Mastering Creativity - James Clear (PDF)

1  2 MASTERING CREATIVITY, 1st Edition This guide is free and you are welcome to share it with others. From James Clear: For most of my life, I didn't consider myself to be particularly creative. I didn't play a musical instrument (or even know how to read music). I wasn't skilled at drawing or painting, or really anything that involved the words “arts” or “crafts.” It wasn't until I moved to Scotland and decided to buy a camera to “take some pictures while I'm over there” that I discovered that creativity was something that could be developed. Over the next year, I took more than 100,000 photos. Fast forward to today and I pursue creative tasks all of the time. Every Monday and Thursday, I publish a new article on JamesClear.com and display creativity as a writer. Occasionally, I'll add some hand-drawn images to those articles. And, of course, I'm still bouncing around the world taking photos and trying to tell compelling stories as a photographer. I'm not sure what your creative goals are, but I am sure that you can make progress towards them. I wrote Mastering Creativity to share the lessons I've learned and to express one simple truth about creativity: you have brilliance inside of you, but only if you can find the guts and grit to pull it out of yourself. Let's get to it...  3 10 THINGS THIS GUIDE WILL TEACH YOU 1. How to overcome the mental blocks that prevent creativity. 2. How to be creative, even if it's not natural for you. 3. How to make time for creative work if you're busy. 4. How the world's greatest artists approach the task of creating. 5. How to make creating a consistent habit. 6. Why smart people should create things. 7. One simple trick that makes it easier to be creative. 8. How to stay motivated over the long run. 9. Why it is important to generate a lot of work to find your creativity. 10. And most importantly, how to make these ideas a habit in real life.  4 Table of Contents How to Find Your Hidden Creative Genius 5 How Creative Geniuses Come Up With Great Ideas 6 How to Uncover Your Creative Talent by Using the “Equal Odds Rule” 9 The Myth of Creative Inspiration 12 The Difference Between Professionals and Amateurs 16 The Weird Strategy Dr. Seuss Used to Create His Greatest Work 21 How to Be Motivated to Create Consistently 26 Smart People Should Create Things 31 The Next Step: Where to Go From Here 34 Sources 35  5 How to Find Your Hidden Creative Genius There is a interesting story about how Pablo Picasso, the famous Spanish artist, developed the ability to produce remarkable work in just minutes. As the story goes, Picasso was walking though the market one day when a woman spotted him. She stopped the artist, pulled out a piece of paper and said, “Mr. Picasso, I am a fan of your work. Please, could you do a little drawing for me?” Picasso smiled and quickly drew a small, but beautiful piece of art on the paper. Then, he handed the paper back to her saying, “That will be one million dollars.” “But Mr. Picasso,” the woman said. “It only took you thirty seconds to draw this little masterpiece.” “My good woman,” Picasso said, “It took me thirty years to draw that masterpiece in thirty seconds.” [1] Picasso isn’t the only brilliant creative who worked for decades to master his craft. His journey is typical of many creative geniuses. Even people of considerable talent rarely produce incredible work before decades of practice. Let’s talk about why that is, and even more important, how you can reveal your own creative genius.  6 How Creative Geniuses Come Up With Great Ideas In 2002, Markus Zusak sat down to write a book. He began by mapping out the beginning and the end of the story. Then, he started listing out chapter headings, pages of them. Some made it into the final story, many were cut. When Zusak began to write out the story itself, he tried narrating it from the perspective of Death. It didn’t come out the way he wanted. He re-wrote the book, this time through the main character’s eyes. Again, something was off. He tried writing it from an outsider’s perspective. Still no good. He tried present tense. He tried past tense. Nothing. The text didn’t flow. He revised. He changed. He edited. By his own estimation, Zusak rewrote the first part of the book 150 to 200 times. In the end, he went back to his original choice and wrote it from the perspective of Death. This time—the 200th time— it felt right. When all was said and done it had taken Zusak three years to write his novel. He called it The Book Thief. In an interview after his book was finally released, Zusak said, “In three years, I must have failed over a thousand times, but each failure brought me closer to  7 what I needed to write, and for that, I’m grateful.” [2] The book exploded in popularity. It stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for over 230 weeks. It sold 8 million copies. It was translated into 40 languages. A few years later, Hollywood came calling and turned The Book Thief into a major motion picture. The Simple Secret to Having Good Luck We often think that blockbuster successes are luck. Maybe it’s easier to explain success that way—as a chance happening, a fortunate outlier. No doubt, there is always some element of luck involved in every success story. But Markus Zusak is proof that if you revise your work 200 times—if you find 200 ways to reinvent yourself, to get better at your craft—then luck seems to have a way of finding you. How do creative geniuses come ups with great ideas? They work and edit and rewrite and retry and pull out their genius through sheer force of will and perseverance. They earn the chance to be lucky because they keep showing up. In her Dartmouth Commencement Address, Shonda Rimes shares a strategy that echoes Zusak’s approach… Dreams do not come true just because you dream them. It’s hard work that makes things happen. It’s hard work that creates change… Ditch the dream and be a doer, not a dreamer.  