Where does creativity come from? Is inspiration an internal process that happens behind the scenes of our brains? Or is it a product of our environment? And how much control can we actually have over when we feel creative or inspired?
I’m Lamar Elimbo, a digital designer and developer exploring the practical ways we can design our digital and physical spaces to improve how we think, feel, and function. I break down concepts from environmental psychology and product design into simple strategies you can start implementing today.
For those of you new around here, this is not what one would call a normal newsletter. You’ve stumbled into a space where the environments around us come to life. Each with a mind and a motive of their own. Where the sidewalks you step on whisper sinister superstitions of cursed cracks and broken backs in your ear. And where walls plastered with posters of cute cats conspire to co-opt your concentration. This is a place where we unveil the hidden influences that our surroundings have on our psychology.
Today’s creature feature is creativity.
To many of us, creativity is an elusive companion. Popular advice proves just how evasive and perfidious it can be when we need it most.
Some, for example, suggest it lives within us: that if we want to find fresh ideas we should “sleep on it” and hope consolidation connects the dots behind the scenes of our dreams.
Others suggest that it lives around us: that to cleanse our creative blocks we should go for walks between trees and let the sensory abundance of the natural world wash over us.
Herein lies our first misstep: we allow Creativity to run wild and free hoping it’ll return to us when we call for it. Hoping it’ll greet us in the morning. Hoping it’ll accompany us on our walk.
But when it doesn’t come, not only are we left with no ideas, we’re left with no ideas about where to look for ideas. We learn too late that its freedom comes at the cost of its compliance.
To reliably call upon our creativity at a moment’s notice, we must first domesticate it. In this post, I’ll reveal the 5 tactics I’ve found most effective for house training my furry friend, Creativity.
1. Characterizing Creativity: How not to be creative
You don’t need to be creative to benefit from creativity.
Creativity as a human identity is a heavy burden to bear. A creative person is permanently condemned to embody traits that, to many others, borders on supernatural.
But much more forgiving is acknowledging creativity as a character in your life. Like the Greeks with their Muses, a person who personifies creativity is one who benefits from the company of an expert in the field of ideation.
When one gets to know creativity as a character instead of a characteristic, they’re rewarded with the ability to internalize its strengths and weaknesses as separate from their own. A person, then, who believes they don’t have a creative bone in their body does not need to adopt creativity into their identity to profit from its potential, they simply need to learn to converse with a character they created.
To develop Creativity into a character of your own, here’s a research-backed baseline profile to get you started:
Strengths: Idea generation
At the top of its skillset is its adeptness at all aspects of ideation, encompassing proficiency in both divergent and convergent thinking.
When it comes to divergent thinking, Creativity’s skills are unparalleled. Here it aims to generate as many ideas as possible with three goals in mind:
originality: uniqueness compared to other ideas
fluency: number and speed of ideas
flexibility: categorical distance between ideas
After fetching together its treasure trove of ideas, Creativity’s convergent thinking phase begins. Where quantity over quality was bedrock to divergence, convergence focuses on filtering ideas down to a select few. This is where Creativity’s artistry shines and seemingly disparate ideas are synthesized together into something novel.
Weaknesses: Insatiability
Be wary of Creativity’s appetite for inspiration. Its insatiable curiosity left unchecked will consume purposelessly to no end. But when proper boundaries are in place, it will work tirelessly to track down the sparks of inspiration most resonant to you.
Personality: High openness to experience, low latent inhibition
Spend a little time with your Creativity, and you’ll notice that it is often hyperactive.
Its inability to sit still can be attributed to its extremely low level of latent inhibition, which makes it so that everything around it acquires meaning and significance.
From a young age, it develops an addiction to its hypersensitivity to sounds, light, textures, and small details in its environments. And because of its high level of openness to experience, without your guidance, it can find itself lost down many an irrelevant rabbit hole.
2. Feeding Creativity: How to find inspiration
Like a dog on a mission, Creativity will venture far and wide to collect the most random shiny objects to stockpile at your feet.
Its childlike curiosity and hunger for novelty are among its most powerful qualities. Yet, if its unbridled consumption is left unmanaged you’ll likely find yourself buried under bookmarks and drowning in the deluge of directionless inspiration you’ve collected over the years.
It’s only with a proper input diet that you’ll be able to train Creativity to tastefully curate your inspiration reservoir.
In order to make a meaningful meal plan for your Creativity, you must prime it with what you value. The usefulness of your capture collection is directly correlated to your ability to notice and note the tastes you value most.
How to notice better: Develop a rudimentary understanding of your tastes.
Identifying the ingredients that make up your taste profile is essential bonding between you and your new pet. It’s the scent list it’ll use to track down the delicious ideas you dream of.
Try starting out with an Interest Audit. Simply make a list of everything that interests you right now and highlight the ones you feel the strongest toward. A good trick if you’re feeling stuck is to look back through the content you’ve liked in your socials and try to spot trends between them.
If you were to make a habit out of doing this once a year, you’d end up with a timeline of all of your interests. An objective way of identifying your most stable fascinations throughout life.
How to note better: Prioritize friction-free capture and retrieval.
Be prepared, because with your tastes at top of mind, Creativity will start noticing even more. The transition between the aimless wanderings towards whiffs of wonder and the militantly mindful march toward meaningful sparks of inspiration will be notable in itself.
And for that you will greatly benefit from a capture system.
For any Notion users out there, I’ve written two tutorials about how to make it as easy as possible to input information into your workspace and just as easy to find it again afterward.
For anyone else, the fundamentals are the same:
Reduce touch points: The fewer number of clicks or steps, the easier and stickier the experience. Make the process of saving ideas as frictionless an experience as possible.
Make it easy to find: The less we have to think about where something is, the more we can think about what to do with it. Make your ideas searchable and surfaceable so they don’t collect dust.
