9
The creative person
Creative people are masters of what they do. Not everything that Einstein and da Vinci did was brilliant – far from it. But because they worked comparatively harder within their fields than others, they achieved more creative and successful results, even though they also had more failures than most other people.
We know a great deal about creative people but actually not that much about their creativity. Most of us are aware, for example, that Einstein did not do very well at school, or that Leonardo da Vinci had the odd habit of writing backwards. We also know a lot of biographical facts about other creative people, such as the one-eared Van Gogh, but Einstein and da Vinci will do.
These disparate facts about the individuals themselves do not serve the purpose of getting to know the creative human being. Few of us can lay claim to any deeper insights into creative people. That there has been such intense focus over the years on descriptions and biographies of certain creative people is probably due to the fact that their lives were in fact quite unusual. Roughly speaking, it has been found that 50% of the advances in most fields have come from 10% of the population. In other words, the majority, and the greatest, of all creative results have been produced by a small number of people who have been regarded as unique and exciting.
But researchers agree that creative people have many attributes in common. These characteristics are not in themselves unusual; rather it is the combination of characteristics that is slightly different in creative people.
Flow of ideas
A first characteristic that creative people have in common with everybody else is that they are not unusually clever. Different studies have tested the correlation between people's creative capacity and their intelligence and found many times that it is less than 0.5, which means that although there is a correlation, it is chiefly something other than IQ that characterizes creative people.
The ‘something other’ that distinguishes creative people is usually termed flow of ideas by psychologists. Flow of ideas means in this context the capacity to generate and develop many ideas. Creative people find it easier than others to generate ideas. The reason for this is another characteristic that creative people share with the rest of us, namely, that they work with something specific. Many people think, however, that it is constraining to work with the same thing for a long time (‘I can't be creative if I only work as an accountant/market retail products all day’).
The myth says that creative people come from outside, whereas in fact creative people usually work on the same specific thing for longer than others. They do not come from outside, but rather from inside the field in which they are creative.
Creative people are masters of what they do. Einstein, for example, lived and breathed physics (even during the early period when he worked in the patent office). Da Vinci, with his fantastic machines, was as close to being a (madly overworking) mechanic as it was possible to be in that period. Not everything they did was brilliant – far from it. But because they worked comparatively harder than others within their fields, they achieved more creative and successful results, even though they also had more failures than most other people. Thomas Edison, the man behind revolutionary breakthroughs such as the incandescent light bulb, holds more patents than anyone else, but he also did more work on electronics and had more unsuccessful projects than anyone else.
Risk-taking
Now you have acquired a new piece of the puzzle to improve your result in the book's introductory test of your potential as a creative business innovator. The last three questions in the test are about taking risks. Most people avoid taking risks; it is a part of our self-preserving nature and is one of our two fundamental drives (as appeared in the earlier section on happiness – see page 42). ‘Why take a chance when I am comfortable with what I do?’ is a common but false piece of reasoning. It is based on the myth that creative people come from the outside and do not have as much to lose by entering a new field, because they have not invested their time, effort, soul and money in it. But creative people come from the inside and they have invested their time, effort, soul and money in the field. And they take risks. The risk-taking expresses itself in the form of taking many risks, but not big risks.
Someone who works a lot on the same project increases his or her flow of ideas, and can therefore test more new solutions. In all probability, many of them will be failures (and the risk is therefore considerably greater than if you keep to habitual paths and choose to be safe rather than sorry). But there is also an increased probability that some of the solutions will in fact succeed. If we add to this our knowledge from the section on whether creativity and the testing of new business ideas is dangerous – where we considered that failed products are not in fact necessarily damaging to the business – it is easy to see that the risks are well worth taking.
We have now looked more closely at two specific characteristics that creative people have in common with everyone else, namely that they are not unusually intelligent and that they often work for a long time on one particular project. Let us now look into other qualities that not only characterize creative people but are also shared by others.
Paradoxes
Research has shown that creative people are distinguished by a number of paradoxes in the form of qualities that most people do not have in combination.
A first such paradox is that creative people are characterized by a large measure of conventionality (adherence to tradition) and rebelliousness. The myth says that creative people are rebels and unconventional, but the truth is that they are to a high degree conventional.
