by Todd Henry
The assassins of the creative process will creep up on us and invade our life. It’s possible to spend days, weeks, or years trying to recover the clarity and passion we once had for our work. The only way to counteract them is to establish practices in our life to keep us focused and engaged. That’s where we’re headed in the next section.
THE PRACTICES
We often reject ideas that seem too simple or too obvious out of hand. If something is simple, the thinking goes, it must be ineffective. But the greatest performers across a wide spectrum of fields understand that the most basic and fundamental practices ultimately lay the foundation for brilliant results.
Vince Lombardi was unarguably one of the greatest coaches in NFL history. As each new season began, he would gather his team together on the first day of practice for his opening pep talk. In the circle were NFL legends, such as Paul Hornung, Bart Starr, and Jim Taylor, as well as numerous other veterans and returning Super Bowl winners. As the players leaned in to hear the great coach’s opening words, Lombardi would begin his pep talk by thrusting a ball into the air, declaring, “Gentlemen, this is a football!”
How insulting! These players were some of the greats of the game! They had accomplished more in their time than many of today’s top players would hope to accomplish in their entire careers. Why not begin by talking about the offense, or about why last season was so successful, or about the strategy for their first game?
Coach Lombardi understood that the foundation of every great work is a solid grasp of the fundamentals. He was sending a message to his team that no matter how great their accomplishments, and no matter how talented they are, the only path to consistent, long-term success is to maintain focus on the basics as the foundation for everything you do.
Though the framework for how we look at them is unique, some of the practices we’ll discuss in upcoming chapters have been implemented by many creatives to great success for centuries. My goal is simply to help you establish them and find a foundation of stability and rhythm that will allow you to experience creative accidents in your everyday life. Remember that common sense is not common practice, and that people who succeed are often those who do the little, everyday things that others won’t.
PART 2
CREATIVE RHYTHM
4.
FOCUS: ZEROING IN ON WHAT’S CRITICAL
If you want to thrive in the create-on-demand world, you must develop the capacity to focus deeply. Though broad and shallow engagement may feel necessary because of the number of priorities on your plate, to be truly effective you must cultivate the ability to do quick, focused dives into the depths of a project and emerge with useful ideas. More important, this must be done in spite of the increasing pressure to do things faster, better, and cheaper.
Because we tend to gravitate toward possibilities, many creative people wrestle with focus. We can quickly become fascinated with new ideas or bounce from unsolved problem to unsolved problem without really solving any of them.
This “priority ping-pong” prevents us from engaging in the kind of deeply focused thinking that facilitates insight and moves the needle on our projects. As the number of unresolved creative problems in our work increases, we can become overwhelmed or generally discouraged by all that’s left undone.
“Where observation is concerned, chance favors the prepared mind.”
—Louis Pasteur
The only solution is to stop living reactively and to instill a new practice for thinking deeply about your work: lock in on the heart of the problem quickly (define), establish your game plan to center your activities around the most crucial priorities (refine), and organize your work so that you’re minimizing distractions and staying on course (cluster). Developing these practices will increase the number and quality of spontaneous insights you experience.
Two key factors, which largely stem from dissonance, affect our capacity to focus: unhealthy assumptions and the “ping.”
UNHEALTHY ASSUMPTIONS
A few years ago my family visited Lake Erie for a long Fourth of July holiday. As evening approached, we were preparing to walk to the pier to watch the fireworks when our five-year-old middle son started getting nervous. We explained that fireworks are fun and that there was no reason to be afraid, but he was having none of it. We finally persuaded him to make the trek to the lake, but he protested all the way. When we arrived at the perfect vantage point and began setting up our blankets, his protests grew frantic.
“Owen,” I said, “fireworks are perfectly safe. They’re not going to fall on you.”
“I’m not worried about them falling on me,” Owen replied. “Fireworks make my feet fuzzy.”
“They make your feet fuzzy?” I replied, puzzled.
“Yes. Like at Disney World.”
We had taken a vacation to Disney World the previous year, and because his short legs prevented him from keeping up, Owen had ridden my shoulders around the park. At one point an unexpected plume of fireworks startled him. At the time, he had been sitting on my shoulders for an hour or so, and his legs had fallen asleep. Shaken out of his reverie by the fireworks, he realized that he had lost all feeling in his feet. His four-year-old mind assumed that it was the fireworks that had made his feet “fuzzy.”
For more than a year, I realized, Owen had carried this assumption with him and had lived in terror of feet-zapping fireworks. I was eventually able to convince him that fireworks have absolutely nothing to do with what he felt in his feet when he was on my shoulders, but to this day he is still a little nervous around them.
