Creators on Creativity and the Science of Creativity
Research lessons behind inspirational quotes about creativity
Who can resist a beautiful quote from an inspirational creator? Well-known creators — artists, writers, innovators, and entrepreneurs — provide insights about creativity based on their practice. Their words have the power to make us pause and consider their authors’ perspectives. But it is also helpful to ask whether there is research behind these quotes. Are they teaching us something that we could and perhaps should apply to our own lives?
Below are nine lessons where inspiration and science agree.
1. “Creativity takes courage.” Henri Matisse
Creative ideas are unconventional. It is never clear how others will react to them. Researchers at Yale University examined what goes on in people’s minds as they consider what to do with their ideas. They might see creative work as important, but also imagine how others will react (Would teachers or bosses be angry and think their authority is being challenged?) and they contend with self-consciousness and anxiety. Courage to create means making the decision to act — share creative ideas, pursue creative projects — in spite of the discomfort. Creativity is not just thinking outside the box, but also requires accepting challenging feelings and dealing with them in ways that enable us to act on ideas.
2. “If I were given one hour to save the planet, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute resolving it.” Albert Einstein
People associate creativity and problem solving. Yet, creativity scholars consider the key to creativity to be problem finding — identifying problems and opportunities for creation and innovation, exploring problem spaces, and examining different ways of approaching them. Scientists at the University of Chicago observed art students at work on a still life drawing and showed that most creative paintings were not done by those who got to work quickly and spent most time painting. Rather, the most creative art was done by those who spent most time arranging and rearranging objects they could include in their still life, weighing them, and feeling their textures, and who continued this process throughout their painting. This is not the case only for art, but also in business. Startups that scale without this prolonged process of problem finding are more likely to fail.
3. “Everyone who’s ever taken a shower has had an idea. It’s the person who gets out of the shower, dries off, and does something about it who makes a difference.” Nolan Bushnell
When we encounter something exceptionally creative, we tend to ask where the creators got the idea. The implication being that ideas are the most important part of creativity or the most difficult one. However, ideas are not in short supply. Brainstorming sessions readily generate ideas. The difficulty is developing those ideas and building them into something — works of art, new inventions, or ventures. Despite spending more than $60 billion a year on management training, organizational leaders agree that they fail to bring these ideas to life, resulting in a knowledge-doing gap.
4. “The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider’s web.” Pablo Picasso
Creativity is full of emotions. Emotions can inspire creativity — such as when an artist depicts a joyous scene, a novelist writes a story of generational grief, or when an innovation is born out of frustration that an existing product or service is too difficult to use. If we pay attention to our feelings, we can read their messages and use them to power creativity. Feeling sympathy shows us others’ pain and we can consider ways how to help. Anger points out injustice that should be addressed. What Picasso called being a receptacle, emotion science calls emotions containing information that can be used to inspire action.
5. “Without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth.” Carl Jung
The central attribute of creative individuals — artists, writers, scientists, designers, innovators — is their openness to experiences. They do not thrive on routine, but depart from it, explore new routes, and create connections between ideas that previously seemed unrelated. They are curious and have broad interests on which they draw for inspiration.
6. “Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do anything really good.” William Faulkner
Creativity requires taking risks. We take an intellectual risk when we cannot be sure that we know how to do something, but still try. Because creativity means doing something that hasn’t been done in a particular form before, we will almost certainly face intellectual risks. Creativity also involves taking social risks — risks to our reputation. Our original idea or work might not be accepted by others or might even elicit backlash. Creative individuals do not necessarily seek or enjoy risks, but they are willing and able to tolerate them.
7. “You can design and create, and build the most wonderful place in the world. But it takes people to make the dream a reality.” Walt Disney
Creativity is social, even when it does not seem like it. Inspiration for creativity can come from others. Artists can depict joy of a picnic party or draw attention to social ills like racial discrimination and violence. At work, ideas are often exchanged informally. Scientists build their research on that of others or in opposition to others. Creativity is social in indirect ways too. Support for creativity can come from outside of work and from colleagues and leaders. And finally, creativity is social in its effects — it reaches audiences it aims to delight or move, it tries to satisfy clients, or seeks engagement by users. Creative individuals do not have to be sociable or outgoing, but have to engage with others to make their ideas happen.
8. “You can’t just give someone a creativity injection. You have to create an environment for curiosity and a way to encourage people and get the best out of them.” Ken Robinson
Research at Yale University shows that when supervisors act in emotionally intelligent ways — they acknowledge and understand employees’ feelings, workers describe feeling challenged and fulfilled, motivated and confident. When supervisors act like emotions should be left at the doorstep, their employees describe being unappreciated and underappreciated, being aggravated and disappointed. The environment of psychological safety created by supervisors who act in emotionally intelligent ways enables workers to grow and gives them permission to create.
9. “This is how you do it: You sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until it’s done. It’s that easy, and that hard.” Neil Gaiman
We often seek hacks to the creative process. A set of instructions or steps. The truth is, there are no shortcuts to starting, working, and reworking. In the creative process, times of frustration or failure are not necessarily a sign of the lack of skill, but a symptom of non-existent roadmap of how to make our idea real. The only way to get to desired outcomes is by doing and redoing. There is no creativity without persistence.
References
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Csikszentmihalyi, M., & Getzels, J. W. (1971). Discovery-oriented behavior and the originality of creative products: A study with artists. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 19(1), 47–52. doi:10.1037/h0031106
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