossamer Condor, the first human-powered airplane to fly a
mile.
Says MacCready: "To design the Condor,
I had to pretend I'd never seen an airplane before. If you have too much
knowledge of what didn't work in the past and what you think can't work, then
you just don't try as many things. The Condor needed to be light, and the only
way I knew I had the absolute minimum weight was if it broke occasionally. If
it broke about every 25th flight, that was just right. And that's the way we
designed it. Now, that's a terrible way to make an ordinary airplane, but it
was very good for this particular vehicle. Breaking wasn't a failure; it was a
success."
In creative problem-solving, a mistake is
an experiment to learn from, valuable information about what to try next.
People often pack in their efforts because they are afraid of making mistakes,
which can be embarrassing, even humiliating. But if you take no chances and
make no mistakes, you fail to learn, let alone do anything unusual or innovative.
Research suggests that creative
people make more mistakes than their less imaginative peers. They are less
proficient—it's just that they make more attempts than most others. They spin
out more ideas, come up with more possibilities, generate more schemes. They
win some; they lose some.
While creativity takes hard work, the work goes
more smoothly if you take it lightly. Humor greases the wheels of
creativity. When you're joking around, you're freer to consider any
possibility—after all, you're only kidding. Having fun helps you disarm the
inner censor that all too quickly condemns your ideas as ludicrous.
This is why in brainstorming sessions the
operative rule is that anything goes and no one is allowed to dismiss an idea
as too absurd. People are free to generate as many ideas as they can manage to
think of, no matter how wild they seem. In one of those ideas, there is often
the seed that can eventually grow into an innovative solution.
Researchers report that when teams of people are working together
on a problem, those groups that laugh most readily and most often are
more creative and productive than their more dour and decorous counterparts.
Joking around makes good sense: Playfulness is itself a creative state.
When creativity is in full fire, people can
experience what athletes and performers call the "white moment."
Everything clicks. Your skills are so perfectly suited to the challenge that
you seem to blend with it. Everything feels harmonious, unified, and
effortless.
That white moment is what psychologists
call "flow." In flow, people are at their peak. Flow can happen in
any domain of activity. The one requirement is that your skills so perfectly
match the demands of the moment that all self-consciousness disappears. If your
skills are not up to the challenge, you experience anxiety; if your skills are
too great, you experience boredom.
When skills and challenge match, then flow
is most likely to emerge. At that instant, attention is fully focused on the
task at hand. One sign of this complete absorption is that time seems to pass
much more quickly—or much more slowly. People are so attuned to what they're
doing, they're oblivious to any distractions.
Neurological studies of people in flow show
that the brain expends less energy than when they
are wrestling with a problem. One reason seems to be that the parts of the
brain most relevant for the task at hand are most active, and those that are
irrelevant are relatively quiet. By contrast, when one is in a state of anxiety
or confusion, there is no such distinction in activity levels between parts of
the brain.
Flow states often occur in sports, especially among the best athletes. In his biography, basketball
star Bill Russell describes those moments as ones of a nearly supernatural intuition: "It was almost as though
we were playing in slow motion. During those spells I could almost sense how
the next play would develop and the next shot would be taken. Even before the
other team brought the ball inbounds, I could feel it so keenly that I'd want
to shout to my teammates, 'It's coming there!'—except that I knew everything
would change if I did."
While in a flow state, people lose all
self-consciousness. The Zen idea of no-mind is similar: a state of complete
absorption is what one is doing. Says Kenneth Kraft, a Buddhist scholar at
Lehigh University who has spent many years in Japan, "In Zen the word
'mind' is also a symbol for the consciousness of the universe itself. In fact,
the mind of the individual and the mind of the universe are regarded ultimately
as one. So by emptying oneself of one's smaller, individual mind, and by losing
the intense self-consciousness, we are able to tap into this larger, more
creative mind.
The idea of merging with the activity at
hand, which is basic to flow, is intrinsic to Zen. "It's taught in Zen
that one performs an action so completely that one loses oneself in the doing
of it," Kraft explains. "A master calligrapher, for example, is
working in a no-minded way."
