Creativity Is Much More Than 10k Hours of Deliberate Practice
blogs.scientificamerican.com
blogs.scientificamerican.com
On the flip side, a lot of art schools have focused so much on creativity that they've lost their grounding in technique. So you get a lot of creatively profound but technically incompetent graduates.
Neither are great options. But training technique and creativity together seems like a good choice.
Only personal experience to share here, but I can comfortably say that as my technical skills increased, so too did my creativity. I was always worried as a kid that I wasn't "creative" enough to be a decent artist. But when I knew how to express ideas, for some reason I had an easier time coming up with those ideas in the first place.
That's the rub, being creative is not worth much if you don't have the necessary skills and technique (practice practice practice!) to express yourself.
In many real-world cases, creativity is closer to direction and composition than the nuts and bolts technique. This is especially true for works that grow in scale beyond a single practitioner. Modern artists have studios and contractors that actually do e.g. metal casting, modern musicians use engineers/producers to create the actual beats, a film score writer probably isn't a skilled trombonist etc.
IMHO creativity is about decision making - its closer to "taste" and doesn't require skill to be a unique and special talent in itself. Its a bit like the Jobs/Woz divide.
I think you're talking about something other than creativity. Architects are not bricklayers, that's the subject of the allographic/autographic distinction made by Nelson Goodman, but it really is orthogonal to creativity.
Creativity is generally understood to be about fluency, flexibility and originality of ideas. (The Wikipedia page is pretty extensive.) Skill and taste are different and certainly do each contribute to the value of works of art, but not necessarily in a creative way.
Like the work of a prolific artist in a busy studio full of assistants, cooking (for example) involves both skill and (literally) taste. Artists who work like that are actually precluded from certain types of creativity, by their own reputation and the expectations of their market, even if their work is selling well. Much like a chef. I think that's the problem with your notion of what creativity is. You are mistaking aesthetic productivity for originality and the other things that mark actual creativity.
I started painting 3 months ago at age 45 while in the throes of a massive personal crisis, out of a purely selfish need to express myself emotionally rather than accommodate other people. Turns out that I'm good at it, have original ideas, and am already getting unlooked-for interest from other people in loaning or purchasing my artwork. It's not that I have some tremendous natural talent; I work hard at it and when I can't paint I study, plus I had years of self-development in other parts of the arts that allowed me to develop my own aesthetic philosophy. But frankly the most valuable factor underlying this unexpected productivity is an uncharacteristic Not Giving A Shit about other peoples' feelings. Giving myself permission to be a less nice person has been an enormous boon to creativity.
That's something people who don't want to learn how things are done like to say, but isn't really true and is most often simply an excuse to avoid having to learn anything; it's commonly heard from amateur musicians for example in an attempt to avoid learning anything labelled "theory". The reality is that what you're likely to do without looking at what other people have done isn't going to be very creative and is likely way way inside the box and simplistic.
You're not really breaking the rules if you don't know the rules you're breaking; flailing around wildly in the dark isn't creative, it's just dumb luck if you happen to do something new. People who are truly creative, know exactly where the box is and ends and why they're breaking outside of it.
The artist doesn't necessarily know why something is new though, even if they have a lot of experience, it's just a primal response they get to a new piece of music they are working on for example, and then they can try to analyze it after the fact. Most artists I know aren't as methodical as the way you seem to describe, it's a lot more intuition and experimentation, and then because of their vast listening experience their brains are adjusted so that they aren't satisfied with existing stuff
If people lived 1,000+ years people would be talking about 100,000 hours.
To me, unlocking that aesthetic intuition is the essence of creativity. The other component -- which I recognize most people lack -- is an open-mindedness and willingness to experiment and find art in unexpected places. But even if you have that, you still need the mastery, at least in most disciplines.
If you create lots of sculpture, you'll encounter lots of "problems." And if you persevere, you'll discover lots of "solutions" -- whether they are intended results or happy accidents. Mastery in the arts is simply accumulating a sufficiently large library of problems/solutions, and encountering them often enough that they become mental muscle memory, so that you begin to see potential high-level solutions in the world around you. I believe the art we find most "creative" is, counterintuitively, the art that is discovered or stumbled upon by masters who have developed the skill to spot, excavate, and refine it. (Like Michelangelo seeing his sculpture "emerge" from the marble -- I don't think it was the mystical process it's often made out to be, but rather him recognizing the maximum potential of each quirk of the marble, and intuitively seeing how those potentials might combine into an image.) Contrast that with an artist's attempt to make something "from the ground up," based solely on the application of learned principles. The result may be beautiful or masterful, but probably won't have that true creative spark.
