Of you, beyond you
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Winding down the final days of summer, I have three stories to share with you about creativity.
- Maybe it’s not in you at all and your job is to just be there when it shows up
The notion that creativity is something that comes from within—and that some have it and others don’t—is a very Western concept.
For large swaths of time in human history, it wasn’t this way at all. For the Greek and Roman civilizations of the classical era, for instance, they saw creativity as something entirely outside of ourselves.
The Romans saw this as a spirit, which they called genius. One could not be a genius, rather were visited by one in the making of things.
The belief about creativity that fascinates me even more is that of the Greeks. For them, ideas came from what they called daemons: benevolent entities that would guide you in the making of things. It was thought that you could even be transformed into one as the manifestation of bringing an idea to life.
I think there’s some insight in these classical ways of looking at ideas. We don’t really know where they come from. And often it seems as though they arrive when we least expect it.
Here’s Keith Richards explaining (http://www.npr.org/2010/10/25/130722581/the-rolling-stones-keith-richards-looks-back-at-life) how he wrote the hook to (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction more or less in his sleep:
“I go to bed as usual with my guitar, and I wake up the next morning, and I see that the tape is run to the very end. And I think, ‘Well, I didn’t do anything. Maybe I hit a button when I was asleep.’ So I put it back to the beginning and pushed play and there, in some sort of ghostly version, is [the opening lines to ‘Satisfaction’]. It was a whole verse of it. And after that, there’s 40 minutes of me snoring. But there’s the song in its embryo, and I actually dreamt the damned thing.”
- Knowing when to pick a ripe idea: maybe that’s really what the money is for.
Author and journalist Arthur Koestler wrote often and thought deeply about the creative process (be sure have a look at his three-book collection The Sleepwalkers, The Act of Creation and Ghost in the Machine).
He argued that new ideas are the product of combinatorial play, and that they are like the fruit that grows on old vines.
“This leads to the paradox,” he writes, “that the more original a discovery the more obvious it seems afterward.”
One of my favourite stories that illustrates this is designer Paula Scher’s account of how her iconic Citibank logo came into being.
The concept came to her pretty much right away at the first creative brief held with the client. In a matter of minutes, she drew the logo on a napkin at the conference table. And then she spent what she calls “a year of long, boring meetings” trying to sell that same logo to a large, risk-averse corporation.
Her idea survived more or less intact. But it illustrates how much resistance—maybe even disbelief—you’ll encounter when sometimes a great idea just comes to you. It’s a mistake to assume that good ideas only come as a result of long amounts of time talking about and studying a problem.
As Scher says (http://vimeo.com/18839878) : “A lot of clients like to buy process. It’s like they think they are not getting their money’s worth because I solved it too fast.”
- Maybe you need to set limits and not let the cat out so often
Be kind to your creative power but treat it also as a vice: something that needs to be controlled (much like the cat symbolically in the Cohen Brothers film, Inside Llewyn Davis).
Here’s one more story to illustrate:
Tom Waits leaves the studio one day after a very long session working on his record. He’s tired and now he’s on the LA Freeway, fighting traffic. The hot California sun, baking. Tail lights of gridlocked traffic continue on to a vanishing point.
And it’s at this moment that a melody comes to Wait’s ear, complete, beautiful and ready for the taking. But like everyone else around him, he’s got his eye on the road. And even if he pulled over, he has nothing on hand to write down the idea.
So he says instead: “Excuse me. Can you not see I’m driving? Do I look like I can write down a song right now? If you really want to exist, come back at a more opportune moment…otherwise go bother somebody else today. Go bother Leonard Cohen.”
Very best, Patrick
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