There are a zillion books on creativity. I haven’t read many of them, but the few I have looked at really stink. What bothers me most about them is how formulaic they are. You can’t make creativity happen; it’s magic. There are a great many things you can do that stifle your creativity; avoiding those mistakes certainly helps. But never forget: creativity isn’t something that you can order up. Under the perfect circumstances, it strikes like lightning. Most of the time, it doesn’t. Don’t get your expectations too high.
The very first mistake is to consciously try to be creative. Sorry, it doesn’t work that way. Any idea that you can consciously concoct was already obvious.
Creativity takes place deep, deep inside your brain, in a place that you cannot consciously access. (By now I hope that you realize that the human mind is much bigger than “you”. The person you call “me” is really just a front end for the rest of the mind.)
Your task is to somehow set that “deep mind” to work on the problem you wish to solve. The first step in doing so is to translate the problem from the clumsy artificial mental language in which you think into the language of the deep mind. That language is emotion. Thus, you must translate your creative problem into something that you feel. You must truly care about the problem. That problem must be emotionally significant to you. You must NEED to solve it. You must feel that need in your muscles and your bones. Your entire existence must focus on that problem. If you can’t feel it, your mind can’t solve it.
This process cannot be carried out in any short period of time. You must squeeze that problem down into your deep mind over the course of days or weeks or months. This process of driving it downward is crucial to your success.
The creative process is carried out in much the same manner that dreams are created. Have you ever noticed that you forget even the most vivid dream after just a few minutes of wakefulness? That’s because dreams take place in your deep mind, not your conscious mind. As you waken, your conscious mind takes over and your deep mind recedes into the shadows, taking the dream with it.
You may have also noticed that you seldom dream about trivial day-to-day issues. Sure, some trivial flake of your daily experience may pop up in a dream, but the dream really isn’t about those day-to-day problems; instead, it’s always about something deeper, perhaps using mundane coverings for deeper issues. Only the most emotionally intense subjects play any central role in your dreams.
The creative process is closely analogous to the dreaming process. You can’t be creative about mundane day-to-day stuff; only emotionally intense matters penetrate deeply into your mind. That’s why you must FEEL the problem. That’s why you must press it deep into your mind over the course of days or weeks.
At a certain point, pushing no longer accomplishes anything. You must simply relax and wait. Let the soup bubble. The deep mind marches to its own beat. Take a vacation. Work on something else. As the deep mind works on the problem, it might produce an answer. Perhaps it won’t. If it does, it will come to you out of nowhere, at the most unexpected time.
When I was young I read a book about brainstorms. It told a story about a French mathematician a few centuries ago who was struggling with a very difficult problem. He fought with it for weeks, but could not find the solution. Exhausted, he gave up and decided to take a vacation in Normandy. He relates that, as he was stepping off the carriage in Normandy, at the moment his foot touched the step, the entire solution came to him in a single vision. It was much too big to express in a few pages of equations, yet he could see the whole thing in a single vision. He frantically rushed to write down as much as he could while it was still fresh in his mind.
That’s how creativity works. If a solution can be found, it will come to you at the most unexpected moment. It will appear in your mind completely formed (because your deep mind has already worked it all out), but it will fade from your mind quickly, so you must record it immediately.
So here it all is, in four simple steps:
1. FEEL the problem in your body.
2. Push it down deep into your mind.
3. Let it simmer.
4. If the answer does come, record it immediately.
