3 Paths Toward A More Creative Life
Want to be more creative? Sometimes
it’s just a matter of giving yourself the space to think,
Everyone can learn to be more
creative, but to become very creative, I’ve come to believe you need to lead a
creative life. In watching my best students, in examining the lives of
successful entrepreneurs, and in seeing the process of the great Native
American artists who I know, it is clear that how they live their daily lives
is crucial to their success. I realize that it sounds very “zen-y” (which is OK
by me), yet I come to this realization not through a search for spirituality or
clarity but from simple observation.
Creativity is in such demand today
that when we apply for jobs, when we join organizations, or when we just meet
other people, we are asked to present our creative selves. But we can’t do that
unless we understand the nature of our own creativity, locate the sources of
our originality, and have a language that explains our work. If you are one of
the growing number of “creatives,” or want to become one, you need to lead a
creative life. This is what I talk about with my students. Through outside
speakers, deep readings of key classics, and intense classwork, we explore the
nature of leading a creative life and develop a series of concepts and a
literacy that allows us to understand ourselves and communicate and convince
others of the validity of our work and the resonance it has in society and the
marketplace.
It’s a work in progress, of course,
but here are three specific ways that can help you lead a creative life.
As important as it is for you to
lead a hyper-connected and super-stimulating life as a creative person circa
2013, it is just as crucial for you to be self-reflective and mindful. The last
time I had dinner with Bill Moggridge, the father of interaction design, the
cofounder of Ideo, and then head of the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, I
asked him where he went in New York to spark his creativity. He quickly said
the High Line. Walking the High Line was where he would go to think and ponder.
Steve Jobs was a walker. Mark Zuckerberg is a walker.
Walking alone is an excellent
strategy for freeing your mind up to bring together different areas of
knowledge.
For good reason. We are all so
connected these days and distracted by constant interactions. Our time is spent
responding, reacting to others or absorbing, taking in new information. But we
often lack the space, the time, the moment to integrate that knowledge, connect
those dots, generate that creativity. Slowing down and disconnecting provides
that space. That’s why showers or lingering over that cup of coffee before
starting off to work are good places to start your creative life. Taking a walk
is particularly good. Walking alone is an excellent strategy for freeing your mind up so that you’re
able to bring together different areas of knowledge. Finding that neighborhood coffee shop
to hang
(not the one where you meet your friends) and just think can be important. You don’t need hours and hours of
disconnection but just a few to be mindful of your challenges and how you might
meet them. You need to allow your creativity to flow without interruption and
to let your mind to fill up.
Bill Buxton, a principal researcher
at Microsoft Research and a polymath’s polymath (he was building a Cree birch
canoe using traditional tools and techniques the last time I saw him in
Toronto), says people spend more time learning about the music they love than
the fields they work in--especially in high tech. Prospecting and mining the
past to gain a deep understanding of where things come from and why they exist
is hugely important to creating meaningful new things. Buxton points to the
example of the 1993 IBM/Bell South touchscreen smartphone called the Simon that
was a likely inspiration to Jony Ive for the wildly successful iPhone. Bob
Dylan “mined” Woody Guthrie. Van Gogh found inspiration in Jean-Francois
Millet. Being mindful of the roots of your knowledge domain, your industry,
your creative space can bring greater understanding--and more success--to your own
creative efforts.
Mine the past to gain a deep
understanding of where things come from and why they exist.
Being mindful also means
understanding the intellectual context and history of key ideas. The UX (user
experience) is perhaps the single-most important concept in business today, but
our understanding of that experience is shallow. We know enough to be “user”
focused but not enough to really know what that means. Read Walter Benjamin’s
work on aura and fashion, and you realize that our most powerful attraction to
things come from a dynamic engagement, not a passive experience. In Praise
of Shadows, Junichiro Tanizaki describes a Japanese entrancing relationship
to the smell and look and feel of cooking rice. Digging deep into meaning and
understanding, you discover that some wonderful things “beckon” us, we interact
with them emotionally, we want to stay engaged. In an era of social media where
we all want to participate in the making of our lives, user engagement (UE) is
more important than UX.
Being meaningful is important for
leading a creative life because it allows you to understand the deeper meaning
of relationships, outside and inside the marketplace. That includes our
relationships to things and our relationship to one another. For example, we
just celebrated Valentine’s Day. But do you really know what a gift is? We are
mired in swag, “free” gifts we give away at nearly every event. But do you know
the intense underlying psychology, social, political, and economic dynamic that
goes with giving and receiving a gift? Knowing the anthropological and
sociological literature on the gift--it is extensive because the gift is
perhaps the most celebrated and common of all human rituals--provides meaning
to your creativity. Kickstarter is all about the gift as a mechanism of
patronage, art production, and, I would argue (and cofounder Charles Adler
would disagree), shaping a new kind of capitalism.
We now know that we can all learn to
be more creative. It’s not a rare “aha” moment that comes to a lucky few. To be
very creative, however, requires a deep mastering of both knowledge and skills.
Creativity is mostly about two things--connecting different bodies of knowledge
in new ways and seeing patterns where none existed before. Connecting dots of
disparate information (shoes and the Internet, anyone?) usually involves “fresh
eyes.” It plays to the strengths of the younger. Seeing things differently,
often taking existing things and connecting them to new technologies, can be
serendipitous. But we can train ourselves to look for serendipity constantly
and everywhere. We can learn to play at connecting this and that to see what it
creates. We can make serendipity work for us day to day.
Pattern sight is the ability not
only to see the rare “odd duck” but to routinely look for that duck and see it.
Learning pattern recognition takes
longer. Pattern sight requires you to master the skill of looking for what
should and shouldn’t be there. It’s the ability not only to see the rare “odd
duck” but to routinely look for that duck and see it. That’s what good birders
do. That’s what hunters, hikers, skiers, and all outdoors people do. It takes
time to learn patterns of information, which is why you need to spend a lot of
time “in the field.” We call that “experience,” and you’ve seen that whenever
you’re in a situation with someone who just “knows” what’s coming next without
being able to explain it. That person is reading the patterns. This mastery is
not about fresh eyes but wise eyes.
Leading a creative life is
increasingly the path people are choosing, for good reason. In an era of
volatility, uncertainty, chaos, and ambiguity, being creative is perhaps the
best way to navigate your career and succeed. It gives you the right skill set
and mindset. But a creative life can offer more than business success. Keith
Richards perhaps says it best in his biography Life: “There’s a certain
moment when you realize that you’ve actually just left the planet for a bit and
that nobody can touch you. . .When it works, baby, you’ve got wings.” Richards
is a textbook example of leading a creative life, which is why his biography
has become required reading in my classes. But you don’t have to be a rock star
to tap into creative flow--just start by taking a walk.
Written by: Bruce Nussbaum
http://www.fastcodesign.com/1671921/3-paths-toward-a-more-creative-life
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