To illustrate the difference, he told me a story about the time he got to meet George Lucas. Apparently, Robinson popped the question. “Hey, George,” he asked, “why do you keep remaking all those Star Wars movies?”
Lucas had a great answer: “In this particular universe, I’m God. And God isn’t satisfied.”
SIX: EVERYBODY’S GOT A JOB TO DO
There’s a mistaken assumption that creativity is a solitary pursuit. This may be somewhat true for a few steps in the process, but if your interest is in the business of creativity—that is, getting paid to have original and useful ideas—then you better get used to working with others.
The business of creativity is always collaborative. Every journalist has to brave a gauntlet of editors, copy editors, and managing editors ad infinitum. Movies and books and plays and poems are more of the same. Start-up entrepreneurs always have investors, while creative CEOs must navigate boards of directors. And this brings me to an important point: everybody’s got a job to do.
And everybody wants to keep that job.
In writing, this means that even if I turn in something perfect, my editors are still being paid to edit—and so they will. This is why, I discovered, it’s important to try to stay ahead of this curve. These days, every time I turn in a piece of finished work, I intentionally include a few horrible paragraphs. It gives my editors something to do. It lets them feel useful. It keeps their grubby little hands away from my damn perfect sentences.
SEVEN: SOMEONE’S ALWAYS CHASING YOU
Burk Sharpless is a screenwriter, a producer, and a member of a fairly elite club—one of the few people in Hollywood who gets to pen big-budget action flicks. Big-budget means over $100 million. It means big risk. For Burk, it took nearly two decades of incredibly hard work before anyone let him take that risk. And to sustain his creativity over that long haul, Burk believes in tapping one of the oldest motivators of all: competition.
“Someone’s always chasing me,” he says. “I try to remember that. For every movie of mine that gets made, there are thousands that don’t. For every one of me, there are another five thousand screenwriters just below me, and another ten thousand just below them. It’s always a competition. They all want my job. And a couple hundred of them are probably really, really good. They’re just about at my level. They have the talent required, they just haven’t made all the right connections. But they will. I find it very motivating to remember that.”16
EIGHT: CREATIVITY IS A BY-PRODUCT
Contrary to popular opinion, creativity is almost always the by-product of passionate hard work and not the other way around. Two-time Olympian and four-time X Games gold medalist Gretchen Bleiler, who is considered one of the more creative snowboarders in history, explains it like this: “You don’t wake up and say, ‘Today I’m going to be more creative.’ You do the things you love to do and try to get at their essence and allow things to emerge.”17
It’s worth unpacking Bleiler’s idea a little further. Doing what you love is about stacking intrinsic drivers. With frustration built into the creative process, without this stack properly assembled, there’s no way to sustain that effort over the long haul. Trying to get at the essence of things means walking the path to mastery, the need to be constantly learning and improving. Allowing things to emerge is what happens if you get all of this right.
To paraphrase neuroscientist Liane Gabora: “Creativity is paradoxically about pulling something out of the brain that was never put into it.” In this process, we are noticing options where before there were none. Yet a great many of those options only become visible in the middle of the activity. I always set out to write great sentences, but I never set out to write a great sentence. The artistry emerges from the work. It’s the nature of the beast. Remote associations mean that one thing leads to the next and the next and the next. Thus, you can’t force the issue ahead of time. All you can really do is prepare, work hard, and, as Bleiler says, allow things to emerge.
NINE: ALWAYS KEEP YOUR WORD—
ESPECIALLY WHEN TALKING TO YOURSELF
“Creative people show tendencies of thought and action that in most people are segregated,” wrote psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his masterwork, Creativity. “They contain contradictory extremes; instead of being an ‘individual,’ each of them is a ‘multitude.’”18
What Csikszentmihalyi is getting at is the nature of the creative personality type. Every character trait can be thought of as a spectrum. Most of us are of the either/or variety. Either extroverts or introverts, competitive or cooperative, smart or naïve. But this is not true for creatives.
Creatives are often both/and.
Consider conservative and rebellious, two traits that seem diametrically opposed to each other. Yet, creatives are often required to be both at once. A filmmaker who is making a throwback detective story is conserving the tradition of noir filmmaking. That same filmmaker may choose to replace the dark, moody shots often found in this style of film with brightly lit, supersaturated colors—wherein she’s rebelling against tradition. And she can obviously be both in the same film.
The same can be said for introverted and extroverted. Creative businessmen might be extremely introverted when they’re constructing their sales strategy for the next quarter, but extremely gregarious when out on those actual sale calls. Or fantastical and realistic. A science fiction writer has to be fantastical to write a book about life on other planets, and extremely practical when designing the marketing strategy for the launch of that same book.
In total, Csikszentmihalyi identified ten “both/and” characteristics of creatives: energetic and sedate, smart and naïve, playful and disciplined, fantastical and realistic, extroverted and introverted, ambitious and selfless, conservative and rebellious, humble and proud, passionate and objective, sensitive to others and cold as ice. All are the by-products of either the creative process or the neurobiological requirements of creativity. But the end result of this both/and-ness?
