creativity

Yeah, yeah, anyone can be creative

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Wall Street Journal, noted bastion of the arts and rumoured to be the inspiration for Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, has done one of those How to Be Creative articles. It’s called How to Be Creative:

The image of the ‘creative type’ is a myth. Jonah Lehrer on why anyone can innovate—and why a hot shower, a cold beer or a trip to your colleague’s desk might be the key to your next big idea.

How to Be Creative – Jonah Lehrer, Wall Street Journal (12 March 2012)

Another tug of the forelock, this time for 99U. Anybody can be creative, but they’re not. Says I. Lehrer, not so much:

…creativity is not magic, and there’s no such thing as a creative type. Creativity is not a trait that we inherit in our genes or a blessing bestowed by the angels. It’s a skill. Anyone can learn to be creative and to get better at it. New research is shedding light on what allows people to develop world-changing products and to solve the toughest problems. A surprisingly concrete set of lessons has emerged about what creativity is.

The full feature goes on to list exactly what you have to do in order to be creative. Please follow the instructions and let me know when your symphony is read.

I’m minded of Community, the comedy. In one episode, there’s a mobile phone app that you use to rate everyone else. Rather than stars or ticks, these ratings are called meowmeowbeenz. And Abed, an Aspergers’ character says at one point:

Meowmeowbeenz takes everything subjective and unspoken about human interaction and reduces it to explicit, objective numbers. I’ve never felt more alive.

Go read the full piece and let me know if you rate it two or more meowmeowbeenz.

Short version: managers can cock it up, seriously

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We’re creative, it’s what we do. We keep meeting people who say they aren’t creative and I think maybe we’re a bit guilty of reacting the wrong way. Sometimes we’re entrepreneurial – you don’t need to be creative, just hire me! – or, whisper it, we’re patronising. As we’re the creatives, we know what to do and everybody else is just a paper-pusher.

The thing is, people who are not creative do not understand us or what we do. And they don’t like that. They don’t like that one little bit. And what we don’t understand, we seek to control. So you get people like the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, telling our film industry that we should only make successful films. Idiot.

And you get people trying to structure our lives. Now, sometimes that is more than fair: I’m not saying a company that employs you shouldn’t object if you never bleedin’ turn up. But we get micromanaged. We get treated as resources. There’s the Hollywood Approach: if a project is good with one writer, it must be better with ten. Or the BBC Approach: if these creatives love their work so much, we can pay them less.

All you can do is get the work done and keep an eye out for places that think creativity comes in shrink-wrapped boxes off some shelves. But if we can’t fix the situation, we can at least be glad we’re not in this one. Bloomberg Businessweek reports on how 3M has gone from an innovative company to a far more efficient firm that just doesn’t innovate any more. It all happened when they hired a new CEO, James McNerney, and the firm seemed to take a collective “hang on a minute…” when he left again.

At the company that has always prided itself on drawing at least one-third of sales from products released in the past five years, today that fraction has slipped to only one-quarter.

Those results are not coincidental.

“Invention is by its very nature a disorderly process,” says current CEO George Buckley, who has dialed back many of McNerney’s initiatives. “You can’t put a Six Sigma process into that area and say, well, I’m getting behind on invention, so I’m going to schedule myself for three good ideas on Wednesday and two on Friday. That’s not how creativity works.” McNerney declined to comment for this story.

At 3M, A Struggle Between Efficiency And Creativity – Brian Hindo, Bloomberg Businessweek (10 June 2007)

It’s an ancient story and while the full piece is a long and deeply interesting read, would you mind going off to see how 3M is doing today? I can tell you that Buckley lasted at 3M until his retirement in 2013.

Another hat tip to the superb 99U for this.

Video: design and creativity by Michael Beirut

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The other day I was a bit sniffy about an interview with this designer, Michael Beirut – seriously, if he were any more famous you’d have heard of him – in which he said something about even boring jobs can be important because they touch so many people’s lives. So far, so fine, but then the examples he gave were so interesting I thought he’d list his sense of scale.

Not so much.

Watch him now in full flow in his own talk

Michael Bierut: 5 Secrets from 86 Notebooks from 99U on Vimeo.

Dar Williams on productivity and creativity

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I’ve said this before: I wouldn’t kill to write like songwriter Dar Williams, but I’d maim. She has a fine and long body of work, a now substantial discography but interestingly, she’s against being disciplined and productive. I’m obviously paying more attention and notice because I rate her so much but I think she makes these points particularly persuasively.

She makes them in an old interview on Songfacts where am unnamed interviewer presses on the point thisaway:

Songfacts: When you look at this collection, does it amaze you that you’ve accomplished what you have? I don’t want to ask you to brag, but there must be some moment of pride to be able to look at all these songs and re-visit some of your accomplishments over the years. How does it make you feel when you look at the songs that make up this collection?

