A few months ago, I was at a dinner after a great conference day. There was a person I met that day and the conversation came around to our recent work, as it does when we make an acquaintance. I mentioned how I tend to be inspired frustration and that this was a major motivation for writing The Creativity Choice. I thought something was missing out there in how creativity is discussed in our culture and I wanted to provide an alternative, rooted in the science of creativity.
To my surprise, a colleague I have known since graduate student days and who is a very successful communicator, said that this personal impulse did not come across when he read my book.
This comment in a Brazilian steakhouse made me pause and reflect on my choices.
I have made a deliberate decision not to lean heavily into provocative framing. If I was going to wade into psychodynamic waters, I could wonder whether this decision has to do with history being my first love. Provocative framing makes me think of the word provocation, taking my mind to diplomatic pretenses that started wars.
The word provocation has a very different meaning in contemporary communication. A meaning of challenging assumptions and eliciting emotional reactions in a way that can ignite action. I can get behind all of that.
So I asked myself, if I was to make explicit the assumptions I wanted to challenge and actions I was after, how would I put it?
I drive a lot and I listen to a lot of podcasts. Not only I study creativity, but love learning how people do what they do. Which translates to podcasts on building things and starting things and writing things. What interviewers focus most on and what they are impressed by is the idea. How did people possibly think of [whatever they did].
The frustrating part is that ideas are not the most difficult part of the process. After a recent talk I gave, someone from the audience told me how they came up with the idea for we now know as AirBnB several years before the existing one. He did not end up developing and building this idea. Which is the truly difficult part.
Where I grew up, on the Adriatic coast of Croatia, the concept of renting out spare rooms in one’s house was a common practice since at least the 1960s. The AirBnB idea was not revolutionary. It even existed already. What was difficult and what made its success is the platform they built and spread. In other words, it was not about having the idea of renting rooms or apartments.
Creativity scholars did not help this problem of conceiving of creativity as coming up with ideas because this part of the creative process is the easiest to study and we as a field indeed spend most of our time and effort studying it. We can ask people to list all the ways they can think of a brick of a paper clip could be used. People make a list and in 3 minutes time, we have data. Once upon a time, when creativity studies was a new area of research, this was important. Now, I think it is becoming a symptom of a desire and social push for sheer quantity of publications.
Another source of frustration is in the advice we hear for creativity. One of the worst offenders in my probably not so humble opinion: To be creative, you have to become comfortable with discomfort.
This is one of those pieces of advice that sound deep. But what if we take it apart?
Discomfort is uncomfortable.
What does it mean to be comfortable with discomfort?
Also, who can be comfortable with discomfort?
If I cannot be comfortable with discomfort, what does that say? Does that mean I cannot be creative? Not made of the right cloth?
No, no, it does not.
I have taken creative risks, embarked on and completed projects that took time and effort and which had rather uncertain outcomes. This was not comfortable. I did not become comfortable. Rather, I did it in spite being uncomfortable.
Of course, I am not unique. Research suggests that creative people are better described as risk-bearers than risk-seekers.
We are told that you have to have creative confidence. This is the message in popular books and confidence is at the center of theories of creative action.
My point of frustration about this creative confidence is a subtle one. It is not that I don’t believe confidence matters, but I think that how we talk about confidence is not helpful for most people.
Psychologists ask participants in their studies questions about how confident they are in their ability to come up with creative ideas and develop them and ask them to rate the extent they agree. For example, the questions look like the following:
I have confidence in my ability to solve problems creatively.
I can confidently present my ideas to experts or professionals.
I am good at coming up with a lot of different ideas.
I am confident in my ideas even when they are unpopular.
I feel comfortable completing creative tasks.
I trust my creative abilities.
For each of these items, people are asked how much they describe their self-perception on a scale from (usually) 1, meaning definitely no, to 5, meaning definitely yes. What research reliably finds is that higher scores are related to engaging in more creative behavior.
This is where research on creative confidence gets lost in translation when communicated to non-scientists: The correlation between confidence and real-life creativity does not mean that we have to be fully confident to be creative. Rather, it means that those who are relatively more confident are more likely to be creative than those who are relatively less confident.
In everyday discourse, our view of confidence is something like a full tank of fuel. That kind of confidence is not required for creativity. It helps to be closer to full than to empty, but you don’t have to be fully topped off to get started.
In everyday discourse, we also tend to see confidence in terms absence of self-doubt. Creative confidence that is important for creative action is not such a thing. It is more of “I think I might be able to do this” than “There is no doubt in my mind I can do this”.
How can confidence and doubt coexist? Or, a better question, how can we deal with the coexistence of confidence and doubt? That is a matter for another key, but underappreciated and underdiscussed set of skills that help creativity happen by bridging having ideas and doing something with them.
For that, stay tuned for next week…
If you are curious about
- other myths about creativity that can come in our way, check out Chapter 1: Creativity is a choice
- the kinds of risks common in creative work, Chapter 2: Creativity takes risk
- what is creative confidence and how to build it, Chapter 3: Yes, you can
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