The No. 1 Habit of Highly Creative People | Hacker News Reader

The No. 1 Habit of Highly Creative People

zenhabits.net

190 pointsevac54 comments

Nope. The most effective habit of highly creative people is persistence, the ability to work and work and work while resisting burn-out.

The best graphic designers I’ve ever met would put in 8-10 hour days, then go home and work on their personal projects. It was effective, they all had at least 3 AIGA awards and about 10 HOW awards, each.

Too true. This is also the same for every successful entrepreneur I've ever heard of, read about, or ever known.

If we're talking about habit of highly successful people, I would agree it's persistence. But if we're talking specifically about highly creative and innovative people, then we may have to measure them with a slightly different set of metrics, for which solitude may be a more relevant habit than persistence.

Though I can't say whether solitude is THE number one habit, I would agree it's one of the best habits to have for generating insights and ideas.

Not so much, I’m talking about pure poundage of production: code, pots, designs, sculpture. Iteration is the only way to make something better.

Anecdote:

One semester, a professor decided to split his ceramics class up into two sections and see which would create better pots. One half would be graded on their final pot, which would be judged in terms of creativity and technical skill. The other half would be judged in terms of poundage of “acceptable” pots. 50 lbs would be a “C” 65 would be an “B” and 90 would be an “A.”

At the end of the semester, the best pots out of the entire class were picked from the huge number of iterations that the poundage group created.

--Source unknown.

> I’m talking about pure poundage of production

Creativity does not equal pure poundage of production.

No one said it does. The point of that anecdote, though, was to suggest that "pure poundage" is (perhaps counterintuitively) a really important factor in producing good things.

No but experience(poundage of production) and no fear of being judged on talent(anything not bad accepted) allows for grater experimentation which directly relates to creativity.

That anecdote is from a book called Art and Fear, by David Bayles and Ted Orlando. It's a short, excellent study on the exact thrust of this thread: i.e, the collision of talent and persistence and how a successful artist harnesses both of them.

On talent they say, "By definition, whatever [talent] you have is exactly what you need to produce your best work. There is probably no clearer waste of psychic energy than worrying about how much talent you have -- and probably no worry more common."

Which to me sums up the topic nicely.

I just want to point out our confusingly similar user-names. Looking through your comments, it seems we are both interested in psychology and are non-technical.

This may or may not be problematic, but I figured I'd let you know as I just noticed.

(sorry for the threadjack, no other way to contact you)

True, interesting coincidences! Since I just recently joined HN, I haven't had much opportunity to bump into non-programmers (and programmers) who are also interested in psychology. Though this is a bit off-topic, I'm glad that posting the article (The No. 1 Habit of Highly Creative People) could bring around all sorts of people. Nice to meet you!

Interesting that solitude has now largely been made obsolete by mobile devices. Moments where you might have previously spent mulling things over (such as sitting on the bus or waiting for your wife to select an item in a clothing store - true, not exactly a walk on the beach but as close as it gets for many urban dwellers on an average day) are now spent texting, checking Twitter/Facebook, etc.

I think persistence is paramount, but the most general habit is simply "creation." One needs to be creating something, perhaps not always, perhaps not always well, but creating something none the less. It's a self selecting habit to unite a group by, but for some reason, to some, not an obvious one.

That sounds like "the no.1 habit of highly productive creative people", not "the no.1 habit of highly creative people."

Bingo. I am generally far more creative than I am productive. :)

"Everyone can be taught to sculpt: Michelangelo would have had to be taught how not to. So it is with the great programmers".

Alan Perlis

On a side note, it seems like people value persistence more than creativity because it's more attainable by everyone. We can't all be creative freaks like Tesla, Van Gogh, or Einstein, but we can all work really really hard at what we do. Telling someone to "be more creative" doesn't have the same effect as "be more persistent"...you either have it or you don't with creativity.

It's almost like the naturally creative are cheating somehow, and there's a quiet resentment towards them by those of us who are non-creative-but-persistent, as if we want to forget that natural creativity gives a distinct advantage that can't be duplicated by persistence alone.

I think a couple of the posts in this thread exemplify this attitude.

Everyone's "creative" in the lazy sense of "having ideas". Everyone has an armful of ideas. Talk to people, and you can hear them.

I have literal piled notebooks full of ideas (at least, before I switched to text editors). The ones I haven't yet done anything with? They don't matter, because nothing has been created.

The people who actually manage more than going on about how they're "creative" are the people who pursue craft and accomplish their ideas, and that requires dedication and effort.

This conflicts with the mythology of creation as some airy, quasi-magical activity that only Special People do, but it's one of those hard truths: things you want take work.

And no, persistence is not "more attainable by everyone". It's not about plugging away mindlessly, it's about passion and dedication and improvement. These are hard things!

I think the OP meant "creative" as seeing a shortcut e.g instead of spending 10 hours trying to solve a problem, a "creative" person could do it in two using a different approach.

In this case, persistence is inefficient. You can see it happening with workaholics who will take the "hard/long" path and feel like heroes after 72 hours of work.

Persistence and dedication can be real time suckers. Especially if giving up means failing.

