Noble leisure
Creativity can seem like an elusive concept.
All of us aspire to it, but few can actually define it. Fewer yet actively take steps to unlock the full creative powers of their subconscious mind.
But if you know how creativity works you can deliberately cultivate an environment in which it can flourish.
Models of Creativity
Despite its elusiveness, the topic of creativity has been studied and written about extensively – all the way from neuroscience to practical analogies – and many different models exist that explain the creative process.
One of my favorite views on creativity comes from creativity strategist Natalie Nixon, who in her book “The Creativity Leap: Unleash Curiosity, Improvisation, and Intuition at Work” describes creativity as the process that happens when we can combine both wonder and rigor.
Wonder allows us to see things in a fresh light, make new associations, and come up with novel ideas. Rigor allows us to assess these ideas, evaluate how they fit into the bigger picture, and put them into practice to solve the problems we care about.
Only their combination leads to genuine creativity and innovation.
UC Berkeley psychology professor Alison Gopnik offers a description of consciousness that aligns well with Nixon’s interplay of wonder and rigor.
In her studies of cognitive development in children, she came to see their consciousness as operating a bit like a lantern. Their “mental light” shines warm and diffuse, with a purposeful lack of focus that allows them to illuminate and take in everything their environment has to offer. They are the masters of awe and wonder.
Adults on the other hand tend to have a spotlight consciousness. We often shine a harsh and precise beam of light on a very narrow problem, allowing us to deeply understand and analyze its every aspect. We are experts at rigor.
One of the most persistent and universal theories of creativity comes from Graham Wallas. According to him (and many creativity researchers who followed in his footsteps), creativity is a four step process consisting of preparation, incubation, illumination and verification.
Preparation and verification require active work. Incubation and illumination on the other hand require us to take a step back from the problem and allow our subconscious mind to take over freely.
All these views on creativity share an interplay of different complementary states and phases. They require both active effort as well as passive acquiescence. They require the balance of work ethic and rest ethic.
Unfortunately all too often we get stuck on one side of this duality and neglect the other. We’re rigor without wonder, spotlight without lantern, preparation and verification without incubation and illumination, work ethic without rest ethic.
As a result, our creativity suffers.
It’s time to restore the balance.
Priming Yourself for Pattern Recognition and Risk Tolerance
In addition to the conceptual views on creativity outlined above, I’ve come to think about creativity as the combination of two distinct traits and processes: pattern recognition and risk tolerance.
Innovation does not happen in a vacuum. Most creativity happens by connecting distant dots, combining old ideas in novel ways or applying them in fields that have not previously been exposed to them.
To be able to think creatively and spot novel patterns we need to regularly pre-load our brain with new ideas. This only happens if we have enough high quality leisure time to freely and loosely explore a wide range of interests, especially those outside of our core expertise.
Stuck with how to solve a particularly tricky coding problem? Why not take a step back and read a book on ancient Chinese architecture or go on a walk through the woods to observe some bugs?
All too often – and I speak from experience – do we associate a deep sense of guilt with stepping away from “the work” and indulging in such diversions, hobbies or personal interests, even if we are completely stuck (or maybe especially then).
Yet, in many cases that’s exactly what we need in order to make progress.
Rephrasing the stepping away not as an admission of weakness or defeat but as an active and crucial part in the creative process, providing our brain with fresh raw material, can be a simple but important first step in shaking this guilt.
Once the new ideas are uploaded to our brain and we’re in pattern recognition mode, it’s almost like we have a search light on our internal landscape of ideas whose cone keeps expanding the longer we have uninterrupted time to think and let our mind wander.
The longer the leash we keep our subconscious mind on, the more our adult spotlight mindset diffuses into a child’s lantern mindset.
If on the other hand we are always busy and in rigor mode, this cone stays laser-thin, and pattern recognition happens, if at all, only in tiny regions of similar ideas.
As we allow our mental search light to expand through time off, we are able to see patterns within more and more distant ideas. And that’s when true innovation happens.
With this broad and soft illumination, you might be surprised where your subconscious mind can put distant and new ideas to work and see connections between seemingly unrelated concepts – like Chinese architecture or insect behavior and your coding problem. And even if none of the ideas that you newly supplied to your subconsciousness are explicitly applicable to your problem at hand, the novelty and wonder they induce can still shake your brain out of its rut and unlock new patterns in old ideas that will help you get unstuck.
But it is not enough for our subconscious mind to spot interesting patterns.
To allow these patterns to rise to the surface where our conscious mind can pick them up – the illumination phase in Wallas’s model, the stereotypical aha-moment in the shower – the subconscious mind must be at ease, unworried about the potential risk of presenting a new (and maybe silly, or risky) idea.
The more relaxed and safe we feel, the lower this threshold for ideas to surface. The stress and anxiety we get from a lifestyle of busyness on the other hand raises this threshold so high that only the most tame, safe, and boring ideas make it through our internal filter.
Leisure helps us tune and optimize our risk tolerance for more innovative ideas.
Yes, creativity does require hard work. But that’s the easy part, the part that most of us are already fairly good at.
What creativity also needs, and what most of us have to re-learn, is high-quality leisure which is aided, protected, and reinforced by a strong rest ethic.
Leisure allows us to experience awe and wonder. It allows us to absorb new ideas that serve as the raw material our mind turns into powerful aha-moments. And it gives us the mental ease and safety to quiet down our internal filters that might otherwise sabotage or shoot down our ideas before we even become fully aware of them and can let our rigorous side engage with them.
Counterintuitively, largely because of our cultural conditioning, engaging in true leisure – which should not be confused with mindless distraction – is hard. And it often comes with a sense of guilt that is hard to shake, no matter how unjustified we know it to be. But I hope that understanding why rest is so important and valuable will help to ease at least some of the guilt.
The next time you take a step back from a problem, don’t think of it as taking a break. Think of it as deliberately making space for wonder, purposefully providing your brain with new resources, actively engaging in subconscious incubation, and selectively optimizing your internal filter for innovative ideas.