There are two reasons why tradition is important for achieving creative results. In the first place, a thorough knowledge and understanding of the field is required in order to know what to rebel against. We have discussed earlier the fact that markets are rigid and it is not very easy merely to launch a new product or solution. It is necessary to know the market well in order to find new paths and formulations that can break through the market ceiling. In the second place, we know that the creative result is based on meaningfulness, and it is therefore important for the creative person to be able to relate to the existing structures and product offerings, in order to make the new product or solution meaningful and easy for people to understand.
A second paradox is that creative people make extensive use of both divergent and convergent thinking. (Divergent, chaotic thinking is a matter of thinking differently and breaking patterns; convergent thinking is about collecting thoughts into a pattern.) Creative people therefore spend time thinking along new paths and following those paths to the end.
Only one half of creative thinking consists of changing one's thought patterns; the other half consists of trying to combine even the maddest ideas into a creative result. Naturally, you cannot succeed every time, but every attempt helps to train the brain to be stronger and denser with more connections that can be used for problem-solving in the future. That is why creative exercises are so important, because they constantly strengthen the brain and train up both divergent and convergent thinking.
Apropos training, there is a third paradox which states that creative people are also characterized by the fact that they have both abundant energy and a great need for relaxation. They often work harder and for longer than other people, but they also take more time off. By working intensively for certain periods, one can sow many seeds which then lie fallow and can start to germinate. When we discussed whether creativity and launching new products was dangerous, we saw that important learning effects arise from testing new products and solutions and simultaneously working with them. In the same way, mulling over several ideas at the same time can produce considerably more favourable results than working on each idea in turn for a shorter period.
A fourth paradox of creative people is the combination of humility and pride. Humility helps to avoid the trap of getting stuck in well-worn tracks (‘I already know how it should be done’, ‘My experience tells me to do it this way’). Pride ensures that we dare to stick with new ideas even when we do not receive positive reactions from others. Humility means that we dare to fail (for we have established that this is something that is going to happen many times), but pride causes us to stand by our failures and maintain that they were good anyway. Because they are. In Chapter 4, on efficient complexity, we noted that business innovation is based on experimenting and mutating, just like nature and the whole of human evolution.
The fifth paradox provides further evidence for this line of argument, as creative people are to a great extent both introverted and extroverted. The introverted side means that they can concentrate on their work without being too affected or bound by how other people work or conduct their business. The extraverted side is necessary to communicate the new solution and make it meaningful for others. It also provides an additional explanation of why it is not enough to have a monkey combining words – the monkey does not have the ability to communicate to others why the new combination is such a good one. Not even the best combination in the world sells itself. History is full of superior products that never gained a foothold in the market, from the Betamax videotape player, which was of much higher quality than VHS; to the Dvorak keyboard, which totally flopped in spite of radically improving typing speeds compared to the established QWERTY system, which we all still use today.
Finally, researchers have noted that creative people have both feminine and masculine qualities to a marked degree – qualities that individually are common to at least half of the population. The interesting aspect of the feminine–masculine is not how a person behaves or is viewed in social situations. Feminine and masculine sides are in fact just another way of saying that they represent the artistic and logical tendencies, respectively. Artistry and logic characterize the two halves of the brain: our ability on the one hand to see, feel and create totalities, and, on the other, to hear and think and break down the totalities into detail.
In our opening chapters we discussed the fact that creative and strong brains are dense brains with the maximum number of connections. By combining the two halves of the brain and getting them to work together instead of individually, the potential number of connections in the brain increases exponentially.
We have now looked more closely at a number of qualities that, individually or in combination, characterize creative people. An important insight in this chapter is that creative people are not particularly special beings. It may be of interest that Einstein was a failure at school or that his hair stood on end, or that da Vinci wrote backwards and that his hair also stuck out in all directions. But the similarity of their hair is pure accident – there have been lots of less creative people whose hair also had a tendency to stick out in all directions.
What is interesting is that they happened to have a number of qualities and combinations that anyone can in fact train and strengthen. In Part III, we will work on increasing your creative abilities and laying the foundations for the paradoxes with the help of a number of exercises.