The beauty of laziness and postponing things is you let your mind process the information in the background. Unless the task is frustrating/urgent, I'd rather wait for an "humm, interesting" moment.

"as seeing a shortcut e.g instead of spending 10 hours trying to solve a problem, a "creative" person could do it in two using a different approach"

OP didn't say anything to that effect, so I have to go with the words the OP used.

Also, you're strawmanning persistence and dedication.

Being creative? Easy. Using that creativity and actually DOING something with it is much harder.

Be it building an application from nothing through to something useful to the wider world or writing a novel, the ideas are the easy part, follow through that sucks. Funny enough I find novel writing easier than finishing an application of late.

But who are these "naturally creative people"? I think the point the parent is making is that no matter how effortless it may seem, the very creative actually put in a lot of hard work to be so. That's been my experience.

I really can't say whether or not I am "naturally creative". But I routinely come up with "creative" solutions (polite euphemism for "something no normal person would have thought of", and often not appreciated by others as it is "disruptive" behavior). I think solitude is valuable not for having ideas per se but because it removes some of the pressure to conform and allows you to be "out of step" with others (without having to fight someone every step of the way over that detail). It is these "out of step with the crowd" answers that are typically labeled "creative".

When I was trying to figure out how to get myself well after being diagnosed late in life with a form of cystic fibrosis, I intentionally chose to not join any online support groups for CF or otherwise expose myself overly much to conventional views of the problem. I did this because I was already doing better than I was supposed to be and so was my oldest son (who has the same thing) and I wanted to figure out what we were doing right and improve on it. I felt that listening overly much to the mantra that "people like you don't get well" would have put me in danger of believing such brain-washing and thereby helping it to become self-fulfilling prophecy. I also felt that listening overly much to the conventional framing of the problem would pollute my thinking and deny me the opportunity to come up with a more accurate/effective view of the problem. Einstein supposedly said something like "You cannot solve a problem from the level of consciousness that helped create it." So I didn't want to be immersed in or exposed too much to the thought processes of all those folks who believed the problem to be unresolvable. I felt clear thinking on the matter was my only hope of salvation. The pay-off was huge. (And I'm an extrovert, so this was not a particularly easy path for me to follow. Had my life not literally depended upon it, I don't think I would have pursued such a path with so much persistence.)

I didn't mean to call the OP's point into question, I think that solitude can be incredibly helpful for creative work. I just think that effort is incredibly important.

Oh, sorry, it wasn't meant that way at all. Just something about your phrasing got me to thinking is all. I considered posting it on it's own, instead of as a "reply", but that sounded out of context to me.

Not some kind of 'rebuttal'. Just talking.

Thanks.

I think the naturally highly creative people are the ones who get the most gains for the same amount of conscious effort.

My experience of working with creative people has been that many of them work very hard, yes, but many of them do so because they want to get the most out of their natural creativity and talent. To an observer, it looks like their gains are strictly a result of their hard work, but that's because we don't see that hidden multiplier that's scaling their efforts into ability.

I don't mean to imply with my last post that some people just aren't creative altogether when I said that some people have it and some people don't. I just mean people that people have it in different areas (programming, carpentry, painting, organization, conversation, etc), and if you don't have it in an area, you're probably not going to manifest it. You can try to mimic it with persistence though :)

I think your premise, "that we can't all be creative freaks... but we can all work really really hard" is not actually true. Dig up the biographies of any of the people you listed and you'll find that they devoted enormous amounts of time an energy into their work. Tell me that you could really pull 10-14 hour days doing one single thing? And not just 10-14 hour days of 'work' but true practice, which pushes you further. Additionally find me a single case of someone with "natural creative" talent who achieved any sort of success without the requisite amount of hours put in.

I personally find the "natural creative" to be a myth that people prefer to persist, it means that if I'm not Van Gogh, I can more easily say "well I just don't have the talent" and give up right away, and if I'm a bright college student I can just get pissed at the world for not recognizing my "genius" rather than just work at something all day.

In short: extreme amounts of hard work and dedication are more rare than cases of natural talent.

> Dig up the biographies of any of the people you listed and you'll find that they devoted enormous amounts of time an energy into their work.

See the second paragraph here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2061319

I find that when I'm focused on something, I tend to completely ignore outside world, that thing doesn't really exist -- I'm completely inside code/sketch/whatever. Appreciation from the outside world is something I couldn't really care less about, as the fantasy becomes reality.

I think that a healthy balance between living in fantasy and real world, as well as perfecting tools for connecting fantasy and reality is the key.

> On a side note, it seems like people value persistence more than creativity because it's more attainable by everyone. We can't all be creative freaks like Tesla, Van Gogh, or Einstein, but we can all work really really hard at what we do.

I find it interesting that many people on this site are convinced that creativity - even the really unique kind that great inventors possess - is not actually "special" but can be replaced with hard work, as though we're all Einsteins who just lack motivation.

I wonder if that's just rooted in irritation with web designers, many of whom are fond of criticizing programmers for their often poor graphic design skills.

