Creative people can’t explain it.

Be comfortable with chaos.

In another post in this collection, https://medium.com/thoughts-on-creativity/bad7c34842a2, Kevin Ashton discusses why creative people often don’t take time for others: because they’re too busy creating. This makes sense; I’m often shocked by how time flies when I’m lost in composing music or writing an essay. But I believe there is another reason: creative people can’t explain how they do it.

Sure, plenty of creative people have tried to illuminate their process. But like creatives who lose precious time by granting access to wisdom-seekers, those who describe their process in great length have always struck me as not very creative. That’s because true creativity is ultimately a gut-level, emotional endeavor.

When I’m at my most creative, it’s pure instinct, informed by a lifetime of experience. Sometimes more rational problem-solving skills are required…but if you spend too much time rationalizing—too much time creating by force of sheer logic—you aren’t maximizing your creative potential.

Creativity is a messy trip. It’s full of dead-ends, blind corners, U-turns, and breakdowns. There is nothing neat, predictable, or inevitable.

I’ve known countless people who thought themselves creative, but were determined to force their creativity into a tidy production line of clean rooms, conveyor belts, and carefully-controlled processes. Sometimes this approach works, but it mostly results in mass-produced, uninspired products.

I recently spoke to a 400-level university class on digital marketing campaigns. I had no clue what to tell the students. Even after pondering what I do for hours, it was extraordinarily difficult to distill. I wanted to say “Well, you just look at stuff and if you’re experienced enough, you know whether it’s good or not.” But that wouldn’t have made for much of a class.

Instead, I babbled about two universal constants: the difference between data, information, knowledge, and wisdom…and the importance of patterns in our work. Both important, but neither addressed how to be creative.

So perhaps the most important advice I could give anyone on creativity is this: be comfortable with chaos. Don’t try to contain creativity. Don’t sanitize it. You can structure it, but let chaos rule between the dividers. And don’t waste time trying to understand where something good came from (you won’t be able to duplicate it). Creativity happens, or doesn’t. And that’s about all there is to know.

Some will scoff at this, and say “This guy clearly has never thought about what he does.” Precisely.