creativity (or lack there of).
Day 19 of 30 — Public Thoughts
(NEEDS MORE EDITING)
This started as a simple idea…
And quickly spiraled.
I think there’s more here so will need to go through edit and fully flesh out some of these ideas.
Have you had those periods of life where you just felt…
Inspired.
To create, to build…
You can hardly sleep at night, just ready for tomorrow to come.
But, then the day inevitably comes…
Where you’re staring at your laptop and… nothing.
Where’d the inspiration, the creativity go?
But it kinda sucks, because your at the mercy of creativity “striking”…
Except I’ve seen and read some things lately, from people MUCH more creative than me, that are leading me to believe this view of creativity is simply wrong…
So the first blow to the wall of creativity came from Billy Oppenheimer’s newsletters…
He shared Robert Greene’s definition of Creativity…
“Creativity is a function of the previous work you put in.”
The word that stand out word here is…
“Function.”
Like math? Like could there be a simple equation to creativity that I’m not taking advantage of?
But listening to an interview with Brandon Sanderson (a guy who’s shamefully admitted to going on vacation and accidentally writing a new book)
But he views creativity as “Recombination.” (Again pretty formulaic)
The way that human creativity works is recombination. We remix. That's what we're really good at. We don't come up with a new wholesale creature, we put a horn on a horse and look at that, that's cool. That's like how we create just on a fundamental level. We don't imagine a color that we've never seen, our brains aren't equipped for that. Train yourself to look at something you love and break it down to why you love it on a fundamental level and then rebuild it into something that is your own.
Full Interview(https://youtu.be/3U4QCamdLas?si=pGACVjbXoXa7tHRl)
Here I am waiting for creativity to “strike”…
Frustrated because I can’t just “think of a new color”
Yet the reality is…
That’s not what our brains are good at. Seems so obvious?!
The final blow though came from Austin Kleon’s newsletter…
During a recent phone call, my friend Matt Thomas told me he likes to take a high/low approach to balancing his input, which started when he was in grad school reading dense theoretical texts by day and chasing them with movies like Fast Five at night. I’ve currently got a good combo going: I’m reading Middlemarch and binge-watching Bridgerton. (As the poet Donald Hall wrote in Essays After Eighty, everybody who works with their brains all day needs to lighten up a bit at night: “Before Yeats went to sleep every night he read an American Western. When Eliot was done with poetry and editing, he read a mystery book.”)
Ok I get it!!
So it’s not some magical process, where one day you “wake up” creative and inspired…
It’s equation where you need the right inputs to get the outputs desired.
And it probably isn’t all dense theoretical concepts but a balance…
As that’s how we bring “new” ideas to a world…
Taking ideas from one world and bringing them to another.
While I think the formulaic side is an important concept…
Jim Collin’s idea of a Fly Wheel is really how I think about it…
Especially as it relates to creating leverage and momentum in a creative…
