The Complete Guide To The Science Of Becoming A Creative Genius
You have it within you. Follow the process.
Introduction
Can you improve your creativity tenfold?
The goal of this article to make the answer to that question an emphatic, resounding yes.
There are numerous benefits to accelerating your level of creative output.
In a results economy, the more you can produce a result, the more often and in larger amounts you can get paid. For example, Seth Godin is highly creative. He writes a book every 1-2 years. This yields much greater revenue than if he simply sat around waiting for inspiration to strike and only wrote every 8 years.
In a winner-take-all situation, the music industry is a good example. The more you can produce, the more often you find that piece that strikes gold. As Adam Grant observed in his book Originals, the most established creators are also the most prolific. Mozart wrote thousands of songs, and you can probably name 3. Honing your craft more rapidly will get you towards mastery that much faster.
It's simply much more rewarding to live your life when you have a tangible product you point to each day, and say "I built this."
Combing through vast amounts of academic literature, testing theories with personal experiences, such as writing a 30,000 word outline for a book project within a month by using many of the strategies within this article, and observing many of the highest performers in all creative fields, the evidence was clear.
Creativity can a) be learned, and b) you can be the person to learn it.
If you utilize the right mental routines, structures, and environments, you can indeed dramatically increase your creative potential, and truly become a creative genius. I'm giving you those routines in the pages ahead.
In the following sections, I'll present both the academic research and accompanying examples, if relevant, and what you can do to implement the concept into your life. This 1-2 combination should give you both a convincing argument for process-based creativity and the practical tools to make genius creativity a reality in your own life. You'll often find the action pieces or important things to remember in bold so you can easily identify what you need to do.
You can apply these strategies and these processes to any field which you choose, whether it be that of a writer, entrepreneur, musician, comedian, etc.
And as you'll soon find, utilizing the right processes and structures allow you to dream and do far bigger than you ever imagined. They don't confine; rather, they dramatically expand your possibilities.
Let's get started.
First: Debunking a Common Myth
No, there are not "creative people" and non-creative people.
If you want to become extremely productive in your line of chosen work, there is actually absolutely nothing stopping you except the willingness to do the work.
As researchers Ryan Hargrove and John Nietfeld studied, when college students were taught courses on the topics of metacognitive instruction and creativity, and then assessed with a battery of tests to determine creative levels, they improved. Hargrove and Nietfeld concluded:
"Results revealed that undergraduates in the intervention condition outperformed their peers in a comparison condition."
Bottom line? Your ability to create is not arbitrary. It can be improved by learning. I invite you to join the ranks of those students, and upgrade the capabilities of your mind simply by learning more about how it really works.
Section I. Re-Wiring Your Brain For Creative Work
In the film The Creative Brain, researchers defined creativity on a neurological level throughout the course of multiple experiments as, essentially, an unexpected or new connection between synapses in the brain.
This definition is important and will be used again as we further learn how to optimize your brain for high-quality ideas.
This set of strategies pertains to what you you can do to become an idea-generating machine.
This is the mental side of creativity, before any real work or output has taken place.
If you ever meet someone who seems always struck with "inspiration" for the best way to move forward, it's likely because they dissected this down to a process. Surprisingly, "Eureka" moments rarely happen by accident. They are the culmination of previous and strategic moves.
1. Subconscious Priming
"The mind can be likened to an iceberg. Most of an iceberg is below the surface of the water and unseen to the eye. Only a small aspect of it is visible above the surface." - Hannah Curtis
American inventor Thomas Edison once said, "Never go to sleep without a request to your subconscious."
A likely reason he said this is because he understood two things.
The subconscious mind is responsible for the vast majority of the the brain's memories and materials, and therefore, responsible for most of the brain's potential connections that can occur.
You can access your subconscious mind by "priming" it during times when it is most active. These times have been confirmed by research to be directly before and following sleep.
"Take a few moments before you go to bed to meditate on and write down the things you're trying to accomplish. While you're sleeping, your subconscious mind will get to work on those things." - Benjamin Hardy, PhD
This isn't just self-help fantasy. This is real research on how your brain works. You can literally create new situations in your life by instructing your brain to get to work on them during the night.
