I must admit this was fun to write and I will tell you the conclusions from the start, so we can all relax: there is no perfect, one-size-fits-all routine for (creative) work. In the end, it is really, whatever works.

‘One’s daily routine is a highly idiosyncratic collection of compromises, neuroses, and superstitions, built up through trial and error and subject to a variety of external conditions’ - Mason Currey, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work

We all have great-days, ok-days, meh-days and I-wish-it’s-all-over-soon-days. A routine will get you through the day and help you make the most of it.

‘How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days.’ - Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

‘When you don’t know what to do next, your routine tells you. When you don’t have much time, a routine helps you make the little time you have count. When you have all the time in the world, a routine helps you make sure you don’t waste it.’ - Austin Kleon, Keep Going: 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad

You pretty much get the gist of it. To establish a routine, you have to spend some time observing your days, your moods, your needs, your personality. Are you a morning person? A night owl? Where are your free slots of time? You don’t have any free time? What to cut to make some time? Do you have rituals or superstitions that get the creative juices flowing and put you in a working mood?

In my readings I did stumble upon a few suggestions about what a morning routine could look like and driven by the saying ‘if you win the morning, you win the day’ (cheesy, I know, but stick with me) I leave them here for you to take whatever fits. There is no particular order to them, you can of course mix and match.

It helps to wake up early and use the first part of the day for work. If you’re a night owl, this does not apply to you, as night owls do their best work around midnight and prefer to spend the first part of the day sleeping. One thing I gave up upon waking is checking my phone. I realised it’s a sure way to ruin the whole day. When you reach for your phone you’re inviting anxiety and frustration into your life. It’s the easiest way to get your feelings hurt first thing in the morning. Leave the phone for later, after you’ve went through your morning routine or even after you’ve done some work. Don’t worry, the irritating, outraging content will still be there.

Another piece of advice that I found doable is: ‘make your bed’. Even if it’s the only thing you will do that day and the rest is a mess, at least it’s a small but sure accomplishment.

“If you make your bed every morning, you will have accomplished the first task of the day. It will give you a small sense of pride, and it will encourage you to do another task, and another, and another. And by the end of the day that one task completed will have turned into many tasks completed.” - U.S. Navy Admiral Seal William H. McCraven, Make Your Bed: Little Things That Can Change Your Life...And Maybe the World

It doesn’t have to be something fancy, five-star hotel like, just tidy it up so it looks in order. It will also help with your going-to-bed-routine.

Then many people do some sort of physical exercise or movement, to get connected with their body. It can be meditation, some sort of yoga, light movement or heavy lifting, dance or a small walk in your backyard. Whatever fits and your body can take.

Then there’s the grooming part (showering, washing face, brushing teeth) and the eating/drinking part. Some start the day with a glass of water and then coffee/tea, some eat something, and others eat nothing until noon. I think with this we are all pretty clear on our preferences.

Then some people move to the more mental part of the routine, and this could be journaling, writing down an intention for the day, something they are grateful about (to focus the mind on the positive, not the negative), they make a to-do list and set priorities (this reduces the anxiety when you feel overwhelmed and gives a feeling of control), read from a book (not the news), listen to some music.

‘Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense’ - Gertrude Stein, Selected Operas and Plays

Now, about rituals. The difference between a routine and a ritual is the attitude behind the action. While routines can be actions that just need to be done - such as making your bed or taking a shower - rituals are viewed as more meaningful practices which have a real sense of purpose. Rituals do not have to be spiritual or religious. What matters is your subjective experience. With rituals, you are fully engaged with a focus on the experience of the task, rather than its mere completion. Being mindful of your daily routine can invite ritual in. It can be lightning a candle while setting an intention, cleaning rituals (yes, you can turn showering into a ritual), a little prayer, making tea and so on. Rituals help you enter a state of flow in your work, they provide solid ground when faced with the uncertainty of your daily work. They are reassuring, lower anxiety, bring you to the present through focus.

I found two routines that I enjoyed reading, one of Jack Kerouac (which also involves rituals) and one of Kurt Vonnegut.