3. Conjuring Creativity: How to get in a creative mindset
Up to this point we’ve explored processes that occur before the creative moment that you’re likely looking for. We’ve made the effort to understand Creativity and we’ve set in motion it’s ability to keep an eye out for interesting things in our everyday life.
But now we’ve reached a point in time where we need to call on Creativity to come home and help us get some creative work done.
As mentioned at the start, Creativity can be a hard one to catch since it’s always out venturing for valuable insights.
Which is why when we need to call it home, it helps to lure it in with something it loves. And what it loves are environments designed to make it feel comfortable.
One approach is to design spaces for Creativity like we design our beds. Our beds are what I like to call “cause-and-effect spaces”. The type of space whose effect is so strong that it reliably causes a consistent reaction. And we can take inspiration from that in order to design other environments to evoke the states we desire.
The key is to question the conditions of the state.
What happens when we sleep? We lie horizontally. We shift around. Our body temperature decreases. Solutions: a horizontal platform, a mattress for comfort, and blankets for warmth.
Similarly, if we want to beckon Creativity, we should consider its natural conditions. Its affinity for open minds, curated tastes, and friction-free note-taking could lead us to open spaces, reference materials, and chalkboard desks.
An evocative environment is one that mirrors the mindset we’re motivated to achieve, and in this case the pet we’re eager to play with.
Designing your external environment is a solid first step. But as mentioned at the start, Creativity has a habit of jumping between our outside and our inside worlds. So it’s just as important to make your internal environment equally as accommodating.
You know that Sylvia Plath quote about how self-doubt is the enemy to creativity. It isn’t just a cute quip. It’s practical psychology aligned with an overlooked theme that ties together so much of the research around conjuring creativity: that in order to call upon Creativity we must first mute the parts of our mind responsible for critical thought.
For any other neuroscience nerds out there, we essentially need to set the stage for transient hypofrontality by disengaging our prefrontal cortex and activating our default mode network.
Disengage to prime yourself for creativity.
The strategy you employ for silencing your inner voice should be based on your preferences. Some research will suggest that sensory deprivation is the creativity hack to employ. While others show how sensory rich spaces are better at evoking ideation. The true trick is to figure out for yourself how to flip that brain switch.
So get lost looking at art or meditating in nature or listening to music. Just prime yourself with an activity that quiets your mind. Once you learn to do that, creativity will be just one call away.
4. Training divergence: How to have creative ideas
Priming is the point at which a lot of advice stops. It’s the point where we’ve reached that hopeful state again. The passive state of waiting for creativity to come. But this step is the fun part. This is where we can take an active role toward getting the outcomes we want.
Divergent thinking is the one that most people think about when they think of Creativity. It is the quantity over quality type of brainstorm where Creativity’s excitement to show off its finds is at its highest.
But its excitement is evenly matched with its sensitivity to critique. One wrong word of disapproval about something it’s brought back to show you and it will shy away from any future offerings.
This is partially why the happy-go-lucky nature of children is said to make them masters of Creativity. Their willingness to walk along any branch of the imagination is a perfect match for Creativity’s personality.
You may have come across Dr. George Land’s NASA creativity tests which demonstrated how divergent thinking skills rapidly decline between childhood and adulthood. As it turns out, the true origins of that study are a bit fuzzy so we can’t be confident about the veracity of its claims.
But logically it makes sense. And emotionally it resonates.
Young children aren’t yet biased by the conceptual constraints we’ve learned about as adults. Not to mention, they haven’t yet been corrupted by the convergent thinking assembly line the school system forced most of us through, where value was placed on correct conclusions over quality questions.
Which, by the way, brings us to one of the greatest hacks for divergent thinking: to come up with more creative ideas, just come up with more ideas.
Adults are particularly susceptible at falling for the trap of switching to convergent thinking the second they settle on the first “good” idea they have. Instead, Creativity often lies a few layers deeper.
How to truly engage the divergent part of your brain.
Set up an idea quota. Roll a die, multiply that number by 10 and don’t stop until you’ve come up with that many ideas.
Write vs edit modes. This is one of the most effective pieces of writing advice I’ve ever been given. When writing, make a division between writing mode and editing mode. When you’re in writing mode, stream of consciousness is your friend; critique is your enemy. You should aim to write without thinking about any corrections that need to be made. In editing mode, you can return back to what you’ve written with your critical eye.
Play: Be playful. Ask questions that don’t make sense. Pretend that you’re someone you’re not.
5. Training convergence: How to connect the dots
Finally, we’ve reached the stage of convergent thinking, where we take stock of all the ideas Creativity’s brought to us. And we try to find patterns by connecting the dots between the most interesting ones.
Even though it’s our ultimate goal-post, convergence gets a bad rap for its association to the institution a lot of us blame for stifling our Creativity in the first place.
But in spite of the definite lack of holistic training our Creativity received in school, it is likely especially well-equipped at consolidating its now fruitful finds and synthesizing them into unique outcomes.
In the instances, however, when faced with a jumbled arsenal of ideas and a lack of clarity about what to make of them, you might try taking a stab at learning from Creativity’s training yourself.
Sniff out the ideas most strongly connected to your tastes, values, and history. Listen to your subconscious hunches which could be noticing something your overactive frontal cortex can’t. And take a step outside of reality. Because you’ll often find that there’s a lot more sense to be made out here than in there.
Thank you for spending this time with me. As I wrap things up I’d be remiss if I didn’t make a plea for you to cut yourself and your Creativity some slack. Bonding takes time, critique is easy, and Time and Energy are eager to work against you. (Remind me to properly introduce you to those two someday… they are real pieces of work).
Your relationship with Creativity has the potential to be a beautiful one, if you’re patient.