Where Do Ideas Come From?
Since publishing a series of posts on dating and living in the last couple of weeks, I’ve been asked
several times how I came up with the idea to see dating as a kind of metaphor
for life. The immediate source of the story was pretty mundane – someone asked
me a question about another article and I used going on a date as an example to
illustrate my answer, and thought “hey, there might be something to this more
generally!”
But the response to those stories has gotten
me thinking about ideas and creativity more generally. Writers are asked all
the time about where we get our ideas. So are musicians, painters, actors,
designers, and other creative people. It’s a source of fascination for many,
who perhaps see in the talent of others something they feel is missing from
themselves.
Interestingly, most of the creative people I
know don’t see their creative impulses as particularly exclusive. What
separates the creative from the not-so-creative isn’t so much the ability to
come up with ideas but the ability to trust them, or to trust ourselves to realize them. That
trust lies at least in part in knowing we have the skills to bring forth a
finished product from an initial idea, which is why so many creative people
tend to take a craftsman’s (or woman’s) approach towards their work (and resent
those who squander their ideas by refusing to do the groundwork needed to make
them real), but skill is only part of it. There are plenty of skilled but
not-particularly-creative people – hacks – in every field. What separates the
creative from the not-so-creative is the willingness to take risks with ideas,
to push both the idea and the self beyond the safe and comfortable.
There are two schools of thought about where
ideas come from. One is the “artist as antenna” concept, in which ideas float
in some barely perceptible aether waiting for someone to pick them up, the way
a radio picks up a song when it’s tuned to just the right frequency. This is
Keith Richards waking up in the middle of the night with the main riff from
“Satisfaction” fully-formed in his head.
The second school holds that ideas are the
product of hard work and thoughtful concentration. “It’s just work,” says Andy
Warhol to Lou Reed about songwriting in Reed’s album, with John Cale, Songs
for Drella. Sit
down with a pad and pencil and think, and don’t get up until you have
something! This school is the writer grinding out his or her 4 pages a day, the
mad poet storming up and down the street in search of the perfect word to
express exactly what s/he’s feeling, and the designer who sits down with a
brief and just starts working.
The reality is probably somewhere in the middle
– we get ideas from within ourselves and from without, or more to the
point, from the interaction of the two. It is in the active
engagement of the artist with his or her world, through preparation, conscious
attention, curiosity, effort, and a dash of serendipity, that ideas are born:
- Preparation:
Ideas
come to those who are prepared to receive them, whatever the origin. Scientists
have ideas about science, not poetry – unless they have also practiced at the
craft of poetry. And vice-versa – it’s the rare poet who is struck by an idea
that advances our understanding of molecular biology. Skillful musicians have
ideas that translate into beautiful songs, and skillful writers create daring
novels that illuminate our lives. Those who haven’t prepared themselves to be
creative rarely are.
- Attention:
Paying
attention to the world around us – whether the immediate activities of people
in our vicinity or the distant events reported through the media, or anywhere
in between – is one source of ideas. You’ve heard the saying that “necessity is
the other of invention” but it also takes someone paying close enough attention
to recognize that need in the first place.
- Curiosity:
Creativity
often comes from the drive to understand and take things apart, literally or
figuratively. It stems from the desire to know “what if…” and to follow that
question until it gets somewhere interesting.
- Effort:
Whether
you’re the antenna or the bricklayer, creativity takes a commitment to work.
“Ideas are cheap,” the saying goes. “Execution is hard.” Ideas need to be captured, given attention, followed up on, and committed to a
plan of action, or they disappear back to wherever they came – whether “out
there” or deep in your unconscious mind. And they rarely come back.
- Serendipity:
Serendipity
is two things. First, it’s the luck to be at the right place at the right time,
to be Newton at exactly the moment the apple falls from the tree. The second is
the openness to making connections between unrelated things or events – to see
in a bathtub a lesson about physics, or to see in a date a lesson about life.
These elements of creativity all play
together, of course. How many millions of baths were taken before Archimedes
had his “Eureka!” moment? Yet it was Archimedes who was prepared to
understand what it meant when he climbed into his bath and saw the water level
rise, Archimedes who paid attention to what he saw, Archimedes who was curious
enough to wonder what was happening, Archimedes who was willing to do the
follow-up work to translate his experience into a general principle about
volume and displacement, and Archimedes who just happened to bring all this
with him into the bath on that fateful day.
The thing is, these are all things each and
every one of us can cultivate in her or his own life. They aren’t God-given
gifts reserved to the few. And they apply well beyond the world of the arts –
marketers, parents, teachers, factory workers, salespersons, electricians,
computer programmers, and just about everyone else face situations that call
for creative responses, though we often miss them for lack of preparation,
attention, curiosity, effort, or serendipity. Start making a conscious effort
to develop these elements, though, and I bet you’ll start engaging with your
world more creatively in short order.
http://www.lifehack.org/articles/featured/where-do-ideas-come-from.html?ref=mail&mtype=daily_newsletter&mid=20170206_customized_editor_pick&uid=687414&hash=707e797f7e757e6d794c856d747b7b3a6f7b79&action=click
No comments:
Post a Comment