No-mindedness is not unconsciousness, some
kind of vague spaciness. On the contrary, it is a precise awareness during
which one is undisturbed by the mind's usual distracting inner chatter. Says
Kraft, "No-mindedness means not to have the mind filled with random
thoughts like, 'Does this calligraphy look right? Should that stroke go there
or here?' It's just doing. Just the stroke."
In a profound sense, all of our creative
acts express who we are at that moment. In his study of people who shaped the
20th century with their creative genius, Howard Gardner found that although
each of them had reached the limits of their domain, they shared what seems to
have been a childlike freshness in their approach to their work. "I think
every person—whether they are a Big C creative individual or a little c—is
drawing not just on their knowledge and mastery, but drawing fromchildhood."
"You have to have a coyote inside of
you, and you have to get it out."— Chuck Jones, the animator who created
Wile E. Coyote, on how to draw one.
Creativity takes root in childhood. For the
child, life is a creative adventure. The most basic explorations of a child's
world are creative exercises in problem-solving. They begin a lifelong process
of inventing themselves. In this sense, every child reinvents language,
walking, love.
"The kernel of
creativity," says psychologist Teresa Amabile, "is there in the
infant: the desire and drive to explore, to find out about things, to try
things out, to experiment with different ways of handling things and looking at
things. As they grow older, children begin to create entire universes of
reality in their play."
Our experience of creativity in childhood shapes much of what we do in
adulthood, from work to family life. But if creativity is a child's natural state,
what happens on the way to adulthood? The psychological pressures that inhibit
a child's creativity occur early in life. Parents can encourage
or suppress the creativity of their children in the home environment and by
what they demand of schools. Most children in preschool, kindergarten—even in
the first grade—love being in school. They are excited about exploring and
learning. But by the time they are in the third or fourth grade, many don't
like school, let alone have any sense of pleasure in their own creativity.
Amabile's research has identified the main creativity killers:
- Surveillance:
Hovering over kids, making them feel that they're constantly being watched
while they're working.
- Evaluation:
Making kids worry about how others judge what they are doing. Kids should
be concerned primarily with how satisfied they—and not others—are with
their accomplishments.
- Competition:
Putting kids in a win/lose situation, where only one person can come out
on top. A child should be allowed to progress at his own rate.
- Overcontrol:
Telling kids exactly how to do things. This leaves children feeling that
any exploration is a waste of time.
- Pressure:
Establishing grandiose expectations for a child's performance. Training
regimes can easily backfire and end up instilling an aversion for the subject
being taught.
One of the greatest creativity killers, however, is more subtle and so
deeply rooted in our culture that it is hardly noticed. It has to do with time.
Children more naturally than adults enter that ultimate state of
creativity called flow. In flow, time does not matter; there is only the
timeless moment at hand. It is a state that is more comfortable for children
than adults, who are more conscious of the passage of time.
"One ingredient of creativity is open-ended time," says Ann
Lewan, a director of the Capital Children's Museum in Washington, D.C.
"Children have the capacity to get lost in whatever they're doing in a way
that is much harder for an adult. They need the opportunity to follow their
natural inclinations, their own particular talents, to go wherever their
proclivities lead them."
Unfortunately, children are interrupted, torn out of their deepconcentration. Their desire to
work through something is frustrated. "We live in such a hurry-up way, so
again and again children are stopped in the middle of things they love to
do," Lewan says. "They are scheduled. That, more than anything, will
stifle creativity."
Creativity flourishes when things are done for enjoyment. When children
learn a creative form, preserving the joy matters as much—if not more—than
"getting it right." What matters is the pleasure, not perfection.
A stimulating physical environment is part of the equation. So are
specific attitudes that also foster the creative spirit in the young. In
creative families, there is a different feeling in the air; there's more
breathing space. The parents of creative children give them what may seem to be
a surprising amount of freedom.
That is not an easy lesson for many parents. "The main thing I've
learned from my own daughter, Kristene," says Amabile, "is not to
overcontrol, and how important it is as a parent to give her freedom and space.
When she was really little, I'd see her playing with a new toy or a game. And
she'd be trying to put something together or do something in a way that I knew
was wrong; it wasn't the way the game was 'supposed' to be put together. And
I'd rush in and say, 'No, no, honey, let me show you how to do it.' And as soon
as I did that, she'd lose interest.
