The Cultivation of Habits for Creativity
First, buy a comfy chair
Just under a week ago, I moved into an apartment in Central Square. I had been at home for ten days in the interim between being “evicted” from Harvard and moving in here because as it turns out, renting an apartment takes more than just a quick look and signing some papers as I had mistakenly thought. After ironing out the details with the rental broker, heeding my mother’s advice that I could bargain a bit, I finally got the keys.
I was drawn to this apartment because it was exceedingly simple. The owners of the apartment are Chinese restaurant owners, and I can feel the slight tinge of Asian design through the apartment. The fridge — a musty off-white color with smooth contours — looks similar to ones I saw in Japan, and the shower head in the bathroom is made of a plastic from the same family. The floors with their waxy sheen were just refinished. It felt as though people had lived here before — it turns out the owners’ parents had lived here for numerous years — pressing character into the floors and weathering the apartment a bit, but the place had been sanded down and painted for someone new to live in. It felt open and clean but not jarringly new, which would have made me feel responsible for making it feel like a home. Just right for me to begin my post-college phase.
In reality, I am still in college until May, but the quarantine means that I am doing school work from home. But more so than doing school work at the moment, I am thinking. This new space has afforded me the breathing room to think. There is no furniture except the couch, bed, and desk I brought. No clutter. It also helps that absolutely nothing is going on outside of my windows, and for the first time in at least 3.75 years I am experiencing near-zero levels of “FOMO” (fear of missing out) — the god-awful millennial syndrome perpetuated by social media that stifles focus and creativity. I am finally in a space that feels psychologically conducive to the kind of work I want to do — creative work. (I still remain quite open to the possibility that there are many places that would be even better though.) I thought that the transition out of the college environment and into a single unit of space would allow for this transition, and I have been pleasantly surprised by how much that wishful thinking has materialized.
As I was moving out of my dorm, I went to the basement level of the building where people were hurriedly getting rid of items that they could not bring home to wherever they were fleeing. Sitting among piles of clothes hangers and sets of plastic drawers was this gargantuan black CEO-style desk chair. After checking that this chair did not have any major disabilities, I wheeled it back to my room to bring with me wherever I would go. I hauled my brother’s old desk out of our basement at home, and feeling like an accomplished repurposer of furniture, I moved the two items into my new apartment.
For the first time in my life I am actually working at a desk. In truth, at the moment, it is 2:07 a.m. and I am lying in bed writing, but the majority of my day-time work has been taking place upright in a chair, which is a dramatic change from how I was working in college. For writing, I find that lying down is actually best. I think I feel psychologically most coddled with my covers over me and my computer atop my stomach, but for other sorts of work being upright is better than prone. The hard desk chairs in college, however, were unappealing to me, and I found myself doing all types of work in bed.
Intuitively, I knew that certain environmental factors would increase my ability to work, but I did not take action before. I could have lived off-campus in an apartment, as a friend of mine who I met late in college did in his last year, and I could have bought a comfy desk chair. But there was a way things were done in college — the quite dominant norm was to live in dorms, regardless of what environment would best suit the individual, and the college gave us classic wooden chairs, which I never saw anyone swap out.
This is not to say that the college wronged us in any way, but rather that I have learned an important lesson. If something isn’t working for me, I might need to go off the beaten path a bit, and it might take a bit of activation energy, but it will be worth it in the end.
Lesson #1: Place yourself in environments where you can think best. And buy a chair you actually want to sit in.
Just as a space is important for being able to do work, a steady stream of inspiring ideas is important too. It is not enough, at least for me, to sit down at a computer and with brute force churn out something I am proud of. I am doubtful that much of anything that people enjoy reading or watching or seeing came from brute force, uninspired efforts. Thus, it is absolutely critical for me to have a steady stream of inspiring content from other people.
I was recently reading an article in the science magazine Nautilus that contained the following line: “a heavier flow of information can actually smooth the activity of neural processes, much in the way that a circle, represented by infinite points, maps a smoother circuit than a hexagon, represented by only six.” In my experience, a steady stream of new information smooths my mental processes. Rather than mulling over the same few ideas (or worries) again and again, a constant flow of new information keeps my brain moving and coming up with new ideas.
This stream comes from people — people I have met who are interested in things that I am interested in and talk about them in ways that I find interesting — pointing me toward works that I should seek out. One of these people in particular is an avid consumer of knowledge and truth who essentially sits around all day seeking out the “highest signal” ideas and information and passing it along to people. He is a wonderful, and unusual, source.
But there are many people who each play a different role in my life in connecting me to ideas I will find compelling. Friends who share book lists or email out newsletters. A conversation with my therapist that triggered me to seek out the term “empaths,” leading me to a book called Second Sight by a woman named Judith Orloff who, despite being quite controversial within the psychiatry world it seems, writes about internal experiences eerily similar to my own. Immediately when I find something I need to “download” into my brain, I write it down on an ever-growing list on Evernote because the stream is much too fast for me to gulp it all down as it emerges.