Then, you can spend your day acting on the new subconscious breakthroughs you've had. You'll be operating from a state of extreme power. As research cited by Hardy in the earlier quote confirms:
"Performance on newly learned material is improved following sleep."
Before you go to bed each night, ponder on, and journal, 1-2 creative problems you're trying to solve, immediately before sleep.
During and immediately after sleep, new connections will be formed.
It is imperative that you focus specifically on your subconscious mind to enhance connection, because most of the brain's activity and therefore connections will come from your subconscious.
2. Brain Switching
If you keep your brain active and refreshed, you'll be a stronger "ideator." You can't effectively generate creative ideas while in an exhausted slog.
To keep your mind sharp and focused throughout your workday, employ the use of "brain switching."
This is the intentional, yet periodical, change in work projects, to give the brain the ability to solve different problems and increase overall learning. A recent article on this topic analyzed the effects of a study that was done to determine the effectiveness of "interval-based learning." Several treatment groups were analyzed in their proficiency in learning badminton routines, and were given various learning schedules. Some were subjected to long hours with no change in routine. Others switched activities periodically.
Those with the active switching of tasks outperformed their counterparts.
Brain switching is the argument for the intentional switching during deep blocks of learning time.
As the author Benjamin Hardy explains of his own time-frames for brain switching, using audio-books and learning as an example:
"Every 30-60 minutes, I intentionally interrupt one book and switch to another."
He further explains that this practice is not to be confused with distraction, arguing:
"This may seem shallow, but it's not. It's incredibly good for the brain, and can be done in a focused and intentional manner. You're not interrupting yourself with Facebook out of addiction, you're interrupting one thing with another, both of which are done intentionally."
Switching between projects allows you to synthesize knowledge, and generate new connections. This isn't the frenetic distracted type of switching, but the strategic move from one task to the next every few hours.
This correlates nicely with the theories behind "deliberate practice" pioneered by K. Anders Ericsson, which found that you only have the capacity for a few hours of practice each day before your mental faculties become exhausted. Keep this in mind, and don't try to spend more than a few hours on a focused creative task. Max yourself at 1-2 hours, and take a short break.
Equally important is learning when you should stop working altogether, and what you should do instead when you do.
3. Recovery
Not only is periodic switching between different high-concentration activities necessary, but the switch between low-intensity and high-intensity activities in your life.
- High -> High
- High -> Low
In his book Deep Work, Cal Newport explains the concept of Attention Restoration Theory, or ART, which designates that creative insights and productivity are more likely to occur if the creator takes intentional time away from work, and experiences "inherently fascinating stimuli," most commonly in the form of nature walks. He states, "You can restore your ability to direct your attention if you give mental activity a rest."
This modern research parallels historical sentiments, such as the words of philosopher Frederich Nietzsche, who said "all truly great thoughts are conceived by walking."
The effects of walking on creativity were also confirmed in a recent Stanford study conducted by researchers Mary Oppezzo and Daniel L. Schwartz. They stated clearly the affirmative that walking was healthy for creativity:
"Four experiments demonstrate that walking boosts creative ideation in real time and shortly after. Walking outside produced the most novel and highest quality analogies. Walking opens up the free flow of ideas, and it is a simple and robust solution to the goals of increasing creativity and increasing physical activity."
Walking is just one example of what true recovery looks like. Being with friends, a day offline, and going camping are other examples. They are all designed to get you to shake up your environment and your thinking, and let your brain proverbially stretch its legs for a bit before getting back to work. But as walking is one of the easiest to implement, consider taking a walk for 10-15 minutes near your home or workplace, every day, as close to nature as possible. It helps if you do not tie your daily walk to a set time, but instead to a set event. Mine was immediately after I got home from my college campus.
There are two types of walking you can implement:
- Productive meditation: this is a method Cal Newport himself uses to think about hard problems
- Free-flowing: you just give your mind a chance to relax
I recommend alternating your walks between productive meditation and free-flowing. Productive meditation focuses on depth. Free-flowing focuses on breadth. Both are useful for making creative connections and pushing towards your next breakthrough. Experiment with different schedules to determine what is right for you. Alternating days might work. You might favor one more than the other and do 4 days a week, 1 day a week. It's important in any case to integrate both into your working life.