"I realized that she was discovering new ways of playing with
games and toys. Maybe these weren't the way they were intended to be played
with. But she was being creative."
The Art of Creativity
When
the creative spirit stirs, it animates a style of being: a lifetime filled with
the desire to innovate, to explore new ways of doing things, to bring dreams of
reality.
When parents are supportive of their
children's creativity, they will discover what most
psychologists are now confirming: Most children have a natural talent for a
particular activity. By letting a child explore a range of activities, budding
talents are more likely to emerge, The essentials of children's
creativity—especially the importance of finding what they're excited about,
mastering the skills necessary to realize that intelligence, and collaborating with
others—are prerequisites for creativity in adult life. Perhaps nowhere is this
more crucial than in the work we do.
Creativity at Work
"People will soon get tired of staring
at a plywood box every night."— Daryl
F. Zanuck, head of 20th Century Fox, commenting on television in 1946.
The need for creativity is changing how the workplace is organized and what people do.
These changes center on the use and interpretation of information: the basis
for ideas. A company's future depends upon how well it acquires, interprets,
and acts upon information. Today the spread of information
technologies—including computers and data bases—is bringing about a sea of
change in the business world.
Yet how workers
interpret that information is as important as the information itself.
Interpretation is, in fact, a creative act. But the degree of creativity is
influenced by our feelings: our belief that we can speak without fear of
retribution, our feeling of being trusted by others, a confidence in our own intuition. All effect how we
respond to the information before us.
There are many ways in which the creative spirit can find expression in
the workplace: innovations in management, improvements in
distribution methods, or new ideas for financing a business. Creative ideas can
also be used to strengthen the organization itself by increasing the initiative
of workers. One such innovation is the elimination of restrictive job
descriptions that put workers in "boxes" and limit their performance.
Another idea is to share all financial information with all of the employees.
Elimination of traditional corporate secrets helps workers to understand the
larger reality of the business and encourages them to generate ideas of their
own to reduce costs and increase revenues.
Since creative problem-solving requires the psychological commitment of
the whole person, the modern workplace must undergo vital changes. From the
efforts of pioneering companies around the world, a set of key ideas are
emerging that can change the psychology of the workplace.
- Small
is better: Size affects creativity in the workplace.
Bigness by its very nature appears antithetical to the effective
expression of an individual's ideas. The best unit for creative work seems
to be at the scale of the extended family, where people can get to know
one another.
This suggests that
large corporations be broken into smaller, semiautonomous units. An advocate of
this approach is Jim Collins, a lecturer at Stanford University's Graduate
School of Business. "As our society has evolved from small organizations
to large ones," he says, "it has stifled innovation. Of course, there
are economies in doing things on a mass scale. But you lose one thing: that
creative tip. Massiveness breeds conformity."
- Climbing
together: A close-knit team, drawing on the particular
strengths and skills of each member of the group, may be smarter and more
effective than any individual member of that group. Yale psychologist
Robert Sternberg calls it "group IQ"—the sum total of all the
talents of each person in the group. When a team is harmonious, the group
IQ is highest. That places a premium on a leader who can create a smoothly
working team: a leader who knows the virtues of sharing, trust, and
encouragement.
The value of
collaboration is a hard lesson to learn in cultures like ours, where the
trailblazing lone hero has long been idolized, and where the goals of the
individual are so often placed over those of the group. But even those working
alone can learn the advantages of teamwork.
- Vanquishing
negativity: Apart from the structure of a company, the
attitudes that pervade its operations can enhance or thwart creativity.
One of the keys is building feelings of trust and respect to the point
that people feel secure enough to express new ideas without fear of
censure. This is because in the marketplace, imaginative thoughts have
financial value. But an unimaginative, unreceptive attitude destroys
opportunity. Someone who judges your imaginative thoughts, who refuses to
listen to a new way of thinking or simply criticizes it, is a creativity
killer of the first order.Cynicism and negativity are
enemies of the creative spirit.