Great art often makes people think "I never would of thought to do that," which to me is kind of tragic, because they may get discouraged from pursuing art, without realizing that the artist never "thought to do that," either. The artist just had the open-mindedness to look around, the developed intuition to spot it, and the technical skill to build it out.
It's become very difficult for me to draw pictures that are interesting (if wrong) because I've trained so hard to draw them accurately. It's all by rote.
I've tried to fix it, to rewind. Now when I draw it's with my weak hand, and that has gotten me drawing interesting (if wrong) pictures again.
Another technique I've tried is using cheap materials. I usually get more interesting results from my 3 year olds acrylics than using professional oil paints.
That said, the love of art never came back. That's why, to the extreme confusion of my friends and family, I'm in tech now.
It seems like if your goal is to draw correct and interesting faces, you should figure out what in your imperfect weak hand drawings is interesting and practice either keeping that while you perfect your weak hand, or introduce that to your practice with your strong hand.
That said, again, I no longer enjoy it so it's a moot point.
>I've tried to fix it, to rewind.
Were this the case, children would have to spend months deliberately studying how to play.
As the author says, deliberate study is antithetical to creativity. Creativity is spontaneous, playful, imaginative - and none of those things come from grinding.
I have my best ideas usually while doing something totally unrelated.
Research shows that people who simply produce wind up producing better. So, the research disagrees with you at least somewhat.
There is no creativity without production. Production, however, does not guarantee creativity.
Sorry, who are you talking about?
If you practice too much, you will just be an automaton. Able to make but not to express. Your work will be derivative, uninteresting. There are literally millions of artists who have fallen into this trap.
If you practice too little then all your creativity will be for naught as you lack the skill and ability to translate it into an expression. Michelangelo, for example, was apprenticed when he was only 13, and by the time he made the Pieta he had been studying and working for 10 years.
The important thing is to find the balance. To practice as a means to hone a skill that is at your command, rather than your master.
My videos are here if you're curious: http://youtube.com/krisshamloo
Bummer. I was hoping to find some shortcuts to learning how to play the guitar. I've had one for 20 years now and still can't play it.
I just have too many things that I want to do. If I could afford to retire, I could easily keep busy the rest of my life doing all the things I wish I could do right now.
Now I probably won't touch my guitar again for another 3 months because the 5 minutes I can spare tomorrow will be spent reading or coloring a sketch I made or some other thing that I enjoy working on. You might point out that I'm wasting my time reading HN, but I get a great deal of enjoyment out of the things I find on HN.
That said, I do play every day, or mostly, for love of the game. Life's too short to work or play without love.
Amen to that. My problem is that there are too many things that I do for love of the game. I want to spend more time reading, and drawing, and painting, and carving, and tinkering, and gaming, and gardening, and blacksmithing, and cycling, and motorcycling, and writing, and paddleboarding, and traveling, and catching up on TV, playing boardgames with my kids, going to movies with my wife, and cooking, and skating, and lifting weights, and playing softball, and walking my dog, and working on my house, and calligraphy, and on and on and on...
By the end of the year, I had written 60 pages and read one of the Stephen King books.
In 2015 I doubled down on music, and recorded 10 songs.
"It really helps to know what rules you're breaking and why when doing something new."
I lost all respect for the article the moment the author drew difference between chess/music/sport and writing/drawing/teaching/"creativity". Frankly, the way I read it, this is just another hero-worshipping article by consultants whose main contribution to the economy involves destroying R&D and shipping jobs oversea. And it truly saddens me that Hacker News keeps this on my front page.
Why did the difference irk me?
First, find me, seriously, find me 2 basketball matches that are exactly the same. Or 2 golf days that are exactly the same. Or 2 music performances that are exactly the same. Or 2 chess matches that are exactly the same. It's ridiculous to claim that somehow chess and music playing and sports are not creative.
Second, if a person claims that somehow long period of deliberate practices do not matter on engineering, my personal opinion is that all engineers should spit at that person. Such insult! True, each engineering situation has different challenges. However, the principles of engineering (applied sciences, basically) are finite. Same things for writing or drawing. The materials & techniques (even styles!) are finite. Creativity refers to the adroitness of solving the infinite (problem space) with the finite (tools and principles). Without an intimate understanding of the finite (tools and principles), how can one bring it to bear on the infinite?