Jack Kerouac describes his rituals and superstitions in a 1968 Paris Review interview:

‘I had a ritual once of lighting a candle and writing by its light and blowing it out when I was done for the night… also kneeling and praying before starting (I got that from a French movie about George Frideric Handel)… but now I simply hate to write. My superstition? I’m beginning to suspect the full moon. Also I’m hung up on the number nine though I’m told a Piscean like myself should stick to number seven; but I try to do nine touchdowns a day, that is, I stand on my head in the bathroom, on a slipper, and touch the floor nine times with my toe tips, while balanced. This is incidentally more than yoga, it’s an athletic feat, I mean imagine calling me ‘unbalanced’ after that. Frankly I do feel that my mind is going. So another ‘ritual’ as you call it, is to pray to Jesus to preserve my sanity and my energy so I can help my family: that being my paralyzed mother, and my wife, and the ever-present kitties. Okay?’

He then adds a few thoughts on the best time and place for writing:

‘The desk in the room, near the bed, with a good light, midnight till dawn, a drink when you get tired, preferably at home, but if you have no home, make a home out of your hotel room or motel room or pad: peace.’

Kurt Vonnegut’s routine recorded in a letter to his wife in 1965:

‘In an unmoored life like mine, sleep and hunger and work arrange themselves to suit themselves, without consulting me. I’m just as glad they haven’t consulted me about the tiresome details. What they have worked out is this: I awake at 5:30, work until 8:00, eat breakfast at home, work until 10:00, walk a few blocks into town, do errands, go to the nearby municipal swimming pool, which I have all to myself, and swim for half an hour, return home at 11:45, read the mail, eat lunch at noon. In the afternoon I do schoolwork, either teach or prepare. When I get home from school at about 5:30, I numb my twanging intellect with several belts of Scotch and water ($5.00/fifth at the State Liquor store, the only liquor store in town. There are loads of bars, though.), cook supper, read and listen to jazz (lots of good music on the radio here), slip off to sleep at ten. I do pushups and sit-ups all the time, and feel as though I am getting lean and sinewy, but maybe not. Last night, time and my body decided to take me to the movies. I saw The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, which I took very hard. To an unmoored, middle-aged man like myself, it was heart-breaking. That’s all right. I like to have my heart broken.’

Feeling stuck? When in doubt, tidy up. Clean your desk, arrange your tools. Something will shift inside your mind or you might stumble upon an old piece of creation that might be a new answer to your situation. Move. Go for a walk in nature. ‘Solvitur ambulando’ is a Latin phrase that means it is solved by walking. Stare at a tree - if you stare long enough, something will eventually come up.

‘We got rid of the day as well as we could’ - Nathaniel Hawthorne, Twenty Days with Julian and Little Bunny by Papa

‘Finish each day and be done with it. Not every day is going to turn out the way we want it to. All routines and to-do lists are aspirational.

(…)

When the sun goes down and you look back on the day, go easy on yourself. A little self-forgiveness goes a long way. Before you go to bed, make a list of anything you did accomplish, and write down a list of what you want to get done tomorrow. Then forget about it. Hit the pillow with a clear mind. Let your subconscious work on stuff while sleeping’. - Austin Kleon, Keep Going: 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad

Tomorrow is a new day.

‘Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.’

~ Steve Jobs, Wired, February, 1996

*

‘The mind, at its best, is a pattern-making machine, engaged in a perpetual attempt to impose order on to chaos; making links between disparate entities or ideas in order to better understand either or both. It is the ability to spot the potential in the product of connecting things that don’t ordinarily go together that marks out the person (or teacher) who is truly creative.’

~ Phil Beadle, Dancing About Architecture: A Little Book of Creativity, 2011

*

‘The first (principle is) that an idea is nothing more nor less than a new combination of old elements.

(…) The second important principle involved is that the capacity to bring old elements into new combinations depends largely on the ability to see relationships. Here, I suspect, is where minds differ to the greatest degree when it comes to the production of ideas. To some minds each fact is a separate bit of knowledge. To others it is a link in a chain of knowledge. It has relationships and similarities. It is not so much a fact as it is an illustration of a general law applying to a whole series of facts.

(…) Consequently the habit of mind which leads to a search for relationships between facts becomes of the highest importance in the production of ideas.’

~ James Webb Young, A Technique for Producing Ideas, 1939

*

‘When an idea is served up from behind the scenes, the neural circuitry has been working on the problems for hours or days or years, consolidating information and trying out new combinations. But you merely take credit without further wonderment at the vast, hidden political machinery behind the scenes.’

