We create when our decisions become actions and all changes, from the mind outward to what we can communicate or build, are creations.
Our creations are always borrowing from our environment. They may be “new” in form, but they’re always a remix of something else in nature.
Creativity comes through fulfilling a purpose. Since all purposes require a perceived problem, creativity is whatever we make to “fix” that problem.
Creativity is necessary for the good life. Without it, we tend to feel boredom and meaninglessness.
Each creative effort is unique to each person. No two people can make precisely the same guitar solo, dance routine, or accounting report. Even while everyone can assemble precisely the same smaller elements (such as a music chord) the person’s own style mixes into it as the creation scales upward, even with a mundane task.
We form new ideas in our mind with nearly the same neurological wiring as building things in our physical space. The only difference is that physical things usually take more time to make and are harder to destroy.
Abstraction
As soon as we have an idea, we form a new value in our minds for it. From that point, we treat that value as a separate existence from everything else, even when it’s a vague abstraction against an unknown setting.
We tend to create various stories off that initial value, especially if we believe it can become reality. We’ll attach purposes and hopes to it to solidify its “realness”.
One fascinating aspect of this is that we can send an inaccurate copy of that value to others. To do this well is the art of influence, and the experience has specifically religious patterns incorporated into it. Often, others can create more than the person who had the idea in the first place from their completely unrelated specializations and understanding.
Even a finished work is an incomplete idea. It’s impossible to fully depict an abstracted form with the constraints of the reality around us, so we settle for “good enough” (though artist culture is often tortured with obsession about gaining an unattainable perfection).
Once a value is communicated, it spreads out as a small trend, with micro-trends spinning off it. Very often, big trends come from little trends that faded away long before the listener has processed that big idea later.
Why
Often, in this world, people create to gain power (often for money), but creations come from many motivations that are all purposed to add value:
- To communicate a message.
- To make life easier (e.g., technology).
- Mere curiosity if something can be done, which is just for fun.
To create something, we need two beliefs:
- WILLING to do it, which is where we can imagine and feel what the creation will look like at the end.
- ABLE to do it, which is whether we can imagine ourselves succeeding at the task.
Most of the time, the only thing that impedes us is our willingness. If someone is sufficiently motivated and able to sufficiently imagine what they want to see, they can usually get very near to what they were trying to accomplish.
Creators are always designing for a target audience, and their most important audience should be themselves:
- Cleaners must use the things they clean.
- Builders must live and work in their buildings.
- Writers must read their work out loud.
- Computer programmers must use their programs.
- Teachers must follow the logic of their curriculum.
The only way a creator can be sure they’re communicating quality is to receive it themselves as the consumer of the creation, a bit like looking in a mirror. Since it takes so much time, most people don’t do it.
How
Creativity always transitions through a few broad phases. We’re building a new story out of existing ones, so it’s always messy and unpredictable. Since stories create themselves into new stories as we split and reassemble them, we’re perpetually wading through a wall of incomplete things to get to our final purpose.
1. Mess/Inefficiency
We observe sensory cues and learn the steps to perform tasks. We have little to no established habits at this stage, and build things that are generally low-quality and awful-looking.
There are techniques to do everything faster, create less waste, and improve overall quality, but we have a very weak grasp on how to actually do the task, let alone improving it.
Most people live within this stage on most things. It’s usually so frustrating that we’re discouraged to venture farther into it. Excellent teachers will encourage and motivate us, as well as give us all the “shortcuts” they found to save us dozens or even hundreds of hours of time.
It’s important to note that this mess is absolutely required. Without it, the range of the unknown can’t expand enough to create anything meaningful from the final result.
True genius often comes from observing something others have found to be mundane, but finding a new value within it that hasn’t been explored yet.
2. Aspiration
After repeating the tasks and modes of thought enough, we create a somewhat reliable pattern of habits in our minds.
At this point, we’re trying to honor all the rules we understand about the thing. Often, what we make looks a lot like a bad imitation of someone else’s work.
Since we often feel confident enough about our ability, we’ll usually publish what we create and will feel familiar enough that we can continue building.
3. Opposition
Once we’ve discovered nearly all the rules, we’ll find it repulsive and become dissatisfied. We’ll have a burning question that’s a variation of “is that it?”
We’ll try to modify portions of our tasks to create new things for new situations. While the tasks are different, and often unique, they’re often lower-quality than what we were trained in. However, because they’re different than what we’re accustomed to, we treat it as original expressions of our souls.
Since nothing is really new, we might be breaking convention, but are more often making something ugly that doesn’t add any legitimate value. Young people may find it interesting, but the industry in general won’t care.
On occasion, the creator’s style at this stage will skyrocket them to outlandish fame, but more often they’ll just be the creative inspiration for someone else who was loosely inspired by it but does something better with the medium.
If the creator is conceited enough, they’ll blame society for their lack of good publicity. However, if they can stop hoarding their ideas, they’ll move on and keep improving.
4. Elegance/Simplicity
Great creation takes a lot of rework to compensate for errors and flaws. Many people, however, delude themselves into thinking their original results were the product they were looking for.
After humbling ourselves to understanding how utterly unoriginal we all are, we’ll also come to realize how little we’ve really mastered in our craft.
