Creativity (46 page)

With time, other reasons for creating culture have emerged, and in many ways they are now more important, at least for some people some of the time, than the ancient reasons based on competition and material advantage. Operating within a domain can become rewarding in and of itself. To find the right words for a poem, the secret of
a cell’s behavior, or a way to make better microchips for less money is an exhilarating experience in its own right, even if no one else knows about it, and no rewards follow. Almost all of our respondents spoke eloquently and spontaneously about the importance of these intrinsic rewards. If they did not feel this joy, external rewards would not have been sufficient to motivate them to extend their efforts into uncharted regions.

But whereas experts in a discipline usually love what they do, this emotion is generally not available to students or young practitioners. Especially in the sciences, beginners see only the drudgery of the discipline. Teachers rarely spend time trying to reveal the beauty and the fun of doing math or science; students learn that these subjects are ruled by grim determinism instead of the freedom and adventure that the experts experience. Not surprisingly, it is difficult to motivate young people to master aspects of the culture that seem cold and alienating. As a result, knowledge
in these areas might become eroded and creativity increasingly rare.

So one obvious way to enhance creativity is to bring as much as possible of the flow experience into the various domains. It is exhilarating to build culture—to be an artist, a scientist, a thinker, or a doer. All too often, however, the joy of discovery fails to be communicated to young people, who turn instead to passive entertainment. But consuming culture is never as rewarding as producing it. If it were only possible to transmit the excitement of the people we interviewed to the next generation, there is no doubt that creativity would blossom.

T
he major purpose of this book was to describe how creativity works, how culture evolves as domains are transformed by the curiosity and dedication of a few individuals. But another goal was to learn, from the lives of such men and women, how everyone’s life could be made more creative. How can our days, too, be filled with wonder and excitement? To answer this question I move from objective description to prescription. I present my own reflections on what we have learned so far and try to derive from it some practical advice. Just as a physician may look at the physical habits of
the most healthy individuals to find in them a prescription that will help everyone else to be more healthy, so we may extract some useful ideas from the lives of a few creative persons about how to enrich the lives of everyone else.

You probably already have formed some ideas about how to experience life more creatively. At the very least, you have learned about the obstacles that creative individuals have to surmount and the strategies they use to increase the likelihood that they will accomplish original work. In this chapter I will distill these insights and present them as explicit suggestions for how to apply them to everyday life.

These suggestions hold no promise for great creative achievement. As is clear by now, to move from personal to cultural creativity one needs talent, training, and an enormous dose of good luck. Without access to a domain, and without the support of a field, a person has no chance of recognition. Even though personal creativity may not lead to fame and fortune, it can do something that from the individual’s point of view is even more important: make day-to-day experiences more vivid, more enjoyable, more rewarding. When we live creatively, boredom is banished and every moment
holds the promise of a fresh discovery. Whether or not these discoveries enrich the world beyond our personal lives, living creatively links us with the process of evolution.

Most of the suggestions derived from the study of creative lives can be implemented by anybody regardless of age, gender, or social condition. Some of the steps, however, are more appropriate to parents or other adults who want to provide optimal conditions for developing the creativity of children. We cannot change conditions in our own childhood that would make us more curious and hence enhance creativity; but we can change conditions for the next generation. Instead of pointing out each time which suggestions are for adults and which for children, I trust the reader’s judg
ment to make the appropriate distinctions.

I am assuming that each person has,
potentially
, all the psychic energy he or she needs to lead a creative life. However, there are four major sets of obstacles that prevent many from expressing this potential. Some of us are exhausted by too many demands, and so have trouble getting hold of and activating our psychic energy in the first place. Or we get easily distracted and have trouble learning how to protect and channel whatever energy we have. The next problem is laziness, or lacking discipline for controlling the flow of energy. And finally, the last obstacle is not knowing what t
o do with the energy one has. How to avoid these obstacles and liberate the creative energy we all have is what I review in this chapter.

