My modest proposal took me largely by surprise. I was trying to write about ‘general creativity,’ but didn’t like any of the results. My failed efforts eventually degenerated into introspective, ironic, circular little jokes; the essay turned into a story about itself – an ‘auto-bibliography’ as I sometimes call it – that had nowhere to go.
Then I accidentally stumbled upon Seth Godin’s post, which became both encouragement and subject matter for the self-deprecating attitude I worked myself into. And a few hours later, I had produced something totally unexpected.
Such accidents are not unusual; they seem to be the source of creativity. A lot of research has focussed on this ‘chance’ element of creative success in art and science. UC Davis psychologist Dean Keith Simonton specializes in this aspect of creativity, most notably in his 1999 book, Origins of Genius: Darwinian Perspectives On Creativity. Building on the work of psychologist Donald Campbell, Simonton compares the creative process to the chance variations and natural selection of Darwinian evolution.
Simonton’s most radical claim is that the quality of creative output is directly correlated with quantity: the creators with the most successes are simply those with the highest productivity, or who make the most attempts (so they often produce far more failures as well).
Another characteristic of creative individuals is a peculiar kind of egotism. As Simonton says, characteristics like "ego-strength" and self-discipline "enable creators to exploit the strange ideas that fill their heads without allowing those ideas to take over the organization of their personality." Creative geniuses aren’t afraid of risky and untested ideas, nor are they afraid of the social embarrassment and isolation that might follow their (virtually inevitable) failure.
A perfect example of this is Frank Gehry, the great architect who designed the Bilbao Guggenheim Museum, the Walt Disney Concert Hall in LA, and the Experience Music Project in Seattle. I just watched the 2006 documentary, Sketches of Frank Gehry, made by his friend and Academy Award winning director, Sidney Pollack. (I highly recommend this movie to anyone interested in creativity.) One clip has the Guggenheim Foundation's Director, Thomas Krens, talking about Gehry’s ego, or rather, "the biggest ego in the business": "Instead of reacting negatively to criticism, he’ll basically say the reverse of what you might expect someone with a big ego to say – ‘Let’s just rip it apart and start again’ – because he knows that when he does it for the second time, he does it from a higher plane of knowledge, it’s a second opportunity to do that. Now that’s real ego."
It is perhaps because of that confidence that creative people are willing to make risky long-term investments in their original projects and ideas. In their 1995 book, Defying the Crowd: Cultivating Creativity in a Culture of Conformity, psychologists Robert Sternberg and Todd Lubart described creative people as "investors" who know how to "buy low and sell high": "Creators generate ideas that are like undervalued stocks (stocks with a low price-to-earnings ratio), and both the stocks and the ideas are generally rejected by the public."
To put it very succinctly, we can describe creative people as being "open to experience," and having "a disposition that includes a diversity of interests and hobbies, a preference for complexity and novelty, and a tolerance of ambiguity."
What distinguishes Simonton’s work is that he focusses on the importance of chance variations that occur in creative thought processes – those unforseen moments of ‘inspiration’ – which emerge from changing, multiform associations of ideas. One of the book’s strengths is the number of examples of this tendency Simonton provides, mainly in the form of autobiographical reports accounts by scientists like Einstein, Poincare, Helmholtz, and Darwin himself.
Another example of this characteristic is given in the one of the best moments in Sketches of Frank Gehry. Pollack was fortunate to have access to Gehry’s psychoanalyst (!), who suggested that "there's something in there, in that right brain, that allows him to take those free associations, and then make them into practical realities."
Of course, it isn't enough just to generate wild and random ideas. Creative geniuses spend years (usually about ten) gaining enough "domain-relevant knowledge and skills," to be able to recognize and capitalize on their novel ideas. To make this point in another article, Simonton quoted Louis Pasteur, who said, "chance favours the prepared mind." Another expert on creativity, Howard Gruber, has referred to this as generating a "network of enterprise."
I think it’s important (in case you’re inclined to make further reflection of this notion) not to overestimate the novelty of these ideas about "associations"; they’re among the oldest in psychology – arguably older than the field itself. (In case you see this as obvious, and you’re wondering who could be so stupid... me. And I’m a bit miffed that this stuff never came up in the three university psych courses I took.) Philosophers promoted "associationist" doctrines of mind before psychology was even a profession, and William James devoted an entire fifty-five page chapter to association in his monumental Principles of Psychology, published in 1890.
James included a brief history of the doctrine, tracing it from Thomas Hobbes through David Hume, up to James’s friend and sometime intellectual sparring partner, Shadworth Hodgson, who was the first to outline a non-atomistic theory of association (or "redintigration") in 1865 – which I’m tempted to think of as a prototype for "quantum" theories of mind.
And the Darwinian approach to association is nothing new either; the notion of natural selection was almost immediately taken up by philosophers like Herbert Spencer (who, incidentally, also coined the term "survival of the fittest") to enlighten or explain cognitive processes. James did the same; in fact he pointed out that Spencer's theory wasn't Darwinian enough. In Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior, Chicago historian Robert J. Richards summarizes James’s correction of Spencer, telling us James believed that "the novel ideas produced by men of genius – and ourselves on occasion – were not due to direct adaptations," but rather "sprang up in the mind as spontaneous mental variations..."
