Paper I submitted for my Atlantic University TP5150 Course – August 1, 2020
Before enrolling in TP5150, I was under the impression that people were either creative or not, and that it did not expand over many fields. Like most, my impression of a creative person was limited to those involved in the arts and music. While I saw creativity in film-making and visual arts, for example, I still saw Picasso as more creative than Steven Spielberg.
Now one-third of the way through the course, my understanding of creativity has significantly widened. First, many of the authors we’ve studied illustrate that creativity is not just limited to the arts. Nancy Andreasen says, “one sometimes senses a presumption that creativity occurs primarily in the arts and humanities – literature, music, dance, or visual arts – with little recognition that creativity is crucial for other fields as well, such as biology, mathematics, physics, chemistry, earth science, and engineering” (2005, p. 16).
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes the “industries” where creativity plays out as “domains.” As he notes, “Cultures are made up of a variety of domains: music, mathematics, religion, various technologies, and so on” (1999, p. 6). Creativity touches every industry and occupation since it’s the individual who possesses it, not the job itself.
The “Ten-year rule” also resonates with me. Robert Weisberg, citing a study by Hayes (1989), explains that “the 10-Year Rule is relevant to outstanding creative achievement in many domains, including composition of classical music, painting, and poetry” (2006, p. 212). Bunny Paine-Clemes notes that “The Beatles practiced in tacky venues and sweated seven-hour nights in Hamburg before they burst onto the popular music scene. Mozart produced juvenilia before he created his masterpieces” (2015, p. 53). We witness these professionals across a myriad of domains, including athletics, and they make their craft look so effortless. It’s easy to assume their skill must stem solely from their unique talent when in faction, the amount of they’ve dedicated to practicing is a critical component.
Looking back at my career, as I was learning a new discipline, much of my time was spent on rehashing steps I had done previously. Or in many instances, I took a previous design, copied it to a new file, and then used it as a template for the new project. I was self-taught in many forms of media, and it wasn’t until I had a firm foundation in a particular software before I could bring “out-of-the-box” thinking to the art.
A key component of the “10-Year Rule” is motivation and passion. If an individual spends that amount of time working a particular creative talent, they better love what they’re doing. Figure skaters and gymnasts, for example, practice 6 to 8 hours a day. Weisberg describes this as a “highly motivated individual employing domain-specific expertise that has been developed over years of immersion in the domain” (2006, p. 212).
This type of commitment separates the professional creative types from the rest of us. I’ve never devoted this amount of time to any one thing in my life. My commitment and desire for continuing a creative project are related to how much enjoyment I get out of the activity unless I’m getting paid for it.
I found Dr. Edward de Bono talk very compelling, as he brought aspects of creativity to the fore that I had not considered. He summarized the limitations of our postmodern worldview succinctly, which has diminished our creativity as a culture. He says that our current worldview is “excellent but not enough.” He adds that “our existing system is very good at looking at what is but not very good for creating what can be, which is where creativity comes in” (CInnovationGlobal, 2011). The unfortunate result of our mechanical and materialistic worldview.
It’s this aversion to the product and production-oriented outlook of creativity that I find unsettling. I’ve lived it myself, as I’ve discussed previously. Much of my creative work over the years was for clients who paid me to complete a project, whether it was a brochure, direct mail piece, video, or