T
HE
A
CQUISITION OF
C
REATIVE
E
NERGY

With our present knowledge, even an expert neuroanatomist could not tell Einstein’s brain from yours or mine. In terms of the capacity
for processing information, all brains are extremely alike. The limits on how many bits of information we can process at any given time are also similar. Nor is the speed of information processing noticeably different from one brain to the next. In principle, because of the similarity in cerebral hardware, most people could share the same knowledge and perform mental operations at similar levels. Yet what enormous differences there are in how people think and what they think about!

In terms of using mental energy creatively, perhaps the most fundamental difference between people consists in how much uncommitted attention they have left over to deal with novelty. In too many cases, attention is restricted by external necessity. We cannot expect a man who works two jobs, or a working woman with children, to have much mental energy left over to learn a domain, let alone innovate in it. Einstein is supposed to have written his classic papers on the kitchen table of his small apartment in Berne, while rocking the pram of his baby. But the fact is that there are re
al limits to how many things a person can attend to at the same time, and when survival needs require all of one’s attention, none is left over for being creative.

But often the obstacles are internal. In a person concerned with protecting his or her self, practically all the attention is invested in monitoring threats to the ego. This defensiveness may have very understandable causes: Children who have been abused or who have experienced chronic hunger or discrimination are less likely to be curious and interested in novelty for its own sake, because they need all the psychic energy they have simply to survive. Taken to the extreme, a sense of being too vulnerable results in the form of neurosis known as paranoia, where everything that happe
ns is interpreted as a threatening conspiracy against the self. A paranoid tendency is one obstacle to the free deployment of mental energy. The person who suffers from it usually cannot afford to become interested in the world from an objective, impartial viewpoint, and therefore is unable to learn much that is new.

Another limitation on the free use of mental energy is an excessive investment of attention in selfish goals. Of course, we all must first and foremost take care of our own needs. But for some people the concept of “need” is inflated to the point that it becomes an obsession that devours every waking moment. When everything a
person sees, thinks, or does must serve self-interest, there is no attention left over to learn about anything else.

It is difficult to approach the world creatively when one is hungry or shivering from cold, because then all of one’s mental energy is focused on securing the necessities one lacks. And it is equally difficult when a person is rich and famous but devotes all of his or her energies to getting more money and fame. To free up creative energy we need to let go and divert some attention from the pursuit of the predictable goals that genes and memes have programmed in our minds and use it instead to explore the world around us on its own terms.

Curiosity and Interest

So the first step toward a more creative life is the cultivation of curiosity and interest, that is, the allocation of attention to things for their own sake. On this score, children tend to have the advantage over adults; their curiosity is like a constant beam that highlights and invests with interest anything within range. The object need not be useful, attractive, or precious; as long as it is mysterious it is worthy of attention. With age most of us lose the sense of wonder, the feeling of awe in confronting the majesty and variety of the world. Yet without awe life becomes ro
utine. Creative individuals are childlike in that their curiosity remains fresh even at ninety years of age; they delight in the strange and the unknown. And because there is no end to the unknown, their delight also is endless.

At first, curiosity is diffuse and generic. The child’s attention is attracted to any novelty—cloud or bug, grandfather’s cough or a rusted nail. With time, interest usually becomes channeled into a specific domain. A ninety-year-old physicist may retain childhood curiosity in the realm of subatomic particles but is unlikely to have enough free attention left over to marvel at much else. Therefore, creativity within a domain often goes hand in hand with conformity in the rest of life. Einstein at the peak of his breakthroughs in physics played traditional music on his violin. But narro
wing attention to a single domain does not mean limiting the novelty one is able to process; on the contrary, complex domains like poetry, history, physics, or politics reveal constantly expanding perspectives to those who venture to explore them.

So how can interest and curiosity be cultivated, assuming that you feel the desire to do so? Some specific advice may help.

Try to be surprised by something every day
. It could be something you see, hear, or read about. Stop to look at the unusual car parked at the curb, taste the new item on the cafeteria menu, actually listen to your colleague at the office. How is this different from other similar cars, dishes, or conversations? What is its
essence
? Don’t assume that you already know what these things are all about, or that even if you knew them, they wouldn’t matter anyway. Experience this one thing for what it is, not what you think it is. Be open to what the world is telling you. Life is nothing more
than a stream of experiences—the more widely and deeply you swim in it, the richer your life will be.

