5 Fallacies About Creativity
and how they hold ideas hostage.
Throughout my life, I have involved myself in creative projects; from t-shirt design to UX design, comic books to concept albums. Some of my earliest memories are of my brother and I painstakingly making stop-motion movies with action figures on our compact VHS camcorder. Why?
We were born to create.
Creativity is part of what separates humans from all other creatures. We have ideas. We can reason. We imagine. We have the capacity to form solutions to the problems we encounter.
Even though we all have this innate ability to create, some suppress it by believing things that simply aren’t true. These pervasive fallacies limit their potential to innovate.
1. I don’t draw or play an instrument. I am not creative.
Creativity is so much more than mastering mechanical skills like brushing paint on a canvas or pressing keys on a piano. It is more, but it is also less. The barrier-to-entry to being creative is much lower than it is for mastering an instrument.
“Creativity is problem solving… The act of working on those problems is a creative act.” — Ed Catmull, president of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios
Anyone who works on solving problems is being creative, and the fundamental principles and processes of creativity can be applied to nearly any problem in any medium in any field. This definition effectively demolishes the seemingly impenetrable wall that separates the “creative” from the “non-creative”. It’s liberating!
If you’re solving problems, you’re being creative.
Why are people who are involved in visual or musical arts often considered more creative? Their expressions of creativity are more outward. As humans, we rely heavily on our eyes and ears to make sense of the world around us, so beautiful and striking visual and audible works command our attention.
We must not reserve the title of “creative” exclusively for those with outward talents.
Believe you can be creative. Believe you can come up with unique solutions to the problems you face. Everything around you was designed and made by someone as a solution to some problem. They merely tried and learned how to create it.
2. If I wait around long enough, inspiration will eventually come find me.
…only if you’ve done your homework first.
The human brain is a miraculous machine. Even when you have stopped actively working on a problem, it continues to make connections in the background.
Rest is an essential ingredient for a creative breakthrough, but rest alone will not produce a eureka moment. Rest is the final ingredient for great ideas. Rest allows your brain to work on the problem in the background by sub-consciously making connections. For rest to be effective, you need to have exhaustively examined the problem beforehand and explored potential solutions.
You can only harvest what has been sown. A farmer who plants only a little and neglects his crop can expect a meager harvest.
Allow yourself to try things that may fail. Build quick and rough so that failures cost less. There is almost always more than one right answer to a problem, so even if you find one good answer, don’t stop there. Try to generate as many good answers as you can. This is how you plant liberally.
Then… Rest. Do something else — something totally different. Do something relaxing, recreational, or mechanical. Repeat this process of examining the problem from every angle and then resting, and you can expect an abundant harvest of unexpected ideas.
3. To be truly original, I must avoid other people’s ideas.
Nothing comes from nothing. Therefore, everything comes from something.
In my experience, ex nihilo is a false notion. Nothing comes from nothing. Every new idea is stitched together from the existing ideas of others. There is a fascinating documentary about how this cross-pollination of ideas works called Everything Is a Remix.
Avoiding others’ ideas won’t keep you from producing derivative work. It just means you will produce derivative work in ignorance.
Garbage in, garbage out. The more you fill your brain with a diverse array of ideas, images, and experiences that inspire, uplift, teach, question, or provoke thought about the world around you, the more raw material you will have to (consciously or subconsciously) pull from as you approach a new creative project. The more the better.
Conversely, the less good stuff you consume, or the less you try to make sense of the world around you, the fewer original solutions you will be able to generate. If you haven’t internalized any useful, inspiring ideas, how can you create any?
The ideas you perceive around you are the raw materials your mind uses to form new ideas.
Finding the best stuff in the world and sharing it with others should be a habit that’s engrained into your soul as a creative person.
See what has been tried in the past. Learn from others’ failures and successes related to the problem you’re trying to solve. Doing this will help you reach creative success.
4. I would be more creative if I were free of all constraints.
Constraints don’t constrain creativity, they magnify it.
For some, this may be hard to buy. How could limiting the amount of paths someone can take allow them to be more creative?
Remember, creativity is problem solving. This means you’re looking for a right answer to the problem at hand. Constraints allow you to come to a right answer quicker by limiting the amount of possible solutions. They focus your efforts. Constraints may not give you a place to start, but they make it easier to find one by giving you places not to start.
Constraints can also come in the form of obstacles or opposition; shorter deadlines, tighter budgets, failures, having to work with people you don’t get along with. These types of constraints are the most difficult to embrace because they are often unforeseen and painful. However, tough opposition can refine your creativity by forcing you to climb to greater heights to reach a right answer.
Some of the greatest creative endeavors were forged in the fires of project hell. They were rife with bickering, competing, and pushing through conflict after conflict. Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling fresco may be the greatest painting ever created. It may also have had the toughest constraints of any painting project in history. It wasn’t the constraints alone that made it great, it was Michelangelo’s persistence and vision in the face of intense opposition that made it a masterpiece.
5. I need to stay a beginner to stay creative.
Do you know someone who has dropped out of getting an education because he or she thinks it will taint their creative mind, or have you met someone that refuses to learn new things in order to approach a problem from a novice’s perspective? These are attempts to stay a beginner. These attempts are futile, however. As soon as you begin to work on a problem, you have stepped outside of the problem, and you can never be the beginner again.
Being creative is not about staying a beginner, it’s about maintaining the ability to see the world from the eyes of a beginner.
Seeing the world from the eyes of a beginner can be done without limiting your knowledge. You just have to spend more time with beginners. Refusing to learn will inhibit your growth and your ability to form new, great ideas.
