FILED UNDER: INNOVATION
Humans are good at putting people into categories. This was especially useful when our biggest threats to our survival were other prehistoric tribes. But this is not so useful now.
One of the sneakier things that our categorizing brain does is limit ourselves when it comes to creativity. We identify people—and ourselves—as either creative or not.
It turns out that this is one of our brains’ dumber categorizations, because science shows that all of us have the mental capacity to be quite creative. We’re all pretty creative as children, and we slowly get less creative as we grow up. (Sir Ken Robinson makes a compelling case for this in this TED video if you haven’t seen it.)
But what is creativity exactly? It’s not creatio ex nihilo (creating something out of nothing). It’s chemistry. It’s cooking. It’s connecting things that have never been connected before.
In a nutshell, creativity comes down to…
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what ingredients you have to work with—what’s in your brain’s database of stuff it knows; and
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how we mix them—whether deliberately or subconsciously.
“Creative people” are just people who have a lot of things in their heads and a lack of inhibition in mixing them up. Genius creative people are those who can bake with the ingredients in their mental cupboards and make delicious things, whereas weird creative people are the ones who bake uninhibited but whatever comes out is strange and just sometimes edible.
The good news is we can all get better at this no matter how creative we think we are. (And genius creative people usually bake a lot of failed cakes before they get to delicious ones!) Plus, as you know from Dream Teams chapter 5, even the weird kind of creative can be extremely useful to problem solving.
Here are a few things I’ve been trying myself in an attempt to maximize my own creativity over the last couple of years—based on real science:
a) Fill your brain database up with disparate stuff
In Allen Gannett’s new book, The Creative Curve, we learn that science unequivocally says that the more knowledge in your head, and the more diverse that knowledge, the more creative potential you have. Gannett tells the story of Netflix’s Chief Creative Officer who watched every movie in the movie store as a teenager, and how that’s what makes him such a creative genius at Netflix. “You can’t have insights about things you don’t know anything about,” Gannett writes.
Snow Academy founder Shane Snow has been using this as an excuse to watch lots of TV and read lots of books and explore lots of things. The catch, though: 20 percent of the content he consumes has to be outside of his normal track. He says the more he learns about wormholes and ice cream and the history of profanity, the more creative connections he can make on top of the database of knowledge of behavioral science and storytelling that’s his main pursuit.
b) Do creative work somewhere that’s detached from your home/identity
For Dream Teams, Shane dug through a whole bunch of studies that show that we’re more likely to change our minds about things, or to consider exploring things that are outside of our ordinary boundaries, when we leave our familiar, comfortable environments.
“That’s why going on walks in the forest helps people get creative insights. That’s why I spent a couple months in Mexico this year when I was working on my most recent creative projects. Many of the walls that prevent creative connections in our brains are built on top of our home identity. When you leave home, they can crumble.”, he says.
c) Do creative work somewhere with a mild amount of distraction
Research also shows that a low level of noise or distraction keeps our subconscious brain from over-focusing to the point that it prevents creative connections from happening. A little music, a little coffee shop noise, actually helps creative connections slip through our mental walls.
If you don’t like coffee shops, another way to do get this effect is to put a song on repeat. <— Check this article out; you’ll love it!
d) Have a ritual to get you in the creative mood
Snow has a ritual: “My lucky coyote doesn’t actual give me luck. But when I put him down on the table by my laptop, I know it’s time to write. There’s real science to superstition like this, and what it is is not actual superstition. It’s psychological priming. That is to say, it puts us mentally in a mode."
So get yourself a lucky coyote, is what we're saying.