Such practices allow the brain to cultivate and connect the highest possible number of ideas, allowing you both time to generate new ideas during recovery time and work on those ideas during work time.
4. Cognitive Inputs and Learning
In analysis of the most creative and prolific professionals, I noticed that most prolific writers frequently mention research they have done or books they have encountered, and attribute much of their creative work to the connection and development of not just their own ideas but the work of others. For example, Seth Godin credits Zig Ziglar as the inspiration for many of his ideas. Although Godin does a different type of work, and his work is truly original and not simply a copy, it certainly was inspired by other sources. Similarly, Jeff Goins said of creatives in his book Real Artists Don't Starve:
"The Starving Artist strives to be original. The Thriving Artist steals from his influences."
The ability to learn and be inspired by other people's work is essential to success as a creator.
This leads us to the "input" hypothesis, which states that cognitive inputs, learning of new material, although commonly thought of as the neurological opposite of creativity, is actually complementary, and both are necessary to achieving the highest levels of creative excellence.
As analyzed earlier, the neurological definition of creativity is a new and unexpected connection between synapses in the brain.
By becoming a master learner, you open yourself up to these two possibilities:
- A greater number of pathways will form in your brain, multiplying the potential connections between pathways, any of which may spark a creative insight.
- Sometimes, stimuli to the brain can immediately produce a trigger in the moment for a new insight. This effect was discovered by researchers in an experiment involving flashing sets of words, with the "clue" to the solution contained therein. In some cases, depending on the participant and the surrounding words they were shown, the solution was discovered immediately after being shown the prompt. This principle can also be observed in the famous story of Archimedes, a mathematician at work solving the problem of mass displacement, who came across the solution when he was sitting in a bath.
The strong influence of learning on creative ideation helps explain why so many highly prolific creators are insistent not only in learning new things in high quantity but also of carefully choosing high-quality stimuli.
On placing care on which types of stimuli the creator should allow to enter their mind, Todd Henry, a creativity coach, explains:
"Many creatives don't give much thought to what they allow into their minds. E-mails, reports, web videos, TV, magazines, and more flood through their life with no one keeping watch of the gate. Over time this can result in an overall lack of focus or a general numbness to potential inspiration. When we lack structure around the type of stimuli we experience, we lack the space and focus we need to apply our experiences to the work we're engaged in."
Because every potential stimulus impacts the creativity of your brain, it is essential to choose only media and materials that will foster brain growth and deeper thinking. Get very intentional about what you consume, and what you don't.
Good-quality books both in your own field and in disparate fields will help you to have more material to work with. If you want to become highly creative, start by becoming a dedicated learner. The books quoted and referenced in this article are an excellent place to start.
Section II. Structure In Your Creative Work
In the previous section, the concept of creativity in the mental realm was explored by the analysis of various systems, including learning, stimuli, recovery, switching of tasks, and "subconscious requests."
These tools influence the "ideas" component of your creative process.
However, these tools do not describe or assist you in the creative work required to expand those ideas into finished projects in the physical world.
An expanded quantity of ideas is insufficient to make real progress in your career. You need a tangible result to point to as the result of your ideas. For as Henry Ford famously said:
"You can't build a reputation on what you are going to do."
To truly make creative work, you need to master the processes of productivity and organization to make your thoughts and your projects coherent and aligned.
The components that improve creative work will comprise the remainder of this guide.
1. The Power of Outlines
Does creative work require a structure to be effective?
The book Willpower Doesn't Work analyzes this issue by diving deep into the creative routines of John Burke, an American pianist.
Specifically analyzed is what Burke does at the very beginning of each creative project.
As Hardy reports, at the beginning of each creative undertaking, Burke immediately decides when the album will be completed and released. Once the release date is determined, he works backward, mapping out all the key milestones along the way. He calls his piano studio engineer and schedules the day he will record the album. Then he organizes his personal calendar and schedules creation time throughout his workweek over the next several months. He willingly passes up great opportunities because he has creation time on his schedule. Then Burke jumps on his social media accounts and begins telling his fans about his upcoming album. This adds another layer of commitment.
