Let's chat, HN: On "X makes you more creative" | Hacker News Reader

Let's chat, HN: On "X makes you more creative"

7 pointsvisakanv7 comments

Seems like there are all sorts of different links on the front page right now about how different states make you more or less creative. I thought I'd take some time to share my personal thoughts about it.

Creativity is just connecting things. Imagine the world as a giant set of data points. Creativity is seeing a unique set of connections between a given set of data points, or a choosing an unusual subset unusual data points to tell a unique, different story. It's about ordering things differently, selecting things differently. People applaud creativity when it shows us more interesting ways of seeing things. The familiar becomes unfamiliar. The unfamiliar becomes familiar. There's a shorter, faster, more efficient way of doing something. Etc

How do emotional states (sadness, boredom, etc) affect creativity? They act as filters. When you're sad, you focus on some things and not others. When you're happy, you focus on some things and not others. When you're bored... you get the drill.

It isn't the state that makes you more creative. It's CHANGING your state that makes you creative. It's about seeing the world with new eyes. Going for a run makes you more creative. Being sleep-deprived makes you more creative, and getting a good night's sleep makes you more creative– depending on what you're working on.

And of course, the more you work, the more data points you have, the more different variations you attempt, the more you switch things around, the more creative you'll be. It's a skill you can practice, like improv comedy.

I also think that there are specific exercises that can make you a lot more creative. I wrote about this once from the perspective of songwriting. Instead of trying to write a good song, why not try to write the worst song ever? The silliest song ever? The stupidest song ever? Doing these things challenges you to change your frame, change your perspective. That's what inspires creativity.

Chris Rock had a great quote in an interview:

"You keep notes. You look for the recurring. What’s not going away? Boy, this police-brutality thing — it seems to be lingering. What’s going to happen here? You don’t even have the joke, you just say, “Okay, what’s the new angle that makes me not sound like a preacher?” Forget being a comedian, just act like a reporter. What’s the question that hasn’t been asked? How come white kids don’t get shot? Have you ever watched television and seen some white kid get shot by accident?

> And out of that comes comedy.

Comes humor. You laughed right away. I just asked a question that no one had ever asked."

http://www.vulture.com/2014/11/chris-rock-frank-rich-in-conv...

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Steve Jobs:

"Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they've had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.

Unfortunately, that's too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven't had very diverse experiences. So they don't have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one's understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have."

http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/4.02/jobs_pr.html

So I would love to have/see some discussions on HN about creativity. But I'd prefer to hear less about how some state affects creativity and more about specific creative exercises any of you might've taken.

Travel makes you more creative. Learning a new language makes you more creative. Sure, but... so what, you know? Were we really sitting around thinking to ourselves, "Oh, if only somebody told me how to be more creative?" I doubt that's the case!

I'm more curious to know about how/why some people manage to stick to creative exercises/practices/disciplines more so than others, and how I ought to apply that in my own work.

Excellent insight. I wish this were articulated in blog form somewhere.

Personal anecdote. I moved to Santiago, Chile for 6 months in 2011 to participate in Startup Chile. The first week I was there I had an idea for a novel come to me like a lightning bolt. It sort of overcame me and I worked out the entire story in a few days time. More than anything I think it had to do with the sudden change of environment that sparked my creativity. (and yes, I later wrote that novel)

I've written a bunch of stuff about this, but yeah these past few posts/submissions make me realize that there would be utility in a centralized post. I think the closest thing I've written about this is "Letter To A Young Songwriter"– http://visakanv.com/1000/0152-letter-to-a-young-songwriter/

Thanks for linking your post. It makes a lot of sense. I bookmarked to share with others.

It's true creativity is connecting things. Daniel Kahnman in Thinking Fast and Slow referred to it as associative memory working exceptionally well. Additionally, being in a good mood has been proven to make people more creative and intuitive, but is that the whole story? So what if you make more connections. Is that enough to say you are more creative? Do you do something with them or do you just forget them?

I'm not as convinced it's changing your state in general that makes you more creative. We all change many states daily. Are we all de facto more creative daily and haven't got a clue about it?

The general idea is you start from an open mode where all thoughts are entertained and progress is slow. After you become sure of what you want to do, you eventually enter a closed mode, where you shut out the world and move as fast as you can, until you run into the next big obstacle. According to John Cleese, who studied creativity, a big problem is we stay in the closed mode too long. It's the change between open and closed mode that is a big deal. He names 5 factors that make us more creative: http://www.brainpickings.org/2012/04/12/john-cleese-on-creat...

I do know of a few specific creativity exercises though in addition to John Cleese's.

1. Unstructured play. Setup some time, at least 1.5-2 hrs and ideally every day, where the goal is to just play. This removes the expectation to produce anything, which allows your subconscious to visit thoughts you ordinarily wouldn't let it. It's one way to counteract one of the biggest killers to creativity: expectations.

2. Constraint before freedom. Don't initially give yourself the freedom to work on something big or on everything. Instead focus on something small and specific, however minute and irrelevant it might originally seem. This has the effect of keeping the fire contained, which leads to a denser collection of connections. You touched on this already, it's a way of artificially setting a filter without waiting for a personal mood swing or an external change to do it for you. It feels like zig-zagging aimlessly like a fly originally and that's ok.

But do switch into a freedom mode after that. Once the ideas kick in, feel free to run after them. When? There's an embarrassing pull of delight that alarms you. "Why didn't I think of this before...?"

Unstructured play is one instance of the application of this principle.

3. Purge in the morning. This is another long-known writing trick. Write aimlessly in the morning as soon as you wake up, mostly to get the negativity out. Although you are awake, the critical part of yourself isn't yet, which allows thoughts produced by your subconscious overnight to come nearer to the surface. This might be more related to the REM state of sleep, which is when dreams happen, and where tough problems are solved by the subconscious. (The book The Committee of Sleep offers ample evidence to this.) So purging might be less related to mornings and more related to waking up.

Sounds too negative? Don't be surprised the writing continues with solutions to the annoying problems you write about.

Julia Cameron's other two pieces of advice that complement purging in the morning are: a) have a date with yourself once a week (it sounds like unstructured play in the real world) and b) (IIRC) get in the habit of imagining the physical world from a different camera angle.

Which seems similar to...

4. Toy with limits. You touched on this too with improv comedy. Get in the habit of purposefully looking for the two extremes in each situation. If you could lay out every subject on a continuum, what's the worst case and what's the best? It mostly helps understand the forces at play behind a subject and that helps generate ideas.

btw, I like your thinking. At some point reading this post I exclaimed "Hey it's visakanv!" We seem to be interested in similar things.

Oh hey, sorry I didn't see this earlier!

+1 for associative memory

+1 for morning purges, very powerful stuff

+10 for constraints! Absolutely.

+1 for self-dating

+1 for unstructured play

+1 to extreme-hunting (I'm reminded of a book by Tina Sellig talking about entrepreneurship- don't try to look for good ideas, because you constrain your thinking. Try to look for extreme ideas, crazy ideas, intentionally-bad ideas. Then flip them around, invert them, etc).

re: "we all change many states daily"- great point. I guess I was thinking about specific subsets of state change- like when we experience a sharp or dramatic change, or if we make a wilful change while holding something in our minds. I'm sure I'm being rather sketchy and messy about this, but you know how it is.

Thanks for the thoughtful response! I really appreciate it.

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