Simonton also cites Sarnoff Mednick’s "remote association theory." Simonton says that creative geniuses use "flat associative hierarchies," which he has explained elsewhere as meaning "that for any given stimulus, the creative person has many associations available, all with roughly the equal possibilities of retrieval." This is opposed to the "steep associative hierarchies" of less creative people, in which ideas are more likely to associate with a smaller selection of similar and familiar ideas.
We can find something much like this concept in Hodgson’s work as well. Although from Hodgson we get perhaps a better account of uncreative thought processes: "people who have few or weak interests are decided predominantly in their redintigrations [or associations] by habit; those who have many or powerful interests have redintigrations of more variety and more apparent originality. Interest is the source of what is called character... interests, if at once few and powerful, have a tendency to coincide with habit, for then they both run in the same groove; it becomes a habit to feel certain interests; and the same series of redintigrations revolves day after day, unless the objects of presentation are usually new and various, as for instance in travelling."
Of course, Hodgson and James weren’t talking about "creativity" as we know it today, because the concept was still being formed in their time. Through most of history, creation has been viewed as an act of God. Our notion of the "creative person" is a product of five hundred years of humanizing and democratizing progress (which, I believe, is still in the making): inspired by great artists, writers, and designers; enabled by new technologies, from the printing press to the web; validated by scientific discoveries, notably those in the young field of psychology, not to mention Charles Darwin; facilitated by changes in politics and the emergence of global commerce; and articulated by philosophers from Descartes, Locke, Smith, Kant, and whoever has the courage to tackle these complex and ambiguous notions today.
The world I see now is one in which all of these factors – art, science, technology, commerce, and civics – have become closely integrated, almost unified in some aspects, like communications. The one that seems the most absent now is philosophy. Perhaps this is because philosophy is par excellence the domain which progresses on the backs and in the minds of creative geniuses – autonomous iconoclasts, multi-disciplinary adventurers, and unconventional risk-takers – while our age is structured to promote safe, conventional, normal, and methodical productivity, even when it’s framed and sold as "creativity."
The web, obviously, is a major cause of this; that’s the focus, or "head," where the different faces of creativity are increasingly fused together. The web is a civic domain because it has very quickly become part of the infrastructure of our everyday lives; the web is a scientific domain because it is still in a process of discovery, it’s still evolving through experimental trial and error; the web is an artistic domain because it is created and designed by people; and the web is a commercial domain because corporate organizations seem to be the most effective means of managing these diverse elements.
Despite all of the criticism thrown at large corporations for being slow and stodgy, commercial enterprise in general has an astonishing ability to adapt and grow. Every year, thousands of entrepreneurial startups – think of them as "chance variations" – come into the world, becoming either "selected" to thrive or reabsorbed back into the raw material from which new associations may emerge.
Some of the most successful companies, such as Google (itself a chance variation not too long ago), "recreate" this evolutionary process on a smaller scale within themselves, encouraging employees to suggest original ideas, which are then either selected (or more often, not) by objective tests and trials. (Stanford’s Robert Sutton is one of the best researchers and writers on this kind of organizational creativity. See his recent blog post on 'rewarding failure,' which cites Simonton’s Origins of Genius.)
And with professional schools in business, design, and engineering adapting to this new general-creative attitude, even in just the past decade, our appreciation for how to motivate, manage, and reward creative work has improved greatly. Business people are learning to "think like designers" and more creative-minded people are pursuing careers that were formerly in the traditional domain of business.
But is all of this draining the creativeness out of "creativity"? What are the implications for genuinely unconventional and autonomous creators? How might deeply creative people distinguish themselves, when so many others claim and aspire to be creative, aping the rhetoric and manner of creativity as a way to conform with the current attitude of business, making such notions quite conventional and unoriginal?
Art, science, commerce, and civics have become so regulated and methodical that there is little space for genuine creativity to stretch out and thrive in original ways. The one domain that remains open is, oddly, philosophy: the one that's also the most "absent" (remember what Sternberg said about creative people "buying low and selling high"). I’m not talking about professional philosophy, but philosophy in the sense of living through an open-ended love of learning. I usually call this "creative generalism," "general creativity," "radical creativity," "radical generalism," or whatever I feel like at the time. The name doesn't really matter, as long as I don't fall in love with it and lose sight of the important thing, which is to keep learning, creating, developing, growing... It may not bring any immediate material or social rewards, but who’s asking for them?
Combined progress in other domains has generated a breathtaking supply of material for organizing original "networks of enterprise," through which to generate radically new associations and insights. Meanwhile, the emerging technologies – like the web – that are largely responsible for proliferating the supply of information (and increasing its overall complexity), also provide the tools for reorganizing it more creatively and effectively.
I think that very soon someone will figure out how to put it all together, creating a whole new way of looking at life, to understand it intuitively, and to develop a "new common sense." All this will require is a love of adventure, and a willingness to work hard and invest over the long term. I can’t prove it yet; it’s just a feeling I have...