From that point, we’ll revisit the things we wrote off as “garbage” among other creators. We’ll start seeing the purpose behind many of those things and transition from an obsession with building original things to building beautiful things.
Instead of making something that evokes a specific feeling, we’ll try to do things right:
- Using simple words instead of florid ones.
- Using a simple frame instead of an extravagant one.
- Only using camera angles that communicate meaning.
- Including only features that give the user a better experience.
- Adding decorations that contribute more to the story.
By removing unnecessary elements, we magnify the the story we’re trying to build by punctuating what’s left after we’ve removed the extra noise.
This is the creative limit for most people in things that aren’t their natural disposition at this stage.
From this stage, we’ll only improve for a few specific reasons:
- We’re perfectionistic and obsessed about fighting reality’s slow decay into chaos.
- We’re competitive and trying to apply technology and skills to outperform others.
- The medium has constraints, so we work along the edges of the medium to “clean up” inherent flaws with that medium.
- We want a new challenge with a hybrid medium, so we start at the first stage and build up to this stage with that one as well.
Otherwise, we’ll stick with what we’re comfortable with and pass it on to others.
5. Brilliance
If we’re unusually disposed to naturally understanding the medium and are able to draw from other unrelated fields of experience, our creations will take on a surreal, otherworldly characteristic.
At this stage, the creator has found a way to conceal all the messy parts of the creation, leaving nothing but pure beauty. Frequently, they will invert the appearance of anything they touch with that talent simply by exploring facts that most people had overlooked.
Often, the creator will make the task look so easy that it’ll feel like anyone could do it. They’ll treat their tools or performance as if it were as familiar as breathing or walking.
That creator has polished their skills until they can made something utterly profound. Observers from the outside will feel a connection to the creation, but won’t be able to describe it in words.
Usually, the form of the creation will suggest things instead of telling them. As the consumer engages, they will discover that depth for themselves, but not outright. The experience will make the consumer feel like they’re a participant in the work and not merely a spectator.
The familiar feeling is an illusion, and that creation is highly directed chaos that passed through the creator’s soul and habits to transcend death and allude to an inherent religious significance. Even when the creator lives a relatively unimportant life otherwise, their creations are usually honored as independently magnificent.
Building
Everyone needs power to make something, so they usually calculate what it’ll take to make it. The only exception to this are immature people (e.g., children) who have very little ability to understand how much work some creations can take.
Most of that work is unpleasant, so we try to find ways around it. We’ll typically use tools to speed up the unpleasant work. Sometimes, we’re making tools to make those tools.
The creative process itself is always messy. Creators have a constant inner war between perfection in their imagination and the imperfections of reality. Most introspective creators grow to hate their earliest works and often try to create future trends to distance themselves from their initial success.
The timing of creativity is difficult to track. Sometimes, great inspiration takes years, but other times it can take minutes.
Application
Chaos and constraint is crucial for creativity, so a perfectly ordered or wealthy society wouldn’t permit it. However, a perfect society would have enough chaos to keep us engaged, and the middle and upper-middle of most societies’ social classes are typically poor enough to have plenty of constraints to find reasons to be clever.
We can foster creativity in ourselves by working to understand our problem alongside unexplored connections with that problem. The best way to form these connections is to possess as diverse a range of experience as humanly possible.
With enough patience and desire, anything can be created up to the length of time someone (or their creative group) can stay alive and act on that desire.
An episode of the Simpsons isn’t necessarily better than a Shakespeare play. MC Hammer isn’t necessary a worse performer than Johann Pachelbel.
The formation of most works regarded as “masterpieces” were simply cleverness mixed with constraints:
- Jazz solos were designed to extend the length of a song after the “written” part of a song ran out and the dancers wanted to keep going. This is also how the club/house music genre came into existence.
- The role of DJ was to hide the fact that different songs’ beats per minute (BPM) had to have a fractional relationship to each other (e.g., 60 BPM versus 90 or 120 BPM) or the song would feel off-tempo.
- The movie “Jaws” built a lot of dramatic tension about the shark attacking because the mechanical shark kept breaking down.
If a work wasn’t created from constraints, it was created from new technology and new trends:
- Around 1900, concert audiences weren’t allowed to eat, shout, and chat during a performance. Once this convention was established, composers could explore very quiet themes in their music.
- Once music could be recorded (and re-recorded) it started to become dramatically more complex.
- Popular music in the 1970’s has been regarded as relatively lackluster, but once the synthesizer came out (which created sound waves using mathematical formulas in computers) the 1980’s experienced an explosion of new sounds and new styles.
- In the early 2010’s, once television shows were freed from the time-based constraints of 25 or 50-minute blocks (to accommodate for commercials on an hourly schedule), they were able to explore more aspects of the visual medium than previously possible.
Many creators won’t include themselves as the target audience. By doing so, they usually think of themselves as better than their audience, and their work will suffer in the process.
Most creativity requires immense solitude to develop, which is why most creative people are introverts.
The easiest way to create magnificent creations is to rapidly get a “rough draft” out as fast as possible:
- Sketch the idea on scratch paper.
- Make statues in wax before stone.
- Get feedback.
- Ask friends and family.
- Release version 1.0 or 0.8, depending on what you’re making.
- Publish immediately.
Anyone with time and unfulfilled needs can create. All they need is to find a sensible way to fulfill a purpose.