From this, it's clear that Burke doesn't view outlines as a hindrance to creativity, but rather as a vehicle enabling more of it.
Having an outline helps Burke to be extremely productive and efficient with his time.
By eliminating the mental task of the major decisions regarding the creation of his album, Burke is able to devote all of his remaining time and attention to only the actual creative work itself.
Without creating the outline first, Burke would experience ambiguity regarding the creation of his album, and his mental energy would be largely wasted. The attention devoted to those things would be a distraction and therefore a hindrance to his creativity.
Burke is not the only creator advocating for structure to improve the productivity of creative work.
Lynne C. Levesque, in an interview with the Project Management Network said:
"Project management's structure is antithetical to many people's idea of creativity, when really, the opposite should be true. Creativity needs edges to its sandbox."
The journal goes on to report:
"Most people function best when they're given parameters within which to work, and project management provides just that, Dr. Levesque says. Knowing the boundaries will help your team be its most creative without wasting resources."
This contrarian view of outline and structure in creative work is the hidden key for those who want to accomplish significantly more.
Implement a specific outline for the projects you pursue. The two best ways to do this are firstly, to simply create a skeletal framework for your project. Before writing a book, determine what core topics you want to write about. Before composing a song, determine the key, the themes, the message, the emotions, and the chordal progressions. The second strategy is through "batching," which separates activities to increase productivity. For example, when I write articles, I separate them into 3 stages:
- Brainstorming and creating mental models, the flow of what the message will be.
- Research, pulling all the necessary quotes and studies to back up my points and supply the right stories.
- Writing.
Using Burke's example, he batches his work in two phases to eliminate distraction. Phase 1: all busywork, appointments, and social commitments. Phase 2: deep musical composition.
2. Specificity of What You Truly Want
"Your vision of where or who you want to be is the greatest asset you have. Without having a goal it's difficult to score." - Paul Arden
An equally important aspect of the structure-based methods to creativity is not simply to have a process whereby you do your daily creativity, but an end-target.
This end-target will then reveal the routines you should put in place, and, as John Burke, the major decisions you need to clear up.
As Brian Tracy says in his book Creativity and Problem-Solving, pressing problems are some of the greatest stimulants of all leading to greater creativity.
This is because problem-based creativity makes heavy use of your brain's reticular activating system, which starts looking for all related solutions once the brain is fixated on a particular problem.
In this way, creativity and productivity can be greatly enhanced by having a particular goal in mind at the beginning of the project.
This gives your brain a way to analyze whether or not the objective has been reached, and also acts as a "filter" to sort the most relevant and useful ideas to your project.
Don't view yourself as a writer. You are an author with a book project, or an article project. Don't view yourself as just a programmer. You are a programmer with a programming project. Projects have parameters, and they can be achieved. Fuzzy targets, also known as habits, don't get hit.
What goal do you actually have for your career? That goal becomes the filter for everything you do.
In short, as author and management thought leader Stephen R. Covey famously declared, you really should "begin with the end in mind."
Section III. Creative Environments
The impact of the physical room and the elements therein influence you during creative work, and this section will explain which types of environments are the most beneficial.
Environmental design is critical in a productivity context most notably because your brain has a limited and finite amount of attention, as explored in brain switching and recovery earlier.
Because environmental surroundings have a pull on the attention of your brain, you must analyze your environment to see whether the surroundings are pulling your brain into a state of hyper-connectivity and cognitive awareness, or distraction and lost focus.
As a rule of thumb, the more things clogging up your environment, the less creativity and productivity you'll experience. It's a tax on your brain's burden. It's why people who study or work in messy places or with Facebook open rarely accomplish anything.
Although an environment with free-flowing stimuli is useful for generating creative ideas, distractions and draws on the brain's attention are the antithesis of productivity when doing creative work.
A clear distinction must be made between ideation and production. Those willing to carefully make this distinction and treat their working hours with great seriousness are more likely to succeed.
1. Environments That Induce a State of Mind/Identity
In a similar vein to the "cue" hypothesis discussed in the earlier section on stimuli, the environment has the capability to remind the person of specific objectives they have, identities that they want to embody, or a type of behavior they want to exhibit.
