1.Know The Better Question
A little while back author and investor Tim Ferriss walked me through the four things he does on a regular basis to support long haul creativity. His whole list is really good, so we’ll start there:
Daily Exercise: at least an hour, needed to lower anxiety levels and clear the head. Interestingly, the research shows that weight training is better than aerobic training for quieting the inner critic.
Keep a Maker Schedule: Carve out dedicated periods for key tasks that require creativity. If complex problem-solving or analysis is required, Ferriss recommends at least four hour blocks. And this also means no distractions—turn off email, phone, messages, skype, twitter, facebook and all the rest.
Long Walks: Without music or podcasts or distraction, purposefully letting the mind wander. This switches off spotlight attention and switches on the default mode network—aka, the imagination network.
Surround yourself with driven people who are good at spotting your assumptions. “It’s not just people who make me question my assumptions,” Ferriss explains. “The people who are the very best at this are the ones who hear my question and responds with: ‘You’re asking the wrong question. The better question is….’” This last point is really important. While feedback can often be a hindrance to in-the-moment creativity, it’s essential for the long haul. But choice in feedback giver is critical.
This becomes doubly important the more successful you get. If you make a name for yourself in creativity people tend to (initially) trust your creative ideas a little more than they should and too frequently give you the benefit of the doubt. This is no bueno. To make sure he’s getting the feedback he needs, Ferriss hunts for folks who help him reframe his question, rather than just play devil’s advocate. This is dead on. People who play devil’s advocate often do so out of reflex—this means they tend to lack the technical sophistication to really help and often derail creativity through generalization. Reframers, meanwhile, take the idea farther faster. By providing a better question, they’re providing a new launch pad. This provide momentum. And for long haul creativity, nothing is more fundamental than momentum.
2.Momentum Matters Most
Speaking of momentum...there is something deeply exhausting about the year-in and year-out requirements of imagination. Every morning, the writer faces a blank page, the painter an empty canvas; the innovator a dozen directions to go at once. The brilliant tidbit of advice that has helped me solve this slog came from Nobel Laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Marquez said that the key was to quit working at the point you’re most excited. In other words, once Marquez really starts to cook, he shuts down the stove. This seems counter-intuitive. Creativity is an emergent property. Quitting when most excited—when ideas are really emerging—seems like the exact opposite of what you should do. Yet Marquez is exactly right. Creativity isn’t a single battle; it’s an ongoing war. By quitting when you’re most excited, you’re carrying momentum into the next day’s work session. Momentum is the key. When you realize that you left off the day prior at someplace both exciting and familiar—someplace where you know the idea that comes next—you dive right back in, no time wasted, no time to let fear creep back into the equation, and far less time to get up to speed.
3.A Few Thoughts on Sobbing, Shouting, and Punching Hard Objects
I’ve written nine books. Two are in drawers. Seven are in stores. All share one thing in common: at some point during their writing, I ended up on the ground, sobbing, shouting, and punching the floor.
About five years ago, I heard author David Foster Wallace tell a story about the difficulty of creativity. “It never fails,” he said, “at least once a book, I end up on the ground, sobbing, screaming and punching the floor.” The obvious point here is yes, creativity is insanely frustrating for everybody. The core question for Long Haul Creativity is what to do about it? Turns out, researchers have discovered, that frustration is actually a fundamental step in the creative process. From a technical perspective, this seems to have something to do with the limits of working memory and the requirements of creativity’s incubation period, but no one is exactly certain. From a practical perspective, this means reversing our traditional relationship with frustration. Since this emotion is a basic step in the creative process, frustration is actually a sign of progress, a sign of movement in the right direction, a sign that that much needed breakthrough is ever closer to showing up.
4.Sir Ken Robinson Weighs In On Frustration
I just got back from presenting at the World Business Forum in Milan, Italy, where I got to spend some time with creativity expert and all around great guy Sir Ken Robinson. Sir Ken pointed out that long haul creativity requires a low-level, near-constant sense of frustration—and this is different than the just discussed moment-of-madness version of frustration. Moment-of-madness frustration is what makes you punch the ground. The version Ken is describing is about motivation. It’s a near-constant itchy dissatisfaction, a deep sense of what if, and we can make it better, and the like. To illustrate this, he told me a story about George Lucas. Robinson, apparently, popped the question: “Hey George,” he said, “why do you keep remaking all those Star Wars movies?” Lucas had a great answer: “In this particular universe, I’m God. And God isn’t satisfied.”
5.Everybody’s Got A Job To Do
There’s this mistaken assumption that creativity is mostly a solitary pursuit. This may be true, but the business of creativity is always collaborative. Every published journalist has had to brave a gauntlet of editors, copy-editors, managing editors ad infinitum. Movies and books and plays and poems are more of the same. Startup entrepreneurs always have investors—etc. And this brings me to an important point: everybody’s got a job to do. And everybody wants to keep that job. In writing, this means that even if you turn in something perfect, my editors are still being paid to edit—so they will. This is why every time I turn in a piece of finished work, I intentionally include a few horrible lines. It gives my editors something to do. It lets them feel useful. It keeps their grubby little hands away from my damn perfect sentences.
6.Creativity Is A By-Product
Contrary to popular opinion, creativity is almost always the by-product of passionate hard work and not the other way around. Olympian and gazillion time X Games gold medalist Gretchen Blieler—one of the more creative snowboarders in history—puts it this way: “You don’t wake up and say: today I’m going to be more creative. You do the things you love to do and try to get at their essence and allow things to emerge.”
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