Frequently, an emotional roller coaster. “The openness and sensitivity of creative individuals often exposes them to suffering and pain, yet also [to] a great deal of enjoyment,” continues Csikszentmihalyi. “The suffering is easy to understand. The greater sensitivity can cause slights and anxieties that are not usually felt by the rest of us. . . . Being alone at the forefront of a discipline also makes you exposed and vulnerable. . . . It is also true that deep interest and involvement in obscure subjects often goes unrewarded, or even brings on ridicule. Divergent thinking is often perceived as deviant by the majority, and so the creative person may feel isolated and misunderstood. These occupational hazards do come with the territory, so to speak, and it is difficult to see how a person could be creative and at the same time insensitive to them.”
And this brings us to the final bit of advice for long-haul creativity: keep your word.19
First off, keep your word to other people. The roller coaster of creativity can take on the feeling of a crisis. For many, it’s almost like a permission slip to misbehave. This gives creatives the reputation for being difficult to deal with in the short run and unreliable in the long. And while this may be true, it’s definitely not true for people who figure out how to make a living being creative.
More crucially, keep your word to yourself.
Peak performance is a checklist. It’s the fortitude to get up every day and complete every goal on that checklist, and repeat. But once creativity starts getting into this mix and those goals become creative goals, the roller coaster can sweep us away. This is why you have to learn to keep your word to yourself. If you set a goal, you complete that goal, no matter the emotions involved. This is how you sustain creativity over the distance. After all, if you can’t keep doing the work, there’s going to be no haul whatsoever, never mind the long.
18
The Flow of Creativity
In 1968, NASA was confused.1 The space agency had a lot of smart people on staff, but smart and creative were di
fferent things. NASA’s lifeblood was innovation. They desperately needed their most creative engineers working their most difficult challenges. Yet telling the Picassos from the paint-by-numbers crowd—that was the problem.
To help sift and sort engineers, NASA brought in creativity expert George Land. Land designed a test to measure divergent—a.k.a. nonlinear, free-flowing, outside-the-box—thinking abilities, what we now call an “alternative uses test.” A typical question: name as many purposes as you can for that jar of M&Ms. Typically logical “convergent thinking” answers: a candy holder, pencil holder, or place to put errant coins. More divergent, less typical answers: a prison for cockroaches, a badly insulated space helmet.
The test worked. Land solved the problem, and NASA loved the results. But success raised another question: Where does creativity come from in the first place, nature or nurture? Then it dawned on them: Land had unintentionally designed a tool for answering this question as well. His test was so simple, it could be given to children. In fact, it could be given again and again, tracking kids over time, seeing how nurture impacted nature along the way.
With NASA’s help, Land assembled a group of sixteen hundred four- and five-year-olds from a wide assortment of backgrounds. Everyone took the test; their results shocked everyone. Ninety-eight percent of the kids scored at the genius level of creativity. It meant that the average four-year-old could out-innovate the average NASA engineer.
But that ingenuity didn’t last.
Land retested the kids five years later. By then, test scores had plummeted to 30 percent. By age ten, for reasons unclear, some 68 percent of their creativity had vanished.
Five years later, the results were worse. Once these kids reached fifteen years of age, their level of creativity had dropped to 12 percent.
Next, Land gave the test to over a million adults. The average age was thirty-one. Their average creativity: 2 percent.
Land had his answer. Nature builds creatives; nurture tears them down. Growing up, according to his research, was the number one risk factor for squelching innovation.
Why?
Land believes the issue is a conflict between our brain’s fundamental hardwiring and our educational system. Mostly, the brain does convergent thinking with the executive attention network and divergent thinking with the default mode network. But our educational system demands that students use both systems at once. Come up with novel ideas via the default mode network; judge them immediately with executive attention. This constant judgment, this endless cycle of creative criticism and doubt, in Land’s opinion, is killing genius.2
Yet, there are problems with this explanation. For starters, Land’s test was designed in the 1960s, when researchers believed convergent and divergent were different cognitive styles. They’re not. “Divergent and convergent are not types of thinking,” explains psychologist John Kounios, “they are types of lab tasks. In terms of cognition, divergent thinking is convergent thinking repeated without [the] replacement of previously generated solutions. [It’s] not so different.”3
What’s more, Land’s issue is that schools are forcing students to use both the default mode network and the executive attention network at once. Yet, the science shows that creativity requires exactly this kind of multi-network approach. By forcing students to use them both, shouldn’t schools be training up this very ability?
But they’re not.
The reason? Once again: neurobiology.
Executive attention lives in the prefrontal cortex, but the prefrontal cortex doesn’t fully mature until the age of twenty-five. As a result, kids have weaker executive attention skills. This means poorer impulse control over themselves but also over their creative ideas. What’s more, children’s brains aren’t hyper-organized. We’re born with a huge amount of connectivity between neurons, but those connections decline with age. So, when young brains go hunting for remote associations between ideas, there’s more to find. This is the real reason divergent thinking declines over time. It’s not that education kills creativity, it’s that normal developmental processes get in the way.