Third, most of new works are old. Let's take Shakespeare. His works are lovely and creative, no? But consider this: most of his plots are derivative (similar motifs, if not outright fully-formed plots, already existed and popular); most of his language already formed. Shakespeare created at most 10% of his language. He must gain expertise of the other 90% to show case these 10%. Similarly, think of any art or design or product or whatever creative result. Most of such art/design/whatever already follows some popular styles and employs existing and popular techniques. Creativity is only the little extra. Sure, the extra sets it apart. But without the expertise of the 90%, such "extra" can't exist.
Finally, creativity is very inefficient without deep expertise. Many people say things like "I am most creative when xyz" (popular xyz: in shower, on a walk, relaxed, reading, etc.). However, this actually means is that people come up with the 10% (see above) extra during this time. Since the person must create the other 90% to top off the little newness, without expertise, 10% will remain fantasy.
Now, I am not saying "expertise/practice is everything!" Expertise and practice are foundation of the creativity house. Even when you have solid foundation, you don't have a roof yet, and rain will still wet you. However, without foundation, you simply can't build a house. Expertise and practice are a requirement, but alone are probably not enough.
Parting words: people love stories of outsiders winning. However, why don't we talk about outsiders losing? There are vastly more of those. Let's take a simple field: web programming (1. it's appropriate here; 2. outsiders seem to look down on it). You know who built Google? Graduate students from prestige schools. You know who built Microsoft? Students with years of programming experience. You know what outsiders build? The millions of badly written websites, ready to be SQL injected or attacked by a already-patched bugs. That's outsiders' works.
For ex. > You know who built Google? People who weren't working in Yahoo or AltaVista.
> Who built Microsoft? Again outsiders out of the Unix or IBM world.
Further, while basketball matches are not same, the skill part - shooting/dribbling/tackling etc. is definitely same.
I am not arguing against expertise though - I know how critical a proper knowledge of algorithms and data structures is to programming.
What I am saying is that while expertise is important - creativity is fundamentally different from expertise.
However you do need expertise to be creative, I have no dreams of making any discoveries in quantum physics any time soon.
It was not people trying random shit either. It was a pair of PhD students, who were already experts in how information is indexed in libraries, and who understood how citations work in academia, who applied this knowledge to the novel domain of crawling the WWW.
If you look at the biographies of really creative people, you will see a pattern emerging. Practically all the grand masters of the Reinassense specialized in a single art, but dabbled with 2 or 3 more (i.e. Michel Angelo's magna opus is the Sistine Chappel, but he was a master sculptor and a moderately competent architect). Many fiction writers do start their careers as journaists. Great hackers have a tendency to pick up hobbies that have little or nothing to do with computers.
Maybe the problem with the 10-thousand hours is not that it kills creativity, but that people gets obsessed about a single topic and do not try their hand at enough different things for their creativity to flourish.
On another note: who claimed that 10,000 hours of practice leads to creativity? The author says that
>This wealth of research on creativity contradicts the notion that deliberate practice is the sole-- or even the most important-- aspect of creativity.
but this is the first time I've heard of anyone having this idea.
Later down the piece we see
>I have immense respect for Ericsson's body of work on deliberate practice, and do believe that deliberate practice can help you get better in virtually any skill. However, I also believe that an accurate understanding of creativity is important for how we recognize, nurture, value, and ultimately, reward it, across all sectors of society.
But again, it doesn't seem like the author is disagreeing with Ericsson. Am I missing something, is there something in Ericsson's book that would make it clear that Kaufman is not simply attacking a straw-man? Maybe it is from Gladwell using creative people and groups as examples in Outliers?
The article mostly seemed to be trying to surprise us with the obvious.
If you're interested in this type of thing, I'd recommend ":59 Seconds" for a somewhat more down-to-earth and research-based approach. Amongst many of the more interesting findings is that just having actual physical plants around[1] helps improve creativity and that brainstorming in groups (as opposed to separately and then comparing results later) is counterproductive.
(Of course that's also provisional, so some of the research referenced therein may have been refuted, so... Such is that Way of Science.)
[1] Interestingly, pictures of plants/nature don't work.