- Valuing
intuition: The capacity for making intuitive decisions
is a basic ingredient of creativity. Intuition is trusting the vision of
theunconscious, letting go of the
self-conscious control of the thinking mind. It is so often opposed in the
workplace because it can't be measured or quantified or rationally justified.
But it has the ring of truth because it is grounded in the ability of the
unconscious to organize information into unanticipated new ideas.
Operating a business in the global arena demands innovative ways ofunderstanding and responding
to the needs of people. Business people who know how to listen to their
customers rather than just study figures and statistics will have a splendid
future, and those who are able to draw on their intuition will emerge as
natural leaders in this new business environment.
Many workers are no longer in search of a job that is simply a source
of wealth, status, and power, but rather one that—apart from assuring a decent
living—offers a sense of meaning and a platform for individual creativity.
Production as an end itself satisfies neither of those desires.
But there is a growing gap between what
many businesses see as their purpose and what more and more people want in their
work. The larger that gap, the more alienated people feel from their work and
the less of their creative energy is available. If a business fails to change
the environment for its workers, it may find it difficult to get or keep the
best people.
Anita Roddick, founder and president of the
Body Shop International, puts it this way: "I don't want our success to be
measured only by financial yardsticks. What I want to be celebrated for is how
good we are to our employees and our community. It's a different bottom
line."
From the Creative Spirit, by Daniel Golemen, Paul Kaufman, and Michael
Ray, copyright (c) 1992 (Dutton).
Be Aware
So often we go through our days on
automatic pilot, but lacking the Zen inner awareness. To a certain degree, we
like people and situations to be predictable; we enjoy the habitual and tend to
avoid surprises. But there is a downside to routine: We can easily become fixed
in our ways of seeing. Our expectation of how things are supposed to be
replaces our capacity to perceive. This can range from not seeing the new color
or cut of your partner's hair to not seeing a new approach to your work.
Here are two ideas for
refocusing your perceptions and deepening your creative capacity:
- Each
day, do one thing different from your normal routine. You might go to bed
at a new time, or take a new route to work or school. Or eat something you
would never dream of eating. If you are feeling more adventurous, strike
up a conversation with a particularly difficult person—maybe someone you
really can't stand—and treat this person in a completely new way. The more
pesky the person and entrenched the routine, the more likely you are to
shake up your habitual ways of seeing things. The key is not to think
about how to change things or to ask, "What is the best way to change
them?" but rather to change things for no other reason than just for
the sake of it.
What we see every day becomes ordinary to us. People,
sights, sounds, and smells seem to disappear from our awareness. They lose
their distinctiveness. One way of dealing with this is to invent a brand-new
pattern, a fresh way of seeing the commonplace.
- Begin
with something as basic as water. The idea is to notice the number of
times a day you come in contact with it and the extraordinary number of ways
it appears in your life: from a hot shower or the delicate beads of mist
on the leaves outside your window to the ice cubes clinking in your glass.
This technique of taking things out of their ordinary
context and creating a new pattern for them is a way of making the familiar
strange and opening them to a fresh and creative approach.
Ideas From The Twilight Zone
Brain specialists tell us that the
brain-wave pattern of a preadolescent child in the waking state is rich in
theta waves. These waves are much rarer in adults, occurring most frequently
during the hypnagogic state—a twilight zone bordering on sleep, where dreams and reality mix.
Thus a child's waking consciousness is comparable
to a state of mind adults know mainly during these dreamlike moments as they
fall asleep. This may be one reason a child's reality naturally embraces the
zany and the bizarre, the silly and the terrifying. A child's waking awareness
is more open to fresh perceptions and wild ideas.
With puberty, the child's brain changes to
resemble an adult's. The theta brain waves and the wildly creative flair of the
child begin to fade. Some people, however, continue to tap the richness of
theta states later in life. Thomas Edison put the hypnagogic state to work when
he was an adult. He had an unusual technique for doing this: He would doze off
in a chair with his arms and hands draped over the armrests. In each hand he
held a ball bearing. Below each hand on the floor were two pie plates. When he
drifted into the state between waking and sleeping, his hands would naturally
relax and the ball bearings would drop on the plate. Awakened by the noise,
Edison would immediately make notes on any ideas that had come to him.