~ David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, 2012

How to Find Creative Work

Those of us who aspire to work in a creative field often end up despairing that such roles seem so few and far between. Yet the search is less hopeless than it looks: we simply need to think more deeply about what ‘creativity’ really means.

The surprising, liberating side in analysing your search for a job by what pleasures you seek is that it reveals that it can never be a particular industry sector that’s the key to finding a job we can love. Because when properly understood, a creative pleasure is thankfully generic and can therefore truly turn up in many different and initially unexpected places. Careful knowledge of what we love sets us free to love more widely.

A lovely video from The School of Life.

Have a look on their website as well.

A 5-Step Technique for Producing Ideas

Since we mention in the first part of the newsletter the book of James Webb Young, A Technique for Producing Ideas, first published in 1939, maybe it is of interest that we write a bit more about it.

James Webb Young was an advertising man by profession but also a deeply curious and cross-disciplinary thinker at heart. In his book he lays out the five steps necessary in his opinion for a productive creative process, touching on a number of elements corroborated by modern science and thinking on creativity: its reliance on process over mystical talent, its combinatorial nature, its demand for a pondering period, its dependence on the brain’s unconscious processes and so on.

In short, the five steps he describes are:

1. Gathering raw material

   Young talks about the importance of building a rich pool of ‘raw material’ — mental resources from which to build new combinations: Gathering raw material in a real way is not as simple as it sounds. It is such a terrible chore that we are constantly trying to dodge it. The time that ought to be spent in material gathering is spent in wool gathering. Instead of working systematically at the job of gathering raw material we sit around hoping for inspiration to strike us. When we do that we are trying to get the mind to take the fourth step in the idea-producing process while we dodge the preceding steps.

2. Digesting the material

   What you do is to take the different bits of material which you have gathered and feel them all over, as it were, with the tentacles of the mind. You take one fact, turn it this way and that, look at it in different lights, and feel for the meaning of it. You bring two facts together and see how they fit. What you are seeking now is the relationship, a synthesis where everything will come together in a neat combination, like a jig-saw puzzle.

3. Unconscious processing

   It is important to realize that this is just as definite and just as necessary a stage in the process as the two preceding ones. What you have to do at this time, apparently, is to turn the problem over to your unconscious mind and let it work while you sleep.

   (…)

   When you reach this third stage in the production of an idea, drop the problem completely and turn to whatever stimulates your imagination and emotions. Listen to music, go to the theater or movies, read poetry or a detective story.

4. The ‘a-ha!’ moment

   Out of nowhere the Idea will appear.

   It will come to you when you are least expecting it — while shaving, or bathing, or most often when you are half awake in the morning. It may waken you in the middle of the night.

5. Idea meets reality

   It requires a deal of patient working over to make most ideas fit the exact conditions, or the practical exigencies, under which they must work. And here is where many good ideas are lost. The idea man, like the inventor, is often not patient enough or practical enough to go through with this adapting part of the process. But it has to be done if you are to put ideas to work in a work-a-day world.

   Do not make the mistake of holding your idea close to your chest at this stage. Submit it to the criticism of the judicious.

   When you do, a surprising thing will happen. You will find that a good idea has, as it were, self-expanding qualities. It stimulates those who see it to add to it. Thus possibilities in it which you have overlooked will come to light.

We recommend the book, it’s short and to the point and the steps can be applied in all domains of work, not just the ‘creative’ ones.

*By the way, you can watch live footage of the Beatles Abbey Road zebra crossing. The camera was set up in 2010 by the Abbey Road Studios and has been running ever since.

10 things nobody told you about being creative

This is the title of one of Austin Kleon’s books published in 2012 which became a New York Times bestseller. It’s based on a list of 10 things he wished he’d heard when he was starting out as an artist.

1 - Steal like an artist

Every artist gets asked the question, ‘Where do you get your ideas?’.

The honest artist answers, ‘I steal them’.

How does an artist look at the world? First, you figure out what’s worth stealing, then you move on to the next thing. That’s about all there is to it.

When you look at the world this way, you stop worrying about what’s good and what’s bad - there’s only stuff worth stealing, and stuff that’s not worth stealing.

Everything is up for grabs. If you don’t find something worth stealing today, you might find it worth stealing tomorrow or a month or a year from now.

‘The only art I’ll ever study is stuff that I can steal from’. - David Bowie

2 - Don’t wait until you know who you are to get started.