Although intelligence is wasted on the lazy, I somehow doubt that many here would disagree that it is both important in order to be a truly great programmer, as well as something relatively rare enough to be valuable.

>Nope. The most effective habit of highly creative people is persistence, the ability to work and work and work while resisting burn-out.

But if that persistence is applied to 8 hours a day of meetings and 3 hours of email, it wouldn't lead to anything impressive. The days/months/years of persistence must go toward "creating" not just "working." The author made the case that most creativity happens when you're alone with your thoughts.

Persistence may guarantee a certain quantity of output and that may allow for a higher statistical chance of 'wins', but it's not a must-have habit to be highly creative. Compare the histories and creative methodologies of Edison (known for persistence) versus Tesla (mad, but more creative scientist) - I'd rather be Tesla creative than Edison creative. What a lot of creative people that appear incredibly persistent have in common are lifestyles that are driven by curiosity. Leonardo Da Vinci is perhaps the most creative genius to have walked the planet but it wasn't the habit of persistence that set him apart - it was his curiosity. He produced like crazy but he was famously known as a flake in the day (for not finishing stuff). He didn't care about output - he was driven by his questions, his curiosity. Curiosity driven people don't stop because they intrinsically need to find the answers, they can't help it - it's a form of persistence. I'd rather have a insatiably curious person working on developing ideas than a persistent workaholic.

Your attitude is symptomatic of most people who, in lieu of being actually creative and making cool stuff, don't, but believe that if they just keep trying they'll get there. Sometimes this is true, but genius works in mysterious ways.

Also using designers as an example is a bit disingenuous as well. I know this is a massive value judgement, but I don't generally consider designers artists. they're too bound by their medium generally to be considered properly creative and artistic. they're more technicians - solving interesting problems, but never with the surprising abstraction that makes great art great.

  they're too bound by their medium

Sculptors have no chance then :(

Medium was the wrong word, in hindsight...I think I really mean't discipline.

Don't confuse success with creativity.

The article left out the following quote of Albert Einstein:

“I lived in solitude in the country and noticed how the monotony of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind”

Unplugging and just staring at the wall for a couple of hours alone is good for creativity. It tends to lead to a good mental environment for "image streaming". "Image Streaming" is watching a movie in your mind made up of as many memories and things you can imagine pieced together, usually focused on a particular topic. It's basically a way to access the enormous power of the right-side of the brain.

Ok, maybe its not #1, but it is important.

Newton did his best work hiding out in his country house during Plague season.

Einsteid flourished in a Patent office - nobody bothered him much, he could spend all day thinking.

Actually, I've found that the "Top idea in mind" is how I do it, and figured someone would have mentioned it already.

http://www.paulgraham.com/top.html

I just never put a name into it, until I read that essay. When you mull over something in your mind all the time, you're bound to come up with something as you get more new pieces of information in your day to day life.

I think the fact that most historically creative people were nite owls, and the fact they score better on iq tests (see http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200911/intelligence-...) could be linked to the solitude that inevitably happens when you're up late.

The habit is "solitude."

and the opposite, connecting with people.

I think solitude and deep thinking time are crucially important to programming. However, I have been becoming more and more aware that programming is also performance art (audience of our peers), by which I mean that programming is also a social activity.

In order to be appreciated, it must be shared.

Might I recommend: David Bohm wrote a very accessible book on creativity--what it is, how it works, etc.

http://www.amazon.com/Creativity-Routledge-Classics-David-Bo...

I love this idea that somehow creative people are somehow "special"; I really like the articles preface of "Creativity is a nebulous, murky topic that fascinates me endlessly — how does it work? What habits to creative people do that makes them so successful at creativity?"

Here is a good interview with Craig Wynett ("Chief Creativity Officer") at P&G, in which he attempts to explain how they at P&G are trying to approach creativity from a scientific approach:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLBJ9pda7TA

In my opinion, cognitive science will be a huge topic in marketing in the years to come.

Really? I don't think so. Some of the coolest ideas I've ever had have come during discussions with friends. I'm most productive when I'm alone, but rarely do I have creative ideas by myself.

The article notes that solitude should be balanced with participation and awareness of one's space. Upon reading that, I realized that's why sites like HN are so valuable to me: I get both without much hassle.

I resonate with the article. As I've grown in the practice of tranquil and contemplative solitude, my creativity has grown. "Creation comes from within, inspiration comes from without."

This is also called "flow" or being "in the zone" -- focusing on one thing, intensely, without interruptions. It's one more reason to lump programming in with the other creative arts.

Stopped reading the article when I saw listed as a highly creative person the "actress best known for her awesome work in Buffy the Vampire Slayer".

She also writes and produces The Guild ( http://www.watchtheguild.com/ ) and its associated comics. I think the show qualifies her as both creative and a successful web entrepreneur.

Or, to put it another way: meditation.

creating != producing

to a good extent, creativity == (ability to generate alternatives && identify / pick out the best)

and i believe 'ability to generating alternatives' is one of the most important issue here, as often times, most / all existing solutions to a problem have failed or are poor, and it is then required of a 'creative' person to come up with alternatives - obviously the bonus is when the best is picked from these alternatives.

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