The environment is powerful as it triggers a specific set of behaviors or habits. Ideally, you want to trigger the best version, or future version, of yourself.
In Essentialism, Greg McKeown writes on the topic of habits, after explaining Charles Duhigg's famous cue-habit-reward model:
"If we want to change our routine, we don't really need to change the behavior. Rather, we need to find the cue that is triggering the nonessential activity or behavior and find a way to associate that same cue with something that is essential."
In this quote, the cue is referring to something environmental that influences you to do something.
What Benjamin Hardy advocates in Willpower Doesn't Work compounds this notion by declaring, "It's important to realize that your environment is actually the only way you as a person can truly change."
Environment, as we see, is the key to triggering the initial desired change in habit, after which the rest of the mental routine will automatically kick in.
If you intentionally design your workplace environment to induce the emotions and the mindset that you want to embody while working, your productive and creative "identity" will immediately be triggered based on repeated habit of using that workplace. Create the space the most successful version of you would inhabit. Buy the computer your future self would write on. Clean your desk. Make those things a priority.
Creativity and productivity will be at their peak if your environment triggers those traits.
Two specific models are the most useful for testing whether your environment is optimal or not. Assess what mental states are created when you do your work, and with what attitude you approach your work, as you read these models.
2. Flow Model
This model was developed by the Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikzsentmihalyi. In his research, he wanted to discover the specific processes which cause the deepest immersion and the most productive work, and thus the greatest feelings of satisfaction.
By studying moments of deep satisfaction and immersion, both in knowledge work and in other situations, he concluded that satisfaction reaches the highest point while working when high skill level is juxtaposed with high difficulty of the task.
Does your environment trigger you to build high-level skills and then employ them often?
That is best answered by a more recent development, known as the "deep work" model, created by Cal Newport, which offers specific guidance on how to engineer that high engagement and high skill level which is prone to cause the biggest breakthroughs.
3. Deep Work Model
In his book Deep Work, Cal Newport argues that the key to enhanced productivity as a knowledge worker in today's society is the willingness and the ability to concentrate for long periods of time on cognitively demanding tasks, otherwise known as "deep" work.
This allows full exercise of the capabilities of the brain, development of enhanced creativity, and consequently, the ability to develop rare and highly valuable skills, and then employ them. Remember the flow model: high skill, high difficulty. This is the same thing, popping up in different form.
In analyzing the specific environments that the most prolific creatives have used throughout history, Newport concluded that deep work environments are the most effective when the creator is solely engaged in devoting all mental faculties to mastering the project at hand.
Most importantly, he advocates for specific behaviors to ensure this is possible, two of which will be discussed here. The first is the utmost importance of removing distractions, which, as discussed earlier, inhibit the ability of the mind to operate at full capacity due to attention residue theory.
The second is to analyze all work-related tasks and make it the highest priority to eliminate those which are still technically work but require the least mental effort and the least creativity.
The way to "drain the shallows" in this way, according to Newport, is to survey everything you have to do, and honestly ask yourself: how long would it take, in months, to train a smart recent college graduate with no specialized training in my field to complete this task?
The tasks hardest to outsource, Newport argues, are the deepest in nature, and thus should be your highest priority.
Tasks of this nature, as realized when reading this analysis, are also those tasks of the most creative nature. In a common-sense full-circle, put simply, creators should focus all possible energy on creative work. Not anything else. If you wish to be a successful creator, you must create.
Section IV. Common Pitfalls
Unfortunately, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, our society has very romanticized, false depictions of what it is like to be a writer, musician, or artist.
You and I were not born creative. We develop creativity through building skills and becoming highly valuable.
Beware of the following lies, which are the ultimate antithesis of your success doing what we just learned.
1. Distraction Is Useful
One might assume that temporary distractions in the creative environment, such as the creator temporarily pausing work to check email or social media, would enable the creator a "break" from work and a chance to cultivate new ideas.