If I’d waited to know who I was or what I was about before I started ‘being creative’, well, I’d still be sitting around trying to figure myself out instead of making things. In my experience, it’s in the act of making things and doing our work that we figure out who we are.

You’re ready. Start making stuff.

You might be scared to start. That’s natural. There’s this very real thing that runs rampant in educated people. It’s called ‘impostor syndrome’. The clinical definition is a ‘psychological phenomenon in which people are unable to internalise their accomplishments’. It means that you feel like a phony, like you’re just winging it, that you really don’t have any idea what you’re doing.

Guess what: none of us do. Ask anybody doing truly creative work, and they’ll tell you the truth: They don’t know where the good stuff comes from. They just show up to do their thing. Every day.

Many more ideas are in the book, which we highly recommend, especially when you feel stuck in your work (whatever that is).

STEAL LIKE AN ARTIST

Everything is a REMIX

‘The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.’ - Ecclesiastes 1:9

‘Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again’. - André Gide

This week, we bring you Everything is a Remix — a compelling four-part video series mixed into one by filmmaker Kirby Ferguson about the evolution of remixing and collaborative creation, from folk art to today’s most cutting-edge tech-assisted multimedia creations.

Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy

You might steal like an artist, but you might also very well infringe on copyright law. The author Lawrence Lessig insists that copyright law as it stands today is antiquated for digital media since every ‘time you use a creative work in a digital context, the technology is making a copy’. Thus, amateur use and appropriation of digital technology are under unprecedented control that previously extended only to professional use.

Lessig insists that knowledge and manipulation of multi-media technologies is the current generation's form of literacy, what reading and writing was to the previous generation. It is the vernacular of today. The children growing up in a world where these technologies are present in their daily life are unable to comprehend why remixing might be illegal. Lessig insists that because amateur appropriations in the digital age cannot be stopped, they are being criminalised. Thus the most corrosive outcome of this tension is that generations of children are growing up doing what they know is ‘illegal’ and that notion has societal implications that extend far beyond copyright wars.

You can read the book online, as it is available as a free download under one of the Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC 3.0)

Lawrence Lessig is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School, and director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. Prior to rejoining the Harvard faculty, Lessig was a professor at Stanford Law School, where he founded the school’s Center for Internet and Society, and at the University of Chicago. He clerked for Judge Richard Posner on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals and Justice Antonin Scalia on the United States Supreme Court. He is also the founder of Creative Commons, a non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon and to share legally.

READ OR DOWNLOAD THE BOOK HERE

By the way, if you are ever out of inspiration, since 1996 the Internet Archive, founded by digital librarian Brewster Kahle, has amassed an enormous collection of cultural artefacts - text, audio, moving images, software, even archived web pages — offering permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars and anyone else interested in the cultural anthropology of our civilisation.

Creative challenge no. 4

‘A box without hinges, key, or lid, yet golden treasure inside is hid. What is it?’ asks Bilbo Baggins in Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Riddles pose a question to which initially there seems to be no answer until, suddenly, the answer arrives in a flash of insight: ‘Aha! It’s an egg!’. Riddles could be used to measure or at least stir up creative problem-solving potential, or convergent thinking. Unlike the Alternative Uses Test, the goal here is to arrive at a single correct answer (rather than as many answers as possible).

Up for a teaser?

Five pieces of coal, a carrot and a scarf are lying on the lawn. Nobody put them on the lawn but there is a perfectly logical reason why they should be there. What is it?

(the answer is at the end of the newsletter, but give it a fair chance before you scroll)

The Upside of Perfectionism? Creativity.

Perfectionism is a poor master but a good slave. It has downsides if you let it take over: you waste time on relatively unimportant decisions, you get excessively annoyed with yourself over small mistakes, which drains you, and, because you expect others to conform to your standards, you sometimes make collaboration more difficult.

However, perfectionism isn’t all bad. There are also benefits to it.  One largely unrecognised upside is how it boosts creativity. This happens in four ways:  when perfectionists are bothered by evidence that runs contrary to their own or consensus opinion, so they explore it; when their desire to understand everything pushes them to seek out new information; when their stubbornness leads to an innovative solution; when their competitiveness makes them hustle to keep up with others.

An article by Alice Boyes, PhD, a former clinical psychologist turned writer.