8 Maybe you know exactly what it is you dream of being, or maybe you’re paralyzed because you have no idea what your passion is. The truth is, it doesn’t matter. You don’t have to know. You just have to keep moving forward. You just have to keep doing something, seizing the next opportunity, staying open to trying something new. It doesn’t have to fit your vision of the perfect job or the perfect life. Perfect is boring and dreams are not real. Just … do. So you think, “I wish I could travel.” Great. Sell your crappy car, buy a ticket to Bangkok, and go. Right now. I’m serious. You want to be a writer? A writer is someone who writes every day, so start writing. How Creativity Works We all have some type of creative genius inside of us. The only way to release it is to work on it. No single act will uncover more creative powers than forcing yourself to create consistently. For Markus Zusak that meant writing and re-writing 200 times. For you, it might mean singing a song over and over until it sounds right. Or programming a piece of software until all the bugs are out, taking portraits of your friends until the lighting is perfect, or caring for the customers you serve until you know them better than they know themselves. You can make any job a work of art if you put the right energy into it. How do creative geniuses come up with great ideas? They work hard at it.  9 How to Uncover Your Creative Talent by Using the “Equal Odds Rule” Paul Erdos was a strange man. He lived out of two suitcases, never learned how to cook his own meals, worked up to 19 hours per day, took amphetamines daily and washed them down with caffeine, and gave away nearly all of the money that he earned. [3] Erdos was also the most prolific mathematician of the 20th century. He wrote or co-authored over 1,500 mathematical articles during his career and partnered with over 500 different collaborators. As you would expect, his contributions to mathematics were significant. Erdos solved a variety of difficult problems. He worked out a proof for the prime number theorem. He led the development of Ramsey theory. He discovered the proof for a difficult mathematical riddle known as Bertrand’s postulate. Long story short, Erdos was good. He worked his tail off and advanced the field of mathematics because of it. And yet, do you know what became of the vast majority of his 1,500 articles and papers? Nothing. They are long gone. Forgotten. Tucked away in the archives of an old research journal or filed into a box at the bottom of some math lover’s closet. And that is why the story of Paul Erdos is perhaps the best example of what is known as the Equal Odds Rule.  10 Let’s talk about what this rule means and how it can help you uncover your creative talent. The Equal Odds Rule In 1977, a Harvard-trained psychologist named Keith Simonton, developed a theory that he called the Equal Odds Rule. “The Equal Odds Rule says that the average publication of any particular scientist does not have any statistically different chance of having more of an impact than any other scientist’s average publication.” [4] In other words, any given scientist is equally likely to create a game-changing piece of work as they are to create something average that is quickly forgotten. Translated to the world at-large: You can’t predict your own success. Scientists, artists, inventors, writers, entrepreneurs, and workers of all types are equally likely to produce a useless project as they are to produce an important one. If you believe the Equal Odds Rule, then the natural conclusion is that you’re playing a numbers game. Because you can’t predict your success, the best strategy is to produce as much work as possible, which will provide more opportunities to hit the bullseye and create something meaningful. [5] I’ve seen the Equal Odds Rule at play in my own work each month. I write new articles every Monday and Thursday. I know that if I write a new article every Monday and Thursday, then that will be about 8 or 9 articles per month on average. And if I write 8 or 9 articles per month, then 2 or 3 of them will be decent.  11 Which 2 or 3 will be winners? I have no idea. After sticking to this schedule for almost two years, it has become very clear to me that I am a rather terrible judge of my own work. All I can do is try my best each time, commit to doing a volume of work, and trust if I stick with the process then something useful will find it’s way from my hands to the keyboard. The Willingness to Create Garbage Paul Erdos knew something that all great creators eventually discover: Creative genius only reveals itself after you’ve shown up enough times to get the average ideas out of the way. Time after time, problem after problem, Erdos kept working on his craft. 