Letting Go
When people reflect on those times when
they have been most fully creative and expressive, they often describe it as a
"letting-go" experience. It is at that point that creativity occurs.
It may be in doing vigorous exercise or in
concentrating on some simple, repetitive task. It may be just as you are
falling asleep, in dreams, or just as you are waking up. Many find that they
routinely get a useful insight in the shower. Meditating, stretching, playing
an instrument, dancing—these are other ways that people have of surrendering to
their own creativity.
The following two approaches can also help
move you from being stuck to letting go:
- Letting go
physically: Sit in a chair with your hands
resting comfortably on your legs. Tense your legs and keep them tense as
you successively tense your pelvis, rib cage, shoulders, neck, and jaw.
Hold all of that tense for a moment. Now relax.
You have just let go. How did it
feel?
- Letting go
mentally: Imagine that something you
mentally carry around with you—a strong emotion, belief, or thought that
blocks your way—is actually represented by something you are wearing. It
can be a shoe, watch, ring, or necktie. Imagine that this mental block is
contained entirely within the article you are wearing. The thought and the
article have now fused into one. Now, take it off!
Observe what you are
experiencing as you let go of this mental obstacle.
Creative People On Creativity
Spalding Gray,
writer
The Art of Creativity
When the creative spirit stirs, it animates a
style of being: a lifetime filled with the desire to innovate, to explore new
ways of doing things, to bring dreams of reality.
"I have a box beside my desk where I throw everything that's on my
mind about issues I haven't solved. It's like my life puzzle. I just dump that
box out and go through it and begin to make an outline. In that process I begin
to work what I would call creatively. Or like a creative editor. What signals
me that it's working is butterflies in my stomach. It's a feeling of being
turned on. When I first started working that's how I knew that these stories
were delightful, that they tickled me and would probably translate, although I
was never worried about that.
"Creativity is mainly
beginning to see the fabric of the structure, the structural fabric of the
overall theme of what I'm talking about. It's looking a little bit more into
the thematic center of it. It's looking into that and then shaping it so that
it is a predominate feature. Almost like an obsession or something that is
lighting like neon. The creative part is finding a structure and fabric that
has resonance.
"My process differs because most of the creativity goes on
publicly. I never pre-write the monologue. What happens is that I make public
discoveries. And the audience sees that I make that discovery. The creative
part of things is the part you have the least control over. Always, I find I'm
smarter and more creative publicly, in front of people. The monologue really
grows and has its life. There are public discoveries because I'm forgetting
myself in front of the people.
"Creativity is a quick,
clear message that translates into understated art that presumes and assumes
nothing of another person's learning or intellect."
Steve Dunleavy,
reporter
"Creative people are committed to
risk. The creative person always walks two steps into the darkness. Everybody
can see what's in the light... the real heroes delve in the dark."
Benny Golson,
musician
"Creativity comes by breaking the
rules, by saying that you're in love with the anarchist."
Anita Roddick,
founder of The Body Shop
"Creativity is cutting holes to see
through."
Ally Sheedy,
actor
"For me, the creative moment almost
always occurs during a dream state. I wake up certain that I have created
something but I am unaware of what it is at the time. The creation becomes
realized during a later conscious state in its entirety. But I recognize it as
the memory of an earlier idea."
John Waters,
director
"The most important thing I think to
get into a creative spirit is to make time every day to do it, so it becomes a
ritual and a routine. I write everyday from exactly eight o'clock to noon. I
have to create that order to be able to do it. But thinking it up certainly
happens all the time. Sometimes it's like work for me so I carry little
notebooks around. Generally I do it at the exact time everyday. But once I'm
into it I even dream about it.
"It's not possible to pinpoint before
I'm going to write something. I go out exploring horrible bars or different
places, even though I'm not going to write about that. I have to go explore
places so I purposely go to places I was always afraid to go.
"The creative spark is obsession that
makes you go through the drudgery of writing. The most fun of every movie I've
ever done is the moment you think it up. From then in it's downhill because you
have to make it real. You have to deal with the real. As long as it's in your
head, it's the most exciting, but it never gets better."