READ THE ARTICLE HERE

The creative person and the creative context

A lecture by dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi from march 2008, discussing creativity. When do you feel creative? Where does creativity come from? From inkling to invention, follow the course of imagination in this lecture. Csikszentmihalyi was noted for his work in the study of happiness and creativity, but is best known as the architect of the notion of flow and for his years of research and writing on the topic. If you want to know more about his views on creativity we’ll leave you with a recommendation for a book: Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, originally published in 1996.

WATCH THE LECTURE HERE

The entire exploratorium.edu website is worth your time. Located in San Francisco, California, the Exploratorium is a public learning laboratory exploring the world through science, art, and human perception. In it’s early days it was the brainchild of dr. Frank Oppenheimer (the brother of J. Robert Oppenheimer - you know, the “father” of the atomic bomb). Nowadays it offers hundreds of explore-for-yourself exhibits, a website with over 35,000 pages of content, film screenings, evening art and science events for adults, plus much more.

Answer: They were used by children who made a snowman. The snow has now melted.

Was this fun? Follow us also on Instagram and Twitter.

The Science of Curiosity

‘Why are we curious? How does curiosity work in the brain? If there’s one thing that stimulates our curiosity most, it’s a complex topic shrouded in mystery. So where do we start?

One way to begin exploring curiosity is to understand information seeking. This behavior is observable across the entire animal kingdom – from apes and dolphins all the way down to crabs and tiny nematode worms. Information seeking means that every animal seeks information about their environment. This is so they know how to navigate it. In fact, it’s why sensory organs exist – to supply the brain with information that helps you understand your environment and make better choices.

But when does information seeking qualify as curiosity? The difference, we now believe, is in the motivation. If you’re seeking knowledge because of external motivation, like school or work, then it does not qualify as curiosity. But if you’re seeking knowledge because you’re internally motivated – because you just want to know the answer – that’s curiosity. Think about the early human, 35,000 years ago, who made the first flute. They were not driven by a need to stay warm or eat food; instead, they were internally motivated to make an instrument that could make a beautiful sound.’

Curious for more?

CHECK OUT THE BRITANNICA CURIOSITY COMPASS

There is also a test on the Britannica webpage to discover your curiosity type. Have you tried it? We got Explorer and Scientist.

A very important man that you probably never heard of

In a 1948 blockbuster paper called A mathematical theory of communication, Claude Shannon introduced the notion of a bit and laid the foundation for the information age. His ideas ripple through nearly every aspect of modern life, influencing such diverse fields as communication, computing, cryptography, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, cosmology, linguistics, and genetics.

He was a private man and rarely gave interviews unless it was about his passion for toys and games. When interviewed in the 1980s, Shannon was more interested in showing off the gadgets he’d constructed — juggling robots, a Rubik’s Cube solving machine, a wearable computer to win at roulette, a unicycle without pedals, a flame-throwing trumpet — than rehashing the past.

Claude Shannon answered a question that no one else was even asking and in doing so, he changed the world forever. Learning things, discovering things, he never lost that child-like curiosity and delight. He wanted to understand. In the cruelest of ironies, the man who gave us the Information Age lost the last years of his life to Alzheimer’s. He died in 2001.

A video essay by Adam Westbrook (an artist, journalist and Emmy-nominated filmmaker) about Claude Shannon, the father of information theory.

If you want to find out more about Claude Shannon, there is also a 2019 documentary called The Bit Player, directed by Mark A. Levinson, and a 2017 biography A Mind at Play, written by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman.

The Business Case for Curiosity

‘Most of the breakthrough discoveries and remarkable inventions throughout history, from flints for starting a fire to self-driving cars, have something in common: they are the result of curiosity. New research points to three important insights about curiosity as it relates to business. First, curiosity is much more important to an enterprise’s performance than was previously thought. That’s because cultivating it at all levels helps leaders and their employees adapt to uncertain market conditions and external pressures.

Second, by making small changes to the design of their organizations and the ways they manage their employees, leaders can encourage curiosity—and improve their companies. This is true in every industry and for creative and routine work alike.

Third, although leaders might say they treasure inquisitive minds, in fact most stifle curiosity, fearing it will increase risk and inefficiency.’

In this Harvard Business Review article Francesca Gino, an Italian-American behavioural scientist, details the benefits of and common barriers to curiosity in the workplace and then offers five strategies that can help leaders get high returns on investments in employees’ curiosity and in their own.

