The Art of Impossible

by Steven Kotler

  The solution: cast a wide net.

  Read twenty-five to fifty pages a day in a book that’s far outside your specialty. Choose a topic that sits at the intersection of multiple curiosities—as identified in chapter 2, when we learned the passion recipe—but one that has nothing to do with your normal work. As you’re reading, give yourself time to daydream. When an idea catches your attention, pause and give your brain the chance to make a connection. Don’t worry about making that connection. The brain does pattern recognition automatically. If you supply it with ammunition, it will find ways to make the fireworks.

  SEVEN: THE MACGYVER METHOD

  The TV character MacGyver is an excellent problem solver. This is why Lee Zlotoff, who created the character, had to become an excellent problem solver. “To write episodic TV,” explains Zlotoff, “I had to produce an enormous amount of creative material under very tight deadlines. There was no time to get stuck.”18

  After years of this work, Zlotoff noticed that whenever he did get stuck, the answers he sought never appeared in the obvious places—like when he was sitting at his desk plugging away at the problem. Rather, he got his answers when driving or taking a shower. It happened so frequently that, whenever Zlotoff got stuck, he would leave his office to drive home and take a shower.

  Eventually, Zlotoff decided to figure out why this was happening. What he discovered is that lightly stimulating activity, like taking a shower, occupies the conscious mind, but not too much. It serves as an incubation period, allowing us to pass a problem from the conscious to the subconscious. And the subconscious is just a much better problem solver. It’s far faster, far more energy efficient, and has nearly unlimited RAM—meaning, while the conscious mind can handle about 7 bits of information at once, there appears to be no limit on how many ideas the subconscious can juggle.

  More important, Zlotoff also discovered that you can program the subconscious ahead of time. You can give the brain a problem to solve consciously, then use lightly stimulating activity to activate the subconscious, then reengage the conscious mind on the backside of that activity to retrieve your answer. Zlotoff calls it the MacGyver method.

  Here’s how it works:

  STEP ONE: PROBLEM IDENTIFICATION

  Write down your problem. Literally. Speaking it aloud won’t work. Telling a friend doesn’t help. Writing, because of the relationship between tactile experience and memory, is key.

  Also, be as detailed as possible, but don’t worry so much about connective tissue.

  For example, let’s say that tomorrow I’m starting a new chapter in a book but I’m stumped as to where to begin. I’d simply write: “Tomorrow, I want to write a new chapter that’s funny, engaging, ends with a cliffhanger, has something to do with blue whales and Mother Teresa.”

  I want as much detail as possible but don’t need to worry about connecting those details. Why? Because pattern recognition is built into the system. If I’m clear about my goals, the rest takes place automatically, as part of step two.

  STEP TWO: INCUBATION

  Step away from the problem for a little while. After you get the hang of this, one to four hours will do the trick. But in the beginning aim for a half-day or so (or sleep on the problem overnight). During this period, do something stimulating but not taxing. Zlotoff likes to build model airplanes. Gardening, house cleaning, and shooting basketballs all work fine. Long walks as well. What doesn’t work is TV—it requires too much mental processing to turn off consciousness.

  Also, if you choose to use exercise during your incubation period, make sure it’s something light. If you exhaust yourself with a workout, it can hamper your ability to find the solution you’re hunting for afterward. And if you ended up stressed out because you’re tired and can’t find that solution, the extra anxiety is going to further lower your ability to connect ideas and will make finding that solution even harder.

  STEP THREE: FREE WRITING

  After those hours have passed, sit back down at your notepad and start writing again. It doesn’t matter what. Copy passages out of your favorite book, pen song lyrics, do haiku. After a short delay—usually no more than a few minutes—the answers to your problem will start trickling out.

  In the case of my earlier example, I would simply start with: “I’m now trying to write my next chapter but I don’t really know what it’s about.” It sounds simple, but the results can be stunning. You’ll find yourself solving creative problems with far more speed and efficiency than normal.

  Zlotoff believes the biggest gains are emotional. “I never have to worry about a problem,” he says. “If I get stuck, I know my subconscious can come up with answers my conscious mind literally can’t dream of, and in far shorter time frames. It’s totally removed anxiety from my writing process.”

  17

  Long-Haul Creativity

  Ten years ago, I started investigating a critical but rarely discussed type of creativity. While most scientific research has focused on day-to-day creativity or the kind required to solve the problem at hand, I got curious about what it took to sustain that creativity over a multidecade career. Long-haul creativity is how I’ve come to think of this topic.1

  Long-haul creativity is a mystery piled atop a mystery. Creative careers are slippery. One-hit wonders abound, but fewer are enduring superstars. A creative career isn’t about climbing the mountain, it’s about always climbing the mountain. And this level of commitment requires not just originality but rather that ultimate expression of originality: the consistent reinvention of self.

  Again and again.

  Long-haul creativity isn’t about a first act or a second act. It’s a third and fourth and fifth act. It’s that ultimate impossible, the infinite game, where the goal is simply to keep on playing.

