On Being | krēˈādiv |
One Definition.
(Old Idea) — Creativity — (Old Idea)
This is, apparently, one of the definitions of creativity. That’s to say the combinational act that happens between two old ideas, the pzazzz! that links them both anew. We are often seduced by the notion that creativity happens, like the proverbial eureka! moment, in a period of intense focus and devastating convergence of mental faculty. Furrowed brows, light bulbs, sitting in a bath. A shocking combination. Creativity is linked perhaps too closely with our use of the term ‘create’, as in our notions of what we see as ‘created’. The Big Bang. Something where there was nothing. Some form of Creator. Its use often implies the monumental, the ultimate.
Let’s step away from that and take the wheel.
Why would this invention occur?
- I have lots of stuff here.
- I really want to take it there.
- The stuff is too heavy, and there is too far.
The understanding was that the circular shape possessed constant traction with the ground, and therefore progressive movement. A square did not, despite whatever the Flintstones projected. The creative genius did not lie in placing goods on top of the wheel and rolling it. It lay in comprehension of a connective element, namely the load bearing capacity between two wheels, enabled by the axle, which rose to prominence somewhere around 3200BCE in Mesopotamia. This united two circles with a line. It was of course due to prevailing conditions, that being a general appetite for transportation.
So What’s Your Point?
That the axle didn’t magically appear in a bathtub in the Fertile Crescent. The noble wheel was probably around since the earlier date of 3500BCE, devised with a horizontal use to create pottery. Taking a now ‘old’ concept, the potter’s wheel, and employing it to link another thorny old concept, that of ‘moving stuff’, was the inherent creative genius in birthing transport.
No genius meditated deeply on this quandary, and simply magicked a novel concept out of their singular ass. This shit was crowdfunded in the agora. — Plato
Creativity isn’t supreme novelty. It doesn’t have to completely elude your understanding due to its containing heretofore undiscovered concept matter. It is, happily, usually an iteration of something already there. The unholy marriage of two ideas laying around in plain view.
The trick is ‘simply’ to see the links.
How?
Well. There is no perfect ‘how’ that can hand you a roadmap to creativity. That would infer that the process is wholly understood, regulated, and demarcated. It is actually a quest to, at the risk of sounding too Yodaesque, ‘unlearn what you think you know’. Or whatever could be clouding your vision. It could be your immediate environment, too much caffeine, too little caffeine, the strictures of time in a work-mandated schedule, or simply the following statement:
Perfection is creativity’s biggest foe.
A common example would be finding oneself in a state of dire hunger in a new place (the first day of your city vacation) and wanting to locate the best possible meal for your first taste of local food. The notion that ‘this place looks ok but I bet there’s something better round the corner’ often leads to a growing resentment and uncertainty of the situation, coupled with a growing hunger that baffles any sense of logic. What constitutes that ‘perfect’ touchdown bite in a new place anyway?
This works for many people. Some possess an in-built drive to try and complete a given project to some undefinable level of completeness. A wholeness that is complete. It’s a real pain in the ass, but it can also be the fuel that propels hard work. It in no way means you are more effective, and it can be the biggest issue that obstructs you from actually achieving a goal or completing a given project remit. The tough part is therefore figuring out how to dismantle any notion of perfection, replacing it instead with an acceptance of continuous improvement. No matter how much sweat you put into creating that piece of work, if you switch gears and come back to it after a few days…it will seem in dire need of correction. Like your essays at school.
This is a healthy approach the first time round. Update the work with fresh eyes and wrap it up. Done. Complete and walk away.
Or not.
The more you tweak it, the more tweakable it becomes. This can lead to a fixation on completing the project only, and thus can diminish further creative streaks. It puts the finish line further out of reach because it’s the only thing you see. This is that somewhat pointless realm of ineffectiveness you travel to when you’re operating on the immediate expectations of people or the project around you instead of liberating yourself to forget about them or it. This is the bad side of ‘isolation’, what we would call ‘blinkered’.
So the opposite scenario, an ‘open mode’ if you will, is when you successfully manage to dispense caution to the Four Winds and peer into your pocket to see how many reserve f***s you have left to give. It’s momentary freedom from obligation, and that means you get to decide what to absorb. Information in front of you, the input of your colleague, or some other influencing factor. Is it greedy? No, it’s personal absolution from distraction to let your own mind distract you where it wants to.
It’s effective, and grown up.
For your mind has a plan to take you where you want to go.
Open Shut Mind.
As with most things in life, nature has a tendency towards balance and reciprocity. Thus, when it comes to working creatively, your mind can work in the two states of ‘open’ and ‘closed’. The wondrous open mode self, unencumbered by peripheral dross, is able to muse on problems and rationalize what is required to attack them. Not isolated, but switched on to calmly receive signals and input from around you that help you find what your mind is seeking.
