Chukwu Emeka
Creativity and crazy. They go together like ginger and beer, aged cheese and fine wine, impressionist painters, and lead poisoning. One can hardly think of one without the other.
Almost by definition, creativity is the opposite of boring. If something is creative, it’s because it triggers some degree of surprise or excitement within us—it reconfigures existence in ways we could not have previously imagined
Success
Creative people are not boring. Creative work is not boring. Therefore, we assume that the secret to creative success must not be boring.
I had a friend in college who wanted to be a famous novelist. After graduation, he bought a one-way ticket to Paris and intentionally became homeless for all of about three weeks, believing he had to suffer romantically to find inspiration for his art. A few years later, I met a guy in a punk band in Boston who insisted that his heroin usage wasn’t an addiction but part of his creative process, because, as he put it, “nothing good was ever written sober.”
And, sure enough, if we look at history’s greatest creative geniuses, there’s anecdote after anecdote of them being absolutely fucking looney tunes. Igor Stravinsky believed he could only become inspired to write music if he did headstands. In the early days of Apple, Steve Jobs reportedly soaked his feet in the bathroom toilets to clear his mind before meetings. Vincent Van Gogh got into an argument with his flatmate, lopped his own ear off, and—not wanting it to go to waste—gift-wrapped the ear and gave it to his favorite prostitute as a memento.
Yes, “boring” is the last word you would ever use to describe the world’s creative geniuses. And indeed, their work is anything but.
But I’m going to argue something different. I’m going to argue that the process of creativity is actually quite boring. And, because it is boring, creativity itself is repeatable. It’s something you and I and anyone else can practice and become good at.1
Because while the person and the work may be anything but boring, history and science teach us that the process that generates great work… is totally boring.
And that’s good news for us.
WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE “CREATIVE” ANYWAY?
Creativity is a delicate dance between novelty and value.2 For something to feel creative it must feel both new but also useful in some way.
Although we think of creativity as creating something that is unique, most of it isn’t. In fact, most of what we experience as being “new” is simply taking old stuff and remixing it in fresh or unexpected ways.3
For example, the chord progression of the 17th-century composer Johann Pachabel’s “Canon in D” has been refurbished with modern instruments hundreds of times to produce dozens of hit songs just in the last few decades.
“Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work. Every great idea I’ve ever had grew out of work itself.”
It’s no surprise, then, that when you look at the creative geniuses throughout history to find commonalities, the most glaringly obvious one is that they simply worked their asses off more than most people, and longer than most people. There’s almost a direct correlation between how much someone created and how original their work ended up being.
- Mozart and Beethoven each composed more than 600 pieces of music. Most of their contemporaries composed fewer than 100 in their careers.
- Picasso produced so many pieces that art scholars still can’t even count them all. Some estimate that he created more than 50,000 pieces of art over the course of his life. Most other professional artists produced a few hundred to a couple thousand at most.
- Mark Twain wrote 22 novels, hundreds of short stories, dozens of nonfiction books full of essays, memoirs and satire, a book of poetry, and an autobiography. In all, Twain published almost eighty books in less than fifty years, a staggering level of output for any author.
- Studies show that Nobel prize winners produce nearly twice as much work compared to their colleagues in the same fields.9
Twain was so prolific that today he’s given credit for saying everything.
It turns out that the secret to the creative “greats” throughout history is less that they were creative geniuses and more that they were work-ethic geniuses.
To use a basketball analogy, these people scored the most points not because they couldn’t miss, but because they took the most shots.
The nature of history and human memory is that we remember what is great and forget the rest. It’s easy to assume that someone like Twain or Picasso simply produced a few brilliant works when the reality is that they slogged away at their craft for decades to end up with a handful of classics that we revere today.10
Or, as Einstein once put it, “It’s not that I’m so smart, I just sit with the problems longer.”