And this is where flow comes into this story.
In flow, the three major brain networks that underpin the creative process all work together in an unusual way. The executive network is online but not completely. The part that generates task-specific laser focus is hyperactive; everything else is shut down. This means you can focus on your creative problem, but the inner critic remains silent.
Concurrently, the salience network is both hyperactive and incredibly sensitive. It’s tuned into both internal signals being generated by the default mode network and external signals that demand executive attention.
Lastly, the default mode network is wide awake and slightly tweaked. The anterior cingulate cortex is hyperactive, the amygdala is mostly offline—meaning our ability to do pattern recognition and remote association is jacked up, but the brain’s normal bias for negative information is down low. In other words, flow is the brain on creative overdrive.4 It mimics all the inventiveness that comes with being four years old, just, you know, without the downside of having a four-year-old brain.
But this does raise a final question: Where do we get more flow?
Part IV
Flow
Today—is greatness possible?
—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE1
19
The Decoder Ring
There’s one story I’ve left out of our tale, which is how I managed to crack flow’s code in the first place. My decoder ring: Lyme disease.
When I was thirty years old, I got Lyme disease and spent the better portion of three years in bed.1 For those unfamiliar, Lyme is like the worst flu you’ve ever had crossed with paranoid schizophrenia. Physically, I could barely walk across a room. Mentally, it was worse. The technical term for this is “brain fog.” My personal experience was totally bonkers.
First, concentration vanished. It was like trying to think through cotton candy. Then the insomnia set in, the paranoia, and the depression. My vision failed next. Long-term memory vanished. Short-term as well. And on and on.
After three years of this, I was done. The doctors had to pull me off medicines because my stomach lining started bleeding out, and there was nothing else they could do for me. I was functional less than an hour a day. Would I ever get better? No one knew.
I realized that all I would be from this point forward was a burden to my family and friends. I had a sizable collection of barbiturates in the bathroom, a couple of bottles of whiskey in the kitchen. Suicide became a very real possibility. It was no longer a question of if; it was just a question of when.
In the middle of this darkness, a friend showed up at my house and demanded that we go surfing. It was, of course, a ridiculous request. I could barely walk, let alone ride waves. But my friend was insistent. She wouldn’t shut up, and she wouldn’t leave. After hours of her badgering, I couldn’t take it anymore. “What the hell,” I said. “Let’s go surfing. I can always kill myself tomorrow.”
My friend took me to Sunset Beach in Los Angeles, which may be the wimpiest beginner wave in the world. She gave me a board the size of a Cadillac, and the bigger the board, the easier it is to surf. The day was warm, the waves were small, and the tide was out. This meant we could wade to the lineup, which was a good thing, since my friend had to all but carry me out there.
Not three seconds after I got out there, a wave appeared on the horizon. Muscle memory took over. I spun my board around, paddled twice, and popped to my feet. I dropped into that wave, then dropped into another dimension—one that I did not even know existed.
The first thing I noticed was that time had slowed to a crawl. My brain appeared to be working at normal speed, but the world was going by in freeze frame. My vision was panoramic. It felt like I could see out of the back of my head. Then I realized I didn’t seem to have a head. Or not exactly. There was a body traveling on a surfboard across a wave, but the rider was missing. My sense of sel
f had vanished. My consciousness had expanded outward. I had merged with the ocean, become one with the universe—because, you know, that happens.
But that wasn’t the oddest part.
The oddest part: I felt great. For the first time in years. The pain was gone. My head was clear, my mind sharp, my suicidal tendencies a thing of the past.
That wave felt so good that I caught five more that day. Afterward, I wasn’t just destroyed, I was disassembled. My friend drove me home, carried me into bed, and I didn’t move for two weeks. People had to bring me food, because I was too exhausted to walk the fifty feet to my kitchen to make a meal. Yet, on the fifteenth day, the first day that I could walk, I bummed a ride from a neighbor, went back to the beach, and did it again.
And the same thing happened. A radically powerful altered state of consciousness out in the waves, a bedraggled, extinguished version of myself afterward. But something had changed, and I knew it. So I slept for another ten days, went back to the ocean, and did it again.
And again.
And over the course of eight months, when the only thing I was doing differently was surfing and having these quasi-mystical experiences while out in the waves, I got better. Healthier. A lot healthier. I went from being functional 10 percent of the time to functional 80 percent of the time.
None of it made a lick of sense.
For starters, surfing is not a known cure for chronic autoimmune conditions. Second, I was a science guy, a hard-core rational materialist. I didn’t have mystical experiences, and I certainly didn’t have them while surfing.
But I also suspected that there was a pretty good reason for this. On rare occasions, Lyme can get into the brain, which is the only time the disease can be fatal. I was pretty sure I was having these mystical experiences because the disease had done just that. Once again, even though I was feeling better, I was pretty sure my end was nigh.
The Art of Impossible Page 18