The concurrent closed mode can be effective if you wield it correctly. Your closed mode state is actually required to engage solutions as revealed by your open mind. It battens down the hatches and reduces the damnable options that can divert your attention. This is the good side of ‘isolation’, what we would call ‘focused’. Both sides work in concert to illuminate the pathway, then walk you down it to the end.
When the open mode bears fruit, the challenge is to pick it. That’s it. It’s the key moment when your creative aptitudes are in sync with the challenge at hand. It’s the audible ‘click’ within your skull, and the gateway moment for entrance to the flow, your closed mode where focus brings that solution to ultimate completion. This is the ‘eye on the prize’ component, and a sensible amount of tweaking aside, this is where you have to figure out what is required to make the closed mode work. Which distractions do you exclude? Do you stare at a blank wall? Gaze out a window on to a rich vista of inspiration? Maybe it means enduring hours of terrifying peripheral procrastination before you pieces finally slot into place?
The above chart comes from a presentation by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi way back in the NeverNever of 2004. It proceeds at a stately pace, so (start from here) the skinny version goes like this:
The stimulation fundamental to the active application of creativity flows when the level of challenge of a given task spikes enough to match the level of personal skill you possess for that task.
So you’re good enough to take on a challenge, but not before you know you have what it takes!
You can push the envelope of your abilities, and to do so you may just need to keep nudging the dial between a state of arousal (when you are stimulated by challenge) and a state of control (when you are almost overconfident with your skill set). It makes the flow state sound impossible to enter, but when you approach with care you can see the entrance clearly.
Going back to Csikszentmihalyi’s wonder chart above, note how the emotions on the left (starting) side of the graph correlate with feelings of uncertainty or borderline refusal when beginning a task. These change as you acquire more project understanding and the scope of the task increases, piquing your interest as you dive in deeper. It’s when you’re equipped with both the confidence of knowledge and the excitement of what you can do with it that you can fully immerse and go with the flow. And by this we mean it’s ok to understand the limits of your own current expertise, so you aren’t taking on challenges that you may not currently be qualified to face.
“In human societies, knowledge is distributed.”
It’s. Ok.
State of Being.
Although creativity isn’t a simple beast to define, the above approach holds merit as it allows you to actively map your potential progress towards entering a creative flow state via one simple process.
How?
Analyze your current emotional state!
‘Being in the moment’, ‘being present’, ‘mindfulness’, these are all terms that have lately been popularized to counteract the vast ptotential for distraction we face. Close the browser, swich off the box, don’t feel the absurd need to be painfully collaborative with those around you all the time! When you can ask yourself how you are truly feeling at this moment (getting touchy feely here), you can ascertain how those emotions relate to your real progress on your creative work. You may then sense which of the following conditions you are experiencing, indicating you are in the flow:
- Involvement — deep focus. Serenely so.
- Ecstasy — removed from regular reality.
- Inner clarity — as Eddie Morro said in ‘Limitless’*:
I wasn't high, I wasn't wired.
Just clear.
I knew what I needed to do
and how to do it.
Read more: https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/movie_script.php?movie=limitless*(Admittedly he was railed on NZT-48, but the point of clarity is the promise of the drug).
Feeling any of these?
Unicorns. The final word.
Why? The unicorn symbolizes the frantic race to be special. Different. Rare. It’s the current cultural apotheosis of making it Big. It clouds one’s view and denies creativity to flourish.
Using the ‘U’ word scratches a worrying line in the sand. It’s a pretext for a jolly romp down the Yellow Brick Road toward some kind of perfection. And which side of the line you land on infers your success or failure. Though this is a tech sector-centric metaphor, and golly gosh it is a concern, it still applies to our societal fascination with the rainbow shitting, joyously galavanting pony as something systemically aspirational.
The unicorn has come to denote the quest for self-validation in uniqueness. While this is wrapped, marketed and consumed in all manner of joyously multicolored toss, it’s sad that we need to search outside of reality for such a powerful cultural metaphor. The rhino is practically the same, extant, though probably rarer than the damn unicorn!
Whatever creature becomes a totem for vaunted perfection, it is still a search for just that. There is nothing collectively stimulating about trying to attain such rarity. It denies the serenity required for just being, just focusing on the project at hand.
Okay, so this may be a rather drastic summation, but it’s called a metaphor for a reason. It’s not a call for the mass culling of aspiration, more a suggestion that if you constantly need to keep up with the Jones/田中/李/Nguyen/Garcia people (or whatever works in your hood), then you’re preaching to the crowd and not talking with yourself.
Creativity is different for all of us, and that’s why it needs to originate within each of us.
No animals real or mythical were harmed during the creation of this catharsis. I’d like to open up and explore what creativity means, how it enacts, and how we can let it happen in subsequent posts.