  In the last chapter, we examined seven ways to heighten day-to-day creativity. In this one, we’re hunting for ways to sustain that heightened creativity over a lifetime. Unfortunately, this is also where the science gets thin. Little work has been done on long-haul creativity. There are way too many confounding factors for any reasonable approach. Most researchers have simply avoided the issue.

  Yet this doesn’t mean we’re completely lost. What it does mean, at least for this chapter, is that we’re going to alter our approach. Since there’s no great research on the subject, I’ve been doing some of my own. Over the past decade, I’ve talked to a couple hundred peak performers—athletes, artists, scientists, scholars, architects, designers, musicians, screenwriters, and more—seeking solutions that have passed the test of time.

  One thing’s for certain: long-haul creativity involves a slew of unusual skills, many of which conflict with our ideas about what it takes to be creative in the first place. What’s more, long-haul creativity usually requires earning a living from one’s creativity. Yet, being creative is different from the business of being creative. And many of the people who learn how to be good at the first are often really terrible at the second. Finally, emotionally, creativity takes a toll.

  Decade after decade, that toll adds up.

  So here are nine of my favorite lessons on the hard fight of long-haul creativity. A few are my own. Most I learned from others. All are things I’ve applied in my career with considerable success. But don’t assume that what works for me will work for you. Improvise as you see fit.

  ONE: PACK YOUR FULL QUIVER

  In graduate school, I got the chance to study under novelist John Barth.2 Often considered the godfather of American metafiction, Barth made his career by pushing the bounds of language and inspiring a literary movement along the way. He also gave me some of the best advice I’d ever received on long-haul creativity.

  Context is helpful.

  Barth and I were discussing author Thomas Pynchon’s classic Gravity’s Rainbow. For those unfamiliar, the book is a beast: over eight hundred pages long with over eight hundred different characters, and some of the most hyper-stylized language ever written. And that’s what we were discu
ssing: Pynchon’s linguistic pyrotechnics and my obsession with mimicking those pyrotechnics. I, too, wanted to write super-stylized, multilayered sentences, thick with razzle-dazzle. Yet Barth pointed out that there was more going on.

  In the middle of Gravity’s Rainbow, he explained, Pynchon tells two stories that are central to the book’s main themes, and he tells them in very plain language.3 When he needed to, Pynchon ditched style for substance.

  “You can never have too many arrows in your quiver,” is how Barth explained it. He meant that, over the course of any book, most authors will require fluency in a half dozen different styles. Pynchon included everything from advertisements to song lyrics to short stories in Gravity’s Rainbow. Similarly, over the course of a long career, a writer will have to be expert at a dozen different forms of communication: advertising, marketing, novels, nonfiction books, articles, blogs, sales letters, websites, and more. Barth was emphasizing the need to surround your craft.

  For creatives, this is a hard lesson to learn.

  The fun of creativity is doing your thing well, but learning to do everybody else’s thing well—that isn’t nearly as exciting. But that’s how you sustain a career. It’s true in writing. It’s true in every field. As Barth pointed out: you can never have too many arrows in your quiver.

  TWO: THE FERRISS FOUR

  Earlier, Tim Ferriss helped us 80/20 our approach to skill acquisition. Here he weighs in on long-haul creativity. Ferriss takes a four-step approach.4 Four things he does on a regular basis that have helped him sustain creative momentum for years on end.

  DAILY EXERCISE

  Ferris recommends at least an hour a day, and the reason should be already familiar: exercise lowers anxiety levels and helps clear the head. As a consistent stress reliever, there may be no better approach.

  KEEP A MAKER SCHEDULE

  The term “maker schedule” comes from a 2009 essay written by Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham.5 It refers to a schedule that makes room for non-time and no one. It has large blocks of time set aside for focused concentration on one particular task.

  Graham contrasts this to a “manager’s schedule,” which is the day sliced into tiny slots, each with a specific purpose: meetings, calls, emails, and so on. A manager’s schedule is useful on occasion, but for sustaining creativity over time, Ferriss believes a maker’s schedule is foundational.

  So carve out big swatches of time for key creative tasks. If complex problem-solving or analysis is required, Ferriss recommends putting aside blocks of time that are four hours long. And this means no distractions—turn off email, phone, messages, Skype, Twitter, and all the rest. While this may not be how we typically chunk our days, on those days when we need creativity, there’s no other choice in the matter.6

  TAKE LONG WALKS

  Without music or podcasts or distraction, purposefully let the mind wander. The walk is a mandatory incubation period. It switches off spotlight attention and switches on the default mode network—a.k.a. the imagination network—giving the brain the time it needs to hunt for remote associations between ideas.7

  ASK THE BETTER QUESTION

  Surround yourself with people who are good at spotting your assumptions. “It’s not just people who make me question my assumptions,” Ferriss explains. “The people who are the very best at this are the ones who hear my question and respond with: ‘You’re asking the wrong question. The better question is . . .’”

  This last point is important. Feedback is critical for creativity, but your choice of a feedback giver is also critical. Everyone has blind spots. Everyone has preferences. Too much overlap between yourself and your feedback partner can defeat the purpose. But if your partner is too far from you, their feedback will never be truly applicable. It’s a delicate balance.