READ THE HBR ARTICLE HERE

*The original form of the proverb ‘Curiosity killed the cat’, now little used, was ‘Care killed the cat’. In this instance, ‘care’ was defined as ‘worry’ or ‘sorrow’ for others. The origin of the modern variation is unknown.

Oh, before we forget! We’re also on Instagram and Twitter. You know, in case you’re curious.

After our son was born and we started being busy with what kind of toys we would like him to have, I read something that made a lot of sense: get toys that are safe, simple and passive. There are a lot of toys to choose from out there, but we could more or less group them into active and passive toys. Passive toys have one thing in common: they will only respond to the child’s manipulation. With passive toys, the child activates them. Active toys, on the other hand, encourage the child to be passive and to rely on the toy to entertain them.

Whilst both types can provide hours of entertainment, the benefit of passive toys is that they spark curiosity, ignite the imagination, encourage exploration and can be used in a myriad of different ways. Or simply put: passive toy = active child.

Many researchers believe we have fundamentally changed the experience of childhood in such a way that it impairs creative development. Toy and entertainment companies feed kids an endless stream of prefab characters, images, props and plot-lines that allow children to put their imaginations to rest. Children no longer need to imagine a stick is a sword in a game or a story they've imagined: they can play Star Wars with a specific lightsaber in costumes designed for the specific role they are playing.

Many people assume that creativity is an inborn talent that their kids either do or do not have. But actually, creativity is more skill than inborn talent, and it is a skill parents can help their kids develop.

FIND OUT HOW

Creativity in young children

The Swiss artist Paul Klee is known for his complex and highly personal approach to Modern art. Klee was enthusiastic about the role that tribal art, folk painting, and children's art could play in helping artists break from Western artistic conventions and achieve a greater intuitive level. In this work, Klee represents a child's growth in response to the stimuli from his environment. The many ellipses surrounding the toddler's head suggest that he is caught in overwhelming forces of excitement and disorientation. The oversize head evokes the distortions of scale found in children's artworks which Klee admired for their creativity and innocence.

If in the previous article you could find more general suggestions on how to foster creativity in children, we leave here another one that goes more in depth and is more focused on creativity through art and the stages a child goes through, from scribbling*, to pre-schematic, to schematic, to realistic and so on.

YOU CAN READ IT HERE

*A creative exercise to do with your child…

…or children, if you have more or you work with them in nursery, kindergarten, daycare centres etc. It comes from Nona Orbach, an art therapist, art educator, and artist herself.

In many kindergartens in Israel, there is a typical disturbing behaviour of children. They stop drawing and scribbling, and if they do, they become frustrated and say their drawings are ugly.

In these kindergartens, coloring pages are given by the adults, parents, that sometimes draw an image the child requests to fill it with colors.

The outcome is that the child compares his drawings to his parent or teacher. Thus, the natural flow of scribbling and drawing of childhood is disturbed at a very young age, and they stop drawing.

What Nona Orbach proposes is a small exercise with a few basic materials and a simple set up: two kinds of paper, cut in different sizes and a few linear tools (such as different sizes of markers, pens, liners etc., all black). Set them up on a table the child can reach and make an open invitation to scribbling: would you like to try it? It can be at first the child hesitates or does not want to at all. Just leave them there as a doodling opportunity for when the child is ready to try. Put the work on display somewhere in your house, to show the scribbling has value, it’s not ugly, it’s not wrong, it’s not stupid.

Why only black tools for drawing?

Using black lines only encourages the brain to investigate shapes, lines, and dots. This brought the children immediately to their natural developmental phase to create from. The natural flow was revived. If there were coloured pens it would most likely go into schemas as rainbows, hearts, flowers etc. 

You can read Nona’s entire blog post and other articles about creativity on her website THE GOOD ENOUGH STUDIO.

Creative challenge no. 3

The Candle Problem is a test of creative problem solving developed by psychologist Karl Duncker in 1945. The test challenges functional fixedness, a cognitive bias that makes it difficult to use familiar objects in abnormal ways. Subjects are given a candle, a box of thumbtacks, and a box of matches, and are asked to fix the lit candle to the wall so that it will not drip wax onto the table below. Intrigued? Stay a bit with the problem to find an answer, tolerate the discomfort of pondering time and indecision, before you check out the solution (which we moved to the end of this newsletter, so you’re not tempted to click immediately). Check out the next video if you need to get into an open mode.

‘Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating.’