1,500 papers later, it turns out he had some pretty good ideas. If you want to extract your creative genius and make a difference, then embracing idea behind the Equal Odds Rule is a useful strategy. Sometimes you’ll create something good. Sometimes you’ll create something useless. But no matter what, you should always be creating. If you want to make a masterpiece, you have to be willing to create a little garbage along the way.  12 The Myth of Creative Inspiration Franz Kafka is considered one of the most creative and influential writers of the 20th century, but he actually spent most of his time working as a lawyer for the Workers Accident Insurance Institute. How did Kafka produce such fantastic creative works while holding down his day job? By sticking to a strict schedule. He would go to his job from 8:30 AM to 2:30 PM, eat lunch and then take a long nap until 7:30 PM, exercise and eat dinner with his family in the evening, and then begin writing at 11 PM for a few hours each night before going to bed and doing it all over again. Kafka is hardly unique in his commitment to a schedule. As Mason Currey notes in his popular book, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, many of the world’s great artists follow a consistent schedule. Maya Angelou rented a local hotel room and went there to write. She arrived at 6:30 AM, wrote until 2 PM, and then went home to do some editing. She never slept at the hotel. Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon writes five nights per week from 10 PM to 3 AM. Haruki Murakami wakes up at 4 AM, writes for five hours, and then goes for  13 a run. The work of top creatives isn’t dependent upon motivation or inspiration, but rather it follows a consistent pattern and routine. It’s the mastering of daily habits that leads to creative success, not some mythical spark of genius. Here’s why… Daily Routines William James, the famous psychologist, is noted for saying that habits and schedules are important because they “free our minds to advance to really interesting fields of action.” An article in The Guardian agreed by saying, “If you waste resources trying to decide when or where to work, you’ll impede your capacity to do the work.” And there are plenty of research studies on willpower and motivation to back up that statement. In other words, if you’re serious about creating something compelling, you need to stop waiting for motivation and inspiration to strike you and simply set a schedule for doing work on a consistent basis. Of course, that’s easy to say, but much harder to do in practice. Here’s one way of thinking about schedules that may help...  14 Permission to Create Junk Weightlifting offers a good metaphor for scheduling creative work. I can’t predict whether or not I’ll set a PR (personal record) before I go to the gym. In fact, there will be many days when I’ll have a below average workout. Eventually, I figured out that those below average days were just part of the process. The only way to actually lift bigger weights was to continually show up every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday — regardless of whether any individual workout was good or bad. Creative work is no different than training in the gym. You can’t selectively choose your best moments and only work on the days when you have great ideas. The only way to unveil the great ideas inside of you is to go through a volume of work, put in your repetitions, and show up over and over again. Obviously, doing something below average is never the goal. But you have to give yourself permission to grind through the occasional days of below average work because it’s the price you have to pay to get to excellent work. If you’re anything like me, you hate creating something that isn’t excellent. It’s easy to start judging your work and convince yourself to not share something, not publish something, and not ship something because “this isn’t good enough yet.” But the alternative is even worse: if you don’t have a schedule forcing you to deliver, then it’s really easy to avoid doing the work at all. The only way to be consistent enough to make a masterpiece is to give yourself permission to create junk along the way.  15 The Schedule is the System During a conversation about writing, my friend Sarah Peck looked at me and said, “A lot of people never get around to writing because they are always wondering when they are going to write next.” You could say the same thing about working out, starting a business, creating art, and building most habits. The schedule is the system that makes your goals a reality. If you don’t set a schedule for yourself, then your only option is to rely on motivation. If your workout doesn’t have a time when it usually occurs, then each day you’ll wake up thinking, “I hope I feel motivated to exercise today.” If your business doesn’t have a system for marketing, then you’ll show up at work crossing your fingers that you’ll find a way to get the word out (in addition to everything else you have to do). If you don’t have a time block to write every week, then you’ll find yourself saying things like, “I just need to find the willpower to do it.” Stop waiting for motivation or inspiration to strike you and set a schedule for your habits.