After all, the importance of brain switching and recovery are expedient, right? Actually, it's important to distinguish between what type of break the creator is taking from creative work. Cal Newport explicitly states that there is a massive difference between what he calls "inherently fascinating stimuli," which provide a mental respite to restore the ability to concentrate according to ART theory, and distracting stimuli.
Periodic breaks and psychological detachment from work are only useful if they are of the "inherently fascinating stimuli" category, which can include walking in nature, a casual conversation with a friend, listening to music while making dinner, playing a game with your kids, or going for a run.
If, however, you fill your downtime with distracting activities, such as social media, email, or TV, those actually still pull large amounts of attention from the brain and cause rapid firing between neurons despite their low-difficulty nature. Viewing these inputs in the midst of creative work is incredibly harmful, Newport says, due to "attention residue." He says, "When you switch from some Task A to another task B, your attention doesn't immediately follow. A residue of your attention remains stuck thinking about the original task."
Attention residue theory explains why after you watch a movie or play a video game, images or scenes from it are prone to playing in your mind that night or even throughout the next several days.
Thus, if you intertwine your work sessions with social media or email, your thinking will be incredibly diverted and you will accomplish much less. The key distinction is to analyze if the work breaks are of the "inherently fascinating stimuli" type, or of a type that will destroy productivity instead of enhancing it. The best of these have already been discussed: going on walks, engaging in activities with family members or friends, or doing physical activity.
2. Creative Processes Induce Boredom/Misery
Even if the creative process is viable, some creators may oppose this framework on the grounds that it will remove much of the inherent enjoyment in creativity due to the highly specific routines used to optimize it that I argue for in this article.
After all, many "creatives," especially entrepreneurs, are working in creative fields precisely because they dislike traditional societal work structures and prefer to create their own projects.
The rebuttal to this common sentiment is that although this process requires a high level of specificity, it does not in fact limit creative expression of the creator through "rules." Rather, this creative framework assists the creator in channeling their creative energies towards only the most effective strategies which will yield the highest results. As Greg McKeown writes:
"To some, routine can sound like where creativity and innovation go to die, the ultimate exercise in boredom. But the right routines can actually enhance innovation and creativity by giving us the equivalent of an energy rebate. Instead of spending our limited supply of discipline on making the same decisions again and again, embedding our decisions into our routine allows us to channel that discipline toward some other essential activity."
Clearly, the creative process is not about becoming bored or complacent, but rather by outsourcing irrelevant decisions to the environment and to the creative habits, and allowing all conscious attention to be consumed with forming and working on creative ideas.
Making creative process habits, such as regular walking for ideation and working in a "deep work" space, enable you to devote all working attention towards the task at hand, instead of burdening your mind with irrelevant garbage.
3. Creativity Is Random and Cannot Be Improved
The final common opposing argument to the "creative process" is the notion that all creative ideas are "random," and thus the creative process cannot be improved upon.
Although creativity does happen because of random connections in the brain, it's much easier to enable these connections to occur when proper attention is given to increasing the number of potential connections. You can't necessarily control the outcome of creativity, but you can design your circumstances so the odds are dramatically stacked in your favor.
Furthermore, in simply understanding how your own brain works, you will be more likely to increase your output, as Hargrove and Nietfeld showed us earlier. Thus, just from reading this article you are equipped with a better arsenal of productive and creative weapons at your disposal, should you choose to use and excel with them.
As for the creative work process, it's clear that there is no randomness or ambiguity there. Rather, it's about cultivating existing creative ideas into a meaningful project. This has much more to do with work ethic than ideation.
Conclusion
By implementing creativity based on a strategic process, and not simply chance, you can quickly learn how to increase the productivity and efficiency of your knowledge work, and rise to the top of your fields.
This is a blueprint to eliminate confusion and lead you towards the highest levels of productivity imagined.
Know, in short:
- That you can become more creative
- That you should utilize walks, journaling, and subconscious priming to increase the flow of useful ideas
- That you need a specific goal to achieve in your creative objectives
- That you need outlines, structure, and edges to the sandbox
- That your environment for your work absolutely cannot be distracting. Go deeper into your work
These are simple tools, but large doors swing on small hinges. Start implementing these strategies into your life and see the difference. Be a truly creative person and watch opportunity expand.