I find that the sources of the most inspiring content are people who deeply resonate with me for who they are as people. There are terms within the spiritual word cloud like “soul group” to describe these people, and although I hesitate whenever I am reading about something on the same page that has an advertisement for tarot card readers, this term really does capture what I am talking about.
Soul group: a group of people that share the same physical, spiritual, emotional, or mental levels with you at any moment.
Lesson #2: Seek out your “soul group” and find out what moves them. Eat that stuff up.
Organization has always been a struggle for me. Until recently, I would randomly type ideas or notes on the Notes app on my phone without titles and then never return to the notes because I was afraid of dealing with the mess of untitled notes that I had created. I realized that having a system of organization was a pressing need going forward if I was going to be able to be creative. A system of organization means that I do not have to stress about where I am going to write down an idea or how I am going to return to it, both of which dissuade me from writing down anything in the first place. A system gives my thoughts a home that I know will be safe for when I want to return to them.
The “how to organize my thoughts” problem was so paralyzing that I had been internally debating what my organization system should be for months (dare I say, years) rather than trying to map it out because I was not sure where to write down even the plan for my organization system. Whenever I heard someone say, in any context, “Oh, just take out a piece of paper and write it down!” I would become very stressed. What will I do with that loose piece of paper? Will I recycle it afterwards? Take a picture of it and lose it in the sea of photos on my phone? Or will I put it in my backpack and fish it out weeks later in a flattened paper towel roll shape? I think “Just write it down!” is actually terrible advice. I think the advice we need to be giving people is: Develop an organization system.
I have started using Evernote to write down everything that I want to keep track of. I have notebooks for each course I take, a notebook that serves as my journal, a notebook for public writing, a notebook to write down things I want to talk about during therapy, a notebook to write down my dreams, and so on. The organization system is a work in progress, as I am still figuring out where to write down content that could fit in multiple places. I am also wrestling with the dilemma of deciding what is private and what could be public. There is always room for growth through iteration. Nevertheless, this Evernote system is allowing me to be the most organized I have ever been.
Lesson #3: Don’t just “write it down.” Think about where you want to write things down, develop a system, and then use it for everything.
I am an absolute sucker for whatever algorithms social media people use to hook people on their websites. Facebook is my drug of choice. As I work to remove this drug from my life, however, I have learned that I can reap certain benefits of this addiction. Facebook and computers in general, with their instant feedback — click and receive new stimuli — have made me like them a lot. Maybe it’s also the LED screen. There is something about our brains that really, really likes screens. Just look around. This is a problem, but it has a silver lining.
I started hijacking my like for being on screens by replacing the content on the screen with iBooks. I have finally gotten to the point, about two years after starting to use iBooks, where opening the app feels easy, just another thing I do on my computer besides e-mail and schoolwork. I read all of my books on iBooks. This is for a number of reasons — books become searchable, I can highlight lines and then easily access a document with every line I highlighted, and I don’t have to cart around books or god forbid clutter an apartment. I’m only kidding, I think books add aesthetically to environments, which is a downside of keeping them all on my RAM. But one of the main reasons that I read on iBooks is that I noticed I could hijack the lure of screens to focus for longer, read more efficiently, and read more.
Lesson #4: Hijack bad habits and repurpose them toward your goals. I don’t know what other contexts this is possible in, so for starters: Use iBooks.
My senior year of high school, my economics teacher told my class about one of his daughter’s tricks for productivity. Whenever his daughter had to do something she did not want to do, like her laundry, she would ask herself: Will I want to do this any more sometime later? If the answer was yes, she would wait and not bother doing the task in the moment. Maybe in the morning, when she was more awake, hauling her laundry downstairs and touching her feet on cold concrete would not feel as onerous. If the answer was no, she would do it right then.
This strategy maximizes the amount of time you spend actually enjoying what you’re doing. Of course, there are other factors to consider, like whether clean clothes are needed right now, but as one strategy to use among the mix in decision-making, it seems useful.
This strategy is part of a broader one I have been thinking about to maximize creativity which is to do things when you feel inspired to do them. That added energy, like the little bullet on Mario Kart, will put extra steam into your engine and improve the quality of your work. I have heard advice to the contrary, such as that action comes first and motivation comes second, but I think the genuine desire to take action should precede action for the greatest results.
I was reminded of this lesson tonight, when I was about to go to bed but something did not feel right. A set of ideas which had been marinating in my brain for a while coalesced into an idea for this article, and I felt a surge of energy to write, right then, at two in the morning. Going to bed felt like it would have been a waste. It’s just an hour and thirteen minutes later, and I am glad I did. I am sure this would have taken much longer, and been much worse, had I written it in the more clinical hours of the morning.
Lesson #5: Do things when you feel the urge to do them. If there’s something you don’t want to do, ask yourself, will I want to do it more later?
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