Dar: Well, when I was in college, I put a stick-it on my computer, which was huge, that said, “Whatever you do is enough.” I had totally lost my mind, and I was coming back from that. So I would say to myself, you know, you’re supposed to do a ten-page paper, if you do one page you’ll get a D+. If you do two pages, you’ll get a C-, or if you do three pages you’ll get a C-. So that’s all better than an F, so why don’t you do a page?

And it was really, enormously helpful to me. And then a friend of mind was kind of coming back from her lost moment, and I put the stick-it on her computer, and she took a very playful approach to this paper, really appreciating the fact that she wasn’t writing about something very tangible, and just giving it a very playful approach. And she got an A. Her professor said he read it for his wife. It was like, by letting the pressure go and allowing herself to do what she could in that moment, she released a sort of joy in the meaning of the whole assignment.

So it’s like I have a little stick-it on my inner computer that says “Whatever you do is enough.” And I don’t force lines, and I don’t force myself to write every day, and somehow out of that came seven albums that don’t, to me, feel forced. And that’s the only thing I’ll boast about is that there’s nothing about it that to me sounds like I said, “I have to write for 2 hours a day,” with lines where there were no inspiration. I felt it when I wrote it. And I think that experience coming back from being totally insane and putting that stick-it on my computer was a good beginning to a less forced work ethic.

Dar Williams – Songfacts (3 November 2010)

Be sure to read the whole piece: this is all she says on productivity but it’s a wide-ranging interview and she’s smart across it all.

Thanks to @groggy for pointing me at this.

No Eureka moments

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Remember how Wuthering Heights has this weird structure where it’s really a story told to someone who tells it to someone who tells us? (I may have lost track there.) Here’s a story where I’m telling you something Time magazine says author Keith Sawyer recounts the story of researcher Vera John-Steiner who talked to creative geniuses.

She asked ’em “What nourishes sustained productivity in the lives of creative individuals?“ and she expected some bits about eurekas. Instead:

Creativity started with the notebooks’ sketches and jottings, and only later resulted in a pure, powerful idea. The one characteristic that all of these creatives shared— whether they were painters, actors, or scientists— was how often they put their early thoughts and inklings out into the world, in sketches, dashed-off phrases and observations, bits of dialogue, and quick prototypes. Instead of arriving in one giant leap, great creations emerged by zigs and zags as their creators engaged over and over again with these externalized images.

Strokes of Genius: Here’s How the Most Creative People Get Their Ideas – Eric Barker, Time (21 June 2014)
http://time.com/2907776/strokes-of-genius-heres-how-the-most-creative-people-get-their-ideas/

They’ll hate you anyway

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Most people do not create things. At least, they don’t create anything that many other people will ever know about. You can cook for your family for twenty years, nobody outside the ungrateful brats will ever know. You can save your multinational corporation a billion pounds and they definitely won’t tell the world. But if you do something that goes out to people, if you do create something or write something or produce something, you will be hated.

You’ll also hopefully be liked or even loved but the guaranteed one is hated.

In a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, researchers examined predispositions towards topics that subjects knew nothing about.

Some critics are harsh by nature, not because of what they see in the creation they are criticizing.

They found a reliable trend in the responses of certain participants. Despite being asked about a myriad of unconnected topics—and asked again about new topics at a later date, to confirm they weren’t just in a bad mood—they found two abnormal groups who they classified as “likers” and “haters.” The “likers” tended to rate most things positively with zero external information, and the haters… well, you know where this is going.

Born Hatin’ – Why Some People Dislike Everything, Gregory Ciotti, 99U

I’d like Ciotti to use the word ‘myriad’ correctly but we are many years into that process by which the misuse of a word becomes the correct use just because nobody can be bothered to stop it. Nonetheless, the rest of the piece is particularly interesting about how all this applies to what we write online – and why we get some hatred back.

David Bowie on creating things and moving on

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I’m not sure why it feels like there’s been a spate of talks becoming animated cartoons, but here’s another one. The animation is fine, I think I’d just like to concentrate on the audio as it’s David Bowie being rather interesting about separating audience reaction from one’s own perception of a piece of your work.

Via Nackblog

Creativity isn’t a separate deal

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Education gets so focused on exams that it becomes siloed into specifically what gets examined and when. There is less learning for the sake of learning and there is an inherent assumption that subjects are different to each other. There is then an assumption the creativity is something that gets labelled as a subject to be handled on its own.

So many of our gut thoughts about creativity are not true. You can be creative in math and science. Creativity can be integrated into the classroom experience. Creativity is not simply another word for “arts and crafts.”

The Dangers of Creativity Advocates – The Creativity Post

The Creativity Post’s full article is about how championing creativity is a good and great thing yet it can damage us too.

Elizabeth Gilbert: Success, failure and the drive to keep creating

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A smart, funny, quick TED talk by the author of huge hit Eat, Pray, Love (UK book and film, US book and film) – and specifically about how you have to keep creating, how you need to survive both success and failure. She has a particularly thought-provoking idea about what she calls going home to your creativity.