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Comment by AndrewMoffat | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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