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Creativity Reinvented

Assuming that you are willing to do the hard work of facing your inner fears and working through fail

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Mec J.C.
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31 views6 pages

Creativity Reinvented

Assuming that you are willing to do the hard work of facing your inner fears and working through fail

Uploaded by

Mec J.C.
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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While standing under the shade of an apple tree, Sir Isaac Newton saw

an apple fall to the ground. “Why should that apple always descend
perpendicularly to the ground,” Newton wondered. “Why should it not
go sideways, or upwards, but constantly to the earth’s center? Assuredly,
the reason is, that the earth draws it. There must be a drawing power in
matter.”

And thus, the concept of gravity was born.

The story of the falling apple has become one of the lasting and iconic
examples of the creative moment. It is a symbol of the inspired genius
that fills your brain during those “eureka moments” when creative
conditions are just right.

What most people forget, however, is that Newton worked on his ideas
about gravity for nearly twenty years until, in 1687, he published his
groundbreaking book, The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural
Philosophy. The falling apple was merely the beginning of a train of
thought that continued for decades.

Creative Thinking: Destiny or Development?

Creative thinking requires our brains to make connections between


seemingly unrelated ideas. Is this a skill that we are born with or one that
we develop through practice? Let’s look at the research to uncover an
answer.

In the 1960s, a creative performance researcher named George Land


conducted a study of 1,600 five-year-olds and 98 percent of the children
scored in the “highly creative” range. Dr. Land re-tested each subject
during five year increments. When the same children were 10-years-old,
only 30 percent scored in the highly creative range. This number
dropped to 12 percent by age 15 and just 2 percent by age 25. As the
children grew into adults they effectively had the creativity trained out
of them. In the words of Dr. Land, “non-creative behavior is learned.”
Similar trends have been discovered by other researchers. For example,
one study of 272,599 students found that although IQ scores have risen
since 1990, creative thinking scores have decreased.
This is not to say that creativity is 100 percent learned. Genetics do play
a role. According to psychology professor Barbara Kerr, “approximately
22 percent of the variance [in creativity] is due to the influence of
genes.” This discovery was made by studying the differences in creative
thinking between sets of twins.

All of this to say, claiming that “I’m just not the creative type” is a
pretty weak excuse for avoiding creative thinking. Certainly, some
people are primed to be more creative than others. However, nearly
every person is born with some level of creative skill and the majority of
our creative thinking abilities are trainable.
Now that we know creativity is a skill that can be improved, let’s talk
about why—and how—practice and learning impacts your creative
output.

Intelligence and Creative Thinking

What does it take to unleash your creative potential?

As I mentioned in my article on Threshold Theory, being in the top 1


percent of intelligence has no correlation with being fantastically
creative. Instead, you simply have to be smart (not a genius) and then
work hard, practice deliberately and put in your reps.

As long as you meet a threshold of intelligence, then brilliant creative w

Growth Mindset

What exactly are these “personality factors” that researchers are


referring to when it comes to boosting your creative thinking?

One of the most critical components is how you view your talents
internally. More specifically, your creative skills are largely determined
by whether you approach the creative process with a fixed mindset or a
growth mindset.
The differences between these two mindsets are described in detail in
Carol Dweck’s fantastic book, Mindset: The New Psychology of
Success (audiobook).

The basic idea is that when we use a fixed mindset we approach tasks as
if our talents and abilities are fixed and unchanging. In a growth
mindset, however, we believe that our abilities can be improved with
effort and practice. Interestingly, we can easily nudge ourselves in one
direction or another based on how we talk about and praise our efforts.

Here’s a brief summary in Dweck’s words:

“The whole self-esteem movement taught us erroneously that praising


intelligence, talent, abilities would foster self-confidence, self-esteem,
and everything great would follow. But we’ve found it backfires. People
who are praised for talent now worry about doing the next thing, about
taking on the hard task, and not looking talented, tarnishing that
reputation for brilliance. So instead, they’ll stick to their comfort zone
and get really defensive when they hit setbacks.

So what should we praise? The effort, the strategies, the doggedness and
persistence, the grit people show, the resilience that they show in the
face of obstacles, that bouncing back when things go wrong and
knowing what to try next. So I think a huge part of promoting a growth
mindset in the workplace is to convey those values of process, to give
feedback, to reward people engaging in the process, and not just a
successful outcome.”

—Carol Dweck
Embarrassment and Creativity

How can we apply the growth mindset to creativity in practical terms? In


my experience, it comes down to one thing: the willingness to look bad
when pursuing an activity.

As Dweck says, the growth mindset is focused more on the process than
the outcome. This is easy to accept in theory, but very hard to stick to in
practice. Most people don’t want to deal with the accompanying
embarrassment or shame that is often required to learn a new skill.

The list of mistakes that you can never recover from is very short. I think
most of us realize this on some level. We know that our lives will not be
destroyed if that book we write doesn’t sell or if we get turned down by
a potential date or if we forget someone’s name when we introduce
them. It’s not necessarily what comes after the event that worries us. It’s
the possibility of looking stupid, feeling humiliated, or dealing with
embarrassment along the way that prevents us from getting started at all.

In order to fully embrace the growth mindset and enhance your


creativity, you need to be willing to take action in the face of these
feelings which so often deter us.
How to Be More Creative

Assuming that you are willing to do the hard work of facing your inner
fears and working through failure, here are a few practical strategies for
becoming more creative.

Constrain yourself. Carefully designed constraints are one of your best


tools for sparking creative thinking. Dr. Seuss wrote his most famous
book when he limited himself to 50 words. Soccer players develop more
elaborate skill sets when they play on a smaller field. Designers can use
a 3-inch by 5-inch canvas to create better large scale designs. The more
we limit ourselves, the more resourceful we become.

Write more. For nearly three years, I published a new article every
Monday and every Thursday at JamesClear.com. The longer I stuck with
this schedule, the more I realized that I had to write about a dozen
average ideas before I uncovered a brilliant one. By producing a volume
of work, I created a larger surface area for a creative

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