‘You know, when Video Arts asked me if I'd like to talk about creativity I said: No problem! No problem! Because telling people how to be creative is easy, it's only being it that's difficult.’

A great video of John Cleese (remember Monty Python?) giving a speech on creativity 30 years ago, delivered with his signature blend of cultural insight and comic genius. We’ll outline here the five factors that you can arrange to make your lives more creative, but the video is worth watching in its entirety; it’s witty, funny and full of ‘aha!’ moments:

1. Space: You can’t become playful, and therefore creative, if you’re under your usual pressures.

2. Time: It’s not enough to create space; you have to create your space for a specific period of time.

3. Time: Giving your mind as long as possible to come up with something original and learning to tolerate the discomfort of pondering time and indecision.

4. Confidence: Nothing will stop you from being creative so effectively as the fear of making a mistake.

5. Humor: The main evolutionary significance of humour is that it gets us from the closed mode to the open mode quicker than anything else.

You can also read the transcript of the speech here.

Haha! Aha!

Apparently, there’s nothing like a good joke to get the creative juices flowing. In a brainstorming study where 84 participants - students, professional designers and improvisational comedians - took a cartoon caption humour test and a nominal product brainstorming test, the improvisational comedians generated 20 percent more ideas than professional product designers did, and the comedians generated ideas that were also rated 25 percent more creative. The study also found that many of the games used in improvisational comedy training could be effectively adapted to product design idea generation, because they strongly promoted associative thinking - and found that it increased idea output on average by 37 percent in a subsequent product brainstorming session. The findings suggest that improvisational comedy games are a useful warm-up for idea generation, that prolific generation is not a domain-specific ability and that it is possible to teach and train creativity (by developing tools and methods that designers can use to improve their idea generation skills).

READ AND DOWNLOAD THE STUDY

Find out the solution to the candle problem.

Creative challenge no. 2

Developed in the 1960s by psychologist Ellis Paul Torrance, the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (TTCT) sought to identify a creativity-oriented alternative to IQ testing. One of the most iconic elements of the TTCT was the Incomplete Figure test, a drawing challenge that’s similar to a game of exquisite corpse*. You’re given a shape like in the picture above and then asked to complete the image. The test was updated throughout the years and it is one of the most used creativity tests in the world today to predict creative achievement. Like the Alternative Uses test that we presented in the previous newsletter, this test also looked at fluency, originality, flexibility and elaboration. In 1984, a new version of the test was developed that eliminated flexibility as a scoring mechanism.  Two new dimensions were added:

• Resistance to Premature Closure: how open-minded your drawing is - this measures curiosity.

• Abstractness of Titles: how original your title is (‘Brad Pitt’s Mansion’ would score higher than ‘House’) - this measures synthesis and organisation.

Up for a challenge? Print out the figures (or draw them on a piece of paper) and give yourself five minutes to see what you can turn them into. Uncommon subject matter, implied stories, humour, and original perspective all earn extra points.

DOWNLOAD THE FIGURES

The rise and rise of creativity

Once seen as the work of genius, how did creativity become an engine of economic growth and a corporate imperative? And was it always looked upon with such enthusiasm? Is creativity enough?

This article on Aeon by Steven Shapin explores the history of creativity in relation to science and business. Creativity has a written history that starts in the 17th century and back then it was seen as a divine gift, something that cannot be controlled. It evolved into what is now seen as planned creativity, with companies trying to harness its power through a scheduled dedicated time where the focus is producing something new and useful. It is not the easiest read, but it does bring together different perspectives on creativity and its role.

Steven Shapin (born in 1943) is an American historian and sociologist of science. He is the Franklin L. Ford Research Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University. He is considered one of the earliest scholars on the sociology of scientific knowledge and is credited with creating new approaches.

READ THE ARTICLE HERE

David Lynch on where great ideas come from

In 2008, The Atlantic sat down with the filmmaker David Lynch as he mused about inspiration and how to capture the flow of creativity. What resulted is an animated video with a few short ideas about… ideas!

*Exquisite corpse, also known as exquisite cadaver is a game in which an image of a person is drawn in portions, with the paper folded after each portion so that later participants cannot see earlier drawings. This technique was invented by Surrealists and is similar to an old parlour game called Consequences in which players write in turn on a sheet of paper, fold it to conceal part of the writing, and then pass it to the next player for a further contribution. The name is derived from a phrase that resulted when Surrealists first played the game: Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau (‘The exquisite corpse shall drink the new wine’). Read more about it.