  And, for creatives, getting the balance right becomes far more important the more successful you get. If you make a name for yourself as a “creative,” people have a tendency to trust your ideas a little more than they should. Too frequently, you can find yourself being given the benefit of the doubt. This is not a winning formula, so Ferriss takes a proactive approach.

  To get the feedback he needs, Ferriss hunts for folks who help him reframe his question. Rather than just drilling into details or playing devil’s advocate, reframers take the idea farther faster. By providing a better question, they’re providing a launchpad for curiosity. This puts energy back into the system, and that creates momentum. And for long-haul creativity, nothing is more important than momentum.

  THREE: MOMENTUM MATTERS MOST

  Speaking of momentum . . . there is something deeply exhausting about the year-in and year-out requirements of imagination. Every morning, the writer faces a blank page, the painter an empty canvas, the innovator a dozen directions to go at once.

  The advice that has helped me solve this slog came from Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez. In an interview he gave years ago in Playboy (of all places), Márquez said that the key to sustaining momentum was to quit working at the point you’re most excited. In other words, once Márquez really starts to cook, he shuts down the stove.8

  This seems counterintuitive. Creativity is an emergent property. Quitting when most excited—when ideas are really emerging—seems like the exact opposite of what you should do.

  Yet Márquez has it exactly right.

  Creativity isn’t a single battle; it’s an ongoing war. By quitting when you’re excited, you’re carrying momentum into the next day’s work session. Momentum is the real key. When you realize that you left off someplace both exciting and familiar—someplace where you know the idea that comes next—you dive right back in, no time wasted, no time to let fear creep back into the equation, and far less time to get up to speed.

  And it’s not just Márquez who feels this way. Ernest Hemingway advocated for the exact same idea. Hemingway, in fact, would take it to an even greater extreme, often finishing the day’s writing session midsentence, leaving a string of words just dangling off the . . .9

  FOUR: A FEW THOUGHTS ON SOBBING,

  SHOUTING, AND PUNCHING HARD OBJECTS

  I’ve written fifteen books. Two are in drawers. Thirteen are in stores. All share one thing in common: at some point during their writing, I lost my mind.

  Without question, at least once a book, I end up facedown on the ground, sobbing, shouting, and punching the floor. I don’t know how it happens. It just seems to happen. One minute I’m sitting at my desk; the next I’m completely unglued.

  But, of course, I’m not the only one.

  Nearly everyone I’ve spoken to about long-haul creativity has a similar story. So, yes, creativity is insanely frustrating, and it’s insanely frustrating for everybody. The question for long-haul creativity: What to do about it?

  Turns out, nothing.

  Frustration is a fundamental step in the creative process. Freud talked about “sublimation,” a defense mechanism that transforms private, often socially unacceptable frustrations (me, facedown, punching the floor), into socially acceptable expressions of creativity (the book you’re now reading).10 The gestalt psychologist Kurt Lewin simplified things further, arguing that frustration is simply an obstruction to a goal that demands an innovative response.11

  A considerable amount of science backs up this idea. The general thinking is that unsolved problems stick in the brain, in the form of easy-to-retrieve memories. In The Eureka Factor, John Kounios and Mark Beeman explain it this way: “This memory is much more than a mental note. It energizes all of your associations to the information in the problem, sensitizing you to anything in your environment that might be relevant, potentially including the solution. Thus, when you encounter something that’s even remotely associated to the problem—a word, a sound, a smell—it can act like a hint that triggers an insight.”12

  From a practical perspective, this means we have to invert our traditional relationship with frustration. When most people encounter this feeling, they take it as a sign that they�
�re doing something wrong. But if frustration is a necessary step in the creative process, then we need to stop treating its arrival as a disaster. For creativity, frustration is a sign of progress, a sign that that much-needed breakthrough is a lot closer than you suspect. Or, as the playwright Edward Albee once said: “Sometimes it’s necessary to go a long distance out of the way to come back a short distance correctly.”13

  FIVE: SIR KEN ROBINSON WEIGHS

  IN ON FRUSTRATION

  Sir Ken Robinson has become one of our leading proponents for creativity. His TED Talk on the subject remains the most watched of all time.14 He’s argued that creativity should be considered as critical to a child’s education as literacy and numeracy. He’s argued that creativity’s the most important survival skill in a world of accelerating technological change. But what he’s never really talked much about is what it takes to sustain that survival skill over a long career.

  Thus, a few years ago, at a conference in Italy, when I got a chance to sit down and talk to Robinson, one of the first things I asked about was the necessary ingredients for long-haul creativity.15

  “Frustration,” was his response.

  Long-haul creativity, Robinson believes, requires a low-level, near-constant sense of frustration. This is different from the just-discussed moment-of-madness version of frustration. Moment-of-madness frustration is the kind that makes you (or, at least, me) punch the ground. Robinson’s version is about motivation. It’s a constant, itchy dissatisfaction, a deep sense of what-if, and can-I-make-it-better, and the like.