Try to surprise at least one person every day
. Instead of being your predictable self, say something unexpected, express an opinion that you have not dared to reveal, ask a question you wouldn’t ordinarily ask. Or break the routine of your activities: Invite a person to go with you to a show, a restaurant, or a museum that you never visited before. Experiment with your appearance. Comfortable routines are great when they save energy for doing what you really care about; but if you are still searching, they restrict and limit the future.

Write down each day what surprised you and how you surprised others
. Most creative people keep a diary, or notes, or lab records to make their experiences more concrete and enduring. If you don’t do so already, it might help to start with a very specific task: to record each evening the most surprising event that happened that day and your most surprising action. This is a simple enough assignment and one you will find is fun to do. After a few days, you can reread what you have written and reflect on those past experiences. One of the surest ways to enrich life is to make experi
ences less fleeting, so that the most memorable, interesting, and important events are not lost forever a few hours after they occurred. Writing them down so that you can relive them in recollection is one way to keep them from disappearing. And after a few weeks, you may begin to see a pattern of interest emerging in the notes, one that may indicate some domain that would repay exploring in depth.

When something strikes a spark of interest, follow it
. Usually, when something captures our attention—an idea, a song, a flower—the impression is brief. We are too busy to explore the idea, song, or flower further. Or we feel that it is none of our business. After all, we are not thinkers, singers, or botanists, so these things lie outside our grasp. Of course, that’s nonsense. The world
is
our business, and we can’t know which part of it is best suited to our selves, to our potentialities, unless we make a serious effort to learn about as many aspects of it as possible.

If you take time to reflect on how best to implement these four suggestions, and then actually start putting them into effect, you should feel a stirring of possibilities under the accustomed surface of daily experiences. It is the gathering of creative energy, the rebirth of curiosity that has been atrophied since childhood.

Cultivating Flow in Everyday Life

The rebirth of curiosity doesn’t last long, however, unless we learn to enjoy being curious. Entropy, the force behind the famous Second Law of Thermodynamics, applies not only to physical systems but to the functioning of the mind as well. When there is nothing specific to do, our thoughts soon return to the most predictable state, which is randomness or confusion. We pay attention and concentrate when we must—when dressing, driving the car, staying awake at work. But when there is no external force demanding that we concentrate, the mind begins to lose focus. It falls to the lowest energe
tic state, where the least amount of effort is required. When this happens, a sort of mental chaos takes over. Unpleasant thoughts flash into awareness, forgotten regrets resurface, and we become depressed. Then we turn on the TV set, read listlessly the advertising supplement of the newspaper, have pointless conversations—anything to keep our thoughts on an even keel and avoid becoming frightened by what is happening in the mind. Taking refuge in passive entertainment keeps chaos temporarily at bay, but the attention it absorbs gets wasted. On the other hand, when we learn to enjoy using our lat
ent creative energy so that it generates its own internal force to keep concentration focused, we not only avoid depression but also increase the complexity of our capacities to relate to the world.

How can we do this? How can we relearn to enjoy curiosity so
that the pursuit of new experiences and new knowledge becomes self-sustaining?

Wake up in the morning with a specific goal to look forward to
. Creative individuals don’t have to be dragged out of bed; they are eager to start the day. This is not because they are cheerful, enthusiastic types. Nor do they necessarily have something exciting to do. But they believe that there is something meaningful to accomplish each day, and they can’t wait to get started on it.

Most of us don’t feel our actions are that meaningful. Yet everyone can discover at least one thing every day that is worth waking up for. It could be meeting a certain person, shopping for a special item, potting a plant, cleaning the office desk, writing a letter, trying on a new dress. It is easier if each night before falling asleep, you review the next day and choose a particular task that, compared to the rest of the day, should be relatively interesting and exciting. Then next morning, open your eyes and visualize the chosen event—play it out briefly in your mind, like an inner video
tape, until you can hardly wait to get dressed and get going. It does not matter if at first the goals are trivial and not that interesting. The important thing is to take the easy first steps until you master the habit, and then slowly work up to more complex goals. Eventually most of the day should consist of tasks you look forward to, until you feel that getting up in the morning is a privilege, not a chore.