In 1967 psychologist Joy Paul Guilford developed the Alternative Uses Test, meant to enhance your creativity by giving you two minutes to think of as many uses as possible for an everyday object like a chair, a shoe, or a brick. For example, during this exercise, some of the uses participants found for a paper clip were: holds papers together/ cufflinks/ fix a zipper/ hang Christmas decorations/ earrings/ toothpick/ thing you use to push that emergency restart button on your router/ keeping headphones from getting tangled up/ bookmark. I’ve actually used a paperclip as a bookmark (and many other things can be a bookmark in times of need) and I’ve definitely used one to take out the sim card from my phone.

The test measures divergent thinking* across four sub-categories:

• Fluency – the total number of alternative uses you come up with

• Originality – how unique your answers are

• Flexibility – how many categories you cover with your ideas

• Elaboration – the amount of detail you give in your answers

The test can be done individually or in a group setting, with a two-minute limit or without time limitations and all you need is something to write on.

CURIOUS? TAKE THE TEST HERE

‘All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking’

That’s something Nietzsche supposedly said. But Stanford researchers found that walking boosts creative inspiration. They examined the creativity levels of people while they walked versus while they sat. A person's creative output increased by an average of 60% when walking.

Walking stimulates creativity by improving divergent thinking and this generates creative ideas by exploring many possible solutions rather than concentrating on one focused task. Walking distracts (and relaxes) our brains enough to allow the free-flow of information from our subconscious minds. Taking a shower can have a similar effect, that’s why a lot of great ideas stem from those relaxing moments.

While working on his theories, Charles Darwin took daily walks (one in the morning, one in the afternoon) to exercise his mind and body, to think and to observe. Walking the same route each day from his house, through the woods, and back along a field, Darwin referred to this as his ‘thinking path’.

So whenever you feel stuck, a walk might be just what you need.

READ ABOUT THE STANFORD STUDY HERE

*Convergent and divergent thinking in a nutshell

Convergent and divergent thinking (the same J. P. Guilford proposed these terms) are like two sides of a coin. The process of figuring out a concrete solution to any problem is called convergent thinking, while divergent thinking is the process that explores multiple possible solutions in order to generate creative ideas. Convergent thinking is characterised by speed, accuracy and logic. On the other hand, the characteristics of divergent thinking include spontaneous, free-flowing, non-linear. It may seem like these two approaches are competitive, but they actually go hand in hand (though culturally we might encourage one more than the other). Anne Manning (consultant, teacher and trainer) demonstrates these concepts in the short video below.

How do people get new ideas? A 1959 Essay by Isaac Asimov on Creativity

Isaac Asimov on how new ideas are born, the creative person, cerebration sessions (a term he coined) and what kind of facilitation might be needed. Written 62 years ago, it makes very valid and intuitive points.

‘My feeling is that as far as creativity is concerned, isolation is required. The creative person is, in any case, continually working at it. His mind is shuffling his information at all times, even when he is not conscious of it (the famous example of Kekulé* working out the structure of benzene in his sleep is well-known).

The presence of others can only inhibit this process, since creation is embarrassing. For every new good idea you have, there are a hundred, ten thousand foolish ones, which you naturally do not care to display.

READ THE ESSAY

*August Kekulé’s dream and how he discovered benzene

Of all the cases cited by psychiatrists, psychologists and historians of science to illuminate the role of symbolism in creative thought, none is more famous than August Kekulé's somnolent vision of a snake biting its tail**, a dream that supposedly revealed the true structure of the benzene ring to the German chemist.

READ THE STORY

‘The more a person limits himself, the more resourceful he becomes.’

A very interesting read on Brain Pickings about boredom, idleness and how limitations fuel creativity and resourcefulness, all from the perspective of Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard.

‘Adam was bored because he was alone; therefore Eve was created. Since that moment, boredom entered the world and grew in quantity in exact proportion to the growth of population. Adam was bored alone; then Adam and Eve were bored together; then Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel were bored en famille. After that, the population of the world increased and the nations were bored en masse.’

ENTIRE ARTICLE

**Since I mention Kekulé’s dream and one thing leads to another, here’s a bit of info about the ouroboros, an ancient symbol depicting a serpent or dragon eating its own tail. The ouroboros is often interpreted as a symbol for eternal cyclic renewal or a cycle of life, death, and rebirth.

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