Creative thinking requires imitation, not just novelty

Being the sole decision maker is one of the joys of self-employment, and the hard part. You’re tasked with all the small day-to-day choices and the big existential decisions about the trajectory of your practice, all of which require creative thinking on your part.

Coming up with the right ideas worth pursuing isn’t easy, but navigating the process doesn’t have to be random guesswork or a magical strike of lightning. Creative thinking is a skill you can learn and refine, not just a talent you’re born with.

A few years ago, I interviewed Allen Gannett, the author of The Creative Curve: How to Develop the Right Idea, at the Right Time, which demystifies the concept of creativity into a predictable science that anyone can tap into to achieve their version of success.

He debunks the myths about where creativity comes from, why it’s beneficial to imitate and reference the work of others not as a shortcut, and how to use data to validate our ideas.

Brian Honigman: Why do most people believe that creative success comes down to having a light bulb moment or that it’s reserved for geniuses?

Allen Gannett: Our culture has a reverence for story. We have a lot of love for the hero story and the hero myth. What you see is that the popular media, whether that’s books, magazines, or movies, tend to take these people and canonize them. That’s how we sort of internalize creativity and the concept.

Like in the movie Amadeus, for example, which portrays Mozart woefully incorrectly. But that’s how most people internalize Mozart, as this kid who at three years old was playing the piano blindfolded for the pope.

That’s not actually true. In fact, Mozart is a famous example, as there was a letter written by him where he claimed to have the rough drafts of his music compositions in his head. It was found out later that that letter was actually forged by a music magazine publisher who wanted to sell copies.

Creativity has been one of the go-to things that we’ve canonized among individuals. And the concept of creativity and the reality of creativity are very different now.

Honigman: You’ve identified that many of the world’s most creative minds wholeheartedly embraced imitation as part of their approach to commercial success. What’s the right way of imitating the work of others in a field?

Gannett: One of the things that people make a mistake of when it comes to creativity is that they over-focus on the novelty part. Scientists have found that creatives find the most success when they create ideas that are a blend of the familiar and the novel. Those are the ideas that we tend to be most attracted to.

It’s like how the original Star Wars was a western in space. As a result, you have to be able to create things that are also familiar. One of the best ways to do that is to imitate, not the content or the sort of holistic stuff of other great creatives, but actually imitate the structure, like turning creative works into Mad Libs.

We see this really well in pop music. Like the recurring themes in the way pop music is written right now, as the last 20 years have been the Swedish era of pop songwriting. They follow very similar patterns and structures.

The way to learn how to become a pop singer or a pop songwriter is not to just start humming at the piano. It’s actually to experience other people’s content in an imitative way, where you’re actually going through and figuring out what the structure of it is.

Kurt Vonnegut at one point tried to get a master’s thesis in anthropology. And for his master’s thesis, he mapped out the emotional arc of stories to identify the recurring themes, and using that is how he sort of figured out that there’s four recurring patterns of story arcs. That was a foundational experience for him in becoming a creative, as he was able to see what structures already existed.

You don’t have to re-invent the wheel. If you want to be creative, you don’t have to re-invent the structure. It’s about reinventing that little bit of novelty that makes something new and intriguing.

Honigman: Many of your recommendations for achieving creative success rely on collecting and analyzing data. With more options to reference than ever, how can a professional figure out what sources of data are worth paying attention to?

Gannett: These days, the right data is all about listening to your audience. In the book, I talk about Ben & Jerry’s flavor R&D team, which used a relatively low-fi approach.

What they did is they literally just sent email surveys to their customers about new flavor ideas, and that’s how they developed an understanding of whether an idea would be too familiar or too novel. That’s the sweet spot of commercial viability and uniqueness to be interesting.

Surveying your customers is one of the most essential and the most underused techniques. You see this across all sorts of creative industries, like how movies do test screenings.

I think a lot of aspiring creatives underappreciate the value of iteration and feedback. It’s really, really important to incorporate that in your process. It doesn’t have to be high-tech. We’re not talking about big data; it just has to be data.

[A version of this article was originally published in Forbes.]

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