What habits make a
person more creative?
Creativity
is about connecting things that haven’t been connected before. You can’t
connect things that you don’t have in your brain, so I think one of the most
important creative habits is to take in a lot of content—and a wide variety at
that. In his book The Creative Curve my buddy Allen Gannett walks through the
science of how this works. But basically the most impressive and consistently
creative people (songwriter Max Martin, Netflix head of content Ted Sarandos)
tend to spend a huge amount of their time consuming content.
In
terms of habits on this front: I like to set aside 20% of my work time for
exploring things that are outside of my main work. This kind of exploration
expands your database and gives you more potential to make creative connections.
Someone
who is solely focused on their industry has less chance of making a creative
breakthrough than someone who can import perspectives and heuristics and ideas
from other industries. In psychology there’s a concept called “cognitive
entrenchment” that basically says it’s harder to be creative in a field the
longer you’re in it, if you don’t get outside much. This is why I’m convinced
that Einstein’s playing a mean violin—not to mention looking at patents in
umpteen different fields at his desk job—was helpful to him in his physics
work.
This
also gives you an excuse to have some fun. I give myself permission to write
articles about ice cream, to go into a Wikipedia wormhole about wormholes, or
to explore abandoned buildings and take pictures—because it all can be
potentially helpful for creativity at some point.
One of
my favorite examples of this is the old Soviet National Hockey Team dynasty
that I wrote about in my most recent book (Dream Teams). They
won almost every international championship for decades, in large part because
they had this old coach named Tarasov back in the day who made the players
learn to dance and play chess. He made them do ninja rolls in ice skates and
jump off trees. He taught them to look at the world and find anything they
could that they could bring back to hockey. And their creative playing style
surprised the shit out of their opponents—for decades.
Also
this habit of personal 20% exploration time has the added benefit of helping
you not go insane when you’re working on intense things.
Shane Snow,
award-winning journalist and author
FROM QUORA
No comments:
Post a Comment