What my son experienced is something we must guard against in our creative work. Our minds are excellent at solving problems and forming patterns. It’s the primary reason we’re able to survive past the age of two. We learn from our experiences, and some of those lessons keep us from making mistakes that could significantly harm us, like touching a hot stove or punching someone bigger than us. But this ability to connect the dots can also cause us to adopt false assumptions about cause and effect.
For example, it’s easy to assume that because something has always been done a certain way, that must be the one and only right way to do it. We sometimes develop the assumption that because a system or method brought us success in one instance, it will always do so. Or we may assume that because something didn’t work in one instance, it will never work under any circumstances. Any of these assumptions can, over time, be disastrous to our creative process because they limit how we look at problems.
A theory advocated by brain scientist and founder of Palm Computing Jeff Hawkins in his book On Intelligence contends that our minds function by constantly predicting what will happen next and then comparing these predictions with what we actually experience. In doing so we develop patterns that make our future predictions more accurate, a library of experiences against which we can validate new information. This allows us to make many decisions in our life quickly, often based upon hunches and with very little information.
Assumptions can be disastrous to our creative process because they limit how we look at problems.
While this capacity is helpful in allowing us to assimilate new information and experiences quickly and usefully, it can also mire us in mental ruts that prevent us from seeing opportunities that are obvious to others. Instead, we see only the world through the lens of our assumptions, whether they’re true or false. False assumptions can limit the options we have at our disposal as we attempt to generate ideas.
Any good statistician differentiates between causality and correlation. There’s a critical difference between “these two things happened at the same time” and “this thing caused that thing to happen.” But this distinction is often lost in the hustle and urgency of our daily activities. We’re often so busy that we fall into habits that prevent us from focusing on the real issues or that cause us to ignore opportunities simply because we’re not looking for them.
Because the method by which ideas emerge often seems beyond our
control, the temptation to develop rituals around behaviors that have proven successful in the past is real. For example, if we had a creative breakthrough in a meeting attended by a certain group, we might establish a standing meeting with those people. If visiting a certain website yielded inspiration for a project, the site becomes our go-to source of inspiration for all projects that follow. We develop systems to replicate our past successes—or to prevent replicating our past failures—but all we really do is fossilize these processes and create rigidity in our life.
One manager I encountered had developed a ritual for getting to work very early in the morning as a way to get a head start on the day. This practice was remarkably effective for a while, but over time his productivity in these times began to wane significantly. His solution? Get up earlier! Get to work sooner! But this didn’t improve his performance. After a brief discussion, I was able to convince him that his incredible productivity during those initial early morning sessions had little to do with the mechanics of his schedule but was more the result of what the change in routine did for his focus. What began as a means for getting an early start on his truly important work had turned into nothing more than additional time to check e-mail, shuffle papers, and work his task list. We established a few objectives for his morning time, including what he should and should not do, and soon he was back to his highly productive ways.
It’s possible to go for days, weeks, or months at a time drifting through our schedules, attending meetings, and going about our work without ever stopping to think about whether any of these activities are really beneficial to the work. While effective boundaries can be useful in helping us gain focus (as we’ll discuss shortly), false boundaries based upon assumptions can actually cause us to use our energy ineffectively and distract us from what we’re really trying to do.
My family lives in a home that backs up to a nature preserve. A few years ago, when we were doing some remodeling, we decided to build a home office on the back of our house as a place for me to read, think, and write. I greatly enjoy the view of the woods and the animals that frequently walk past my window. (With the exception of the coyote pack. We want them to leave. Now, please.)
One of the unfortunate annoyances of living close to nature is that insects find their way into our home from time to time. About a year ago, I was nestling in for some morning reading on the sofa in my office when I saw a wolf spider sidle up through the gap between the cushions.
I despise spiders more than just about anything else in the world. After ushering him into the spider afterlife, I practically took the office apart looking for any of his eight-legged colleagues before resuming my morning study routine.
Here’s the thing: every single morning thereafter, I inspected the cushions for unwanted guests. That’s 1 minute per day for 365 days, or about 6 hours a year of wasted energy trying to prevent something that hadn’t happened since. I developed a permanent system to protect against something that had happened once. (I’ve since realized the error of my ways and stopped the ritual.) This was significantly misplaced focus and energy based on a one-time negative experience.
In the same way, we may misplace our creative energy because of false assumptions that are based upon one-time experiences—either successes or failures. I once coached a writer about some significant life and career changes she was planning to make. Over the course of several sessions, we kept coming back to the issue of her lifestyle and her need to generate enough income to maintain her standard of living.
As I prodded her to question whether her multiple residences and all her other expenses were really indispensable, she came to realize that many of her life decisions over the past several years had been based upon the assumption that her lifestyle and spending habits were nonnegotiable. This assumption led to a kind of creative stasis, because she was able to take on only work that would pay well enough for her to maintain her lifestyle, and as a result she had little time available to take on the kind of work she loved. She had lived with a self-limiting false assumption, and the result was that many excellent options weren’t even on the table as she planned her career. Over time this had devolved into creative block, career confusion, and procrastination. Once she was able to break through these assumptions, she was able to see how she had many more options than she’d originally thought and found new energy in her work.
When you allow false assumptions to creep into your life, you become inflexible, less capable of focusing on the issues at hand. The key to overcoming them, as we will explore shortly, is to effectively define the creative problems you’re really trying to solve.
Question: Are there assumptions you’re making about your current projects that are artificially limiting your options? These could be the result of what’s worked or failed in the past, something your manager once said in a meeting, or the way in which you’re trying to avoid the worst-case scenario. Take a few minutes to list assumptions that may have crept in and are causing you to lose traction or do less-than-optimal work.
THE “PING”
We live in an age of unprecedented access to information. If we want to know something, we can gain access to that knowledge within a few keystrokes. I’m old enough to remember the days when doing a research project meant hopping in the car and making the trip to the library to crack open the encyclopedias or to (God forbid!) attempt to find something on microfiche. Many people under twenty years old have never had to leave their homes to gain the information they need. With the ubiquity of cheap Internet access, a world of information is now at our fingertips. While technology is the great equalizer with regard to information and communication, there are also some unique new pressures that accompany its newfound place at the center of our life and work.
Technology is an extension of our capacity to accomplish our will. If we desire to do something, technology can help us do it cheaper and faster. But not all the things we want are necessarily beneficial to us. We are often willing to sacrifice long-term gain for the sake of a little short-term satisfaction, and for many of us this tendency is seriously affecting our capacity to focus and be present in the moment. We have almost limitless options at our disposal to cure even the slightest case of boredom. It’s human nature to crave entertainment, and if that’s our will, then technology serves it very well. Entertainment doesn’t necessarily mean games or movies; it can be anything that gives us a charge or provides some kind of distraction from our work, even e-mail or random web surfing. More than ever, we have the capacity to live in a state of perpetual entertainment.
A few years ago I noticed a disturbing pattern in my life. It was a tiny sensation, a little pinprick in my gut every so often. I called it the “Ping.” The Ping is that little sensation that occasionally prompts me to check my e-mail or my social media accounts. It’s the impulse to mindlessly surf news sites instead of doing something productive. And as my number of options grew (turns out there is an app for that), the pull of the Ping became ever more powerful.
The Ping wants to be my master. It wants to own me. It wants me to serve it. The Ping even has a life philosophy for me: “Something out there is more important that whatever is right here.”
If a meeting gets even the slightest bit boring, I reach into my pocket to check my e-mail. If I have a few minutes in line at the store, I check my feeds on Google Reader. Rather than being heads up and actually paying attention to what’s happening in front of me, the Ping tells me, “Hey, you don’t have to be bored. You have options.”
The net result? It’s more and more difficult for me to be fully in one place, to focus on what’s in front of me. I’m losing the capacity to think deeply about whatever I’m experiencing because I tend to gravitate to whatever feeds the Ping. I default to whatever will entertain me right now. Neil Postman’s 1985 work Amusing Ourselves to Death is more relevant than ever in the era in which we are fiber-optically wired to our every desire. Postman argued that our obsession with television is ruining our culture’s capacity
to think and engage in important societal issues. But now, with smartphones, netbooks, and tablet devices connected 24/7 to anything and everything we could want, we have unprecedented capacity to be in a state of perpetual distraction.
Our work demands make it difficult to be in one place at a time. We feel the weight of our overflowing inbox, or we need to break away in the middle of writing a presentation in order to check the text message that just came in on our phone. But in order to do our best work, we need to learn to pay attention to what’s in front of us and to develop the capacity to stay focused on our objectives. The Ping slowly eats away at our effectiveness.
In order to do our best work, we need to learn to pay attention to what’s in front of us and to develop the capacity to stay focused on our objectives.
Author Linda Stone coined a term for the way many of us are living: “continuous partial attention.” We’re always kind of here, and kind of somewhere else. (We’ve had to pass laws to prevent people from text messaging while driving with their knees at 65 miles per hour!) This divided focus prevents us from bringing our full energy and skill to the work we’re doing. Some of us slip in and out of zombielike engagement with our work as we scan the horizon for something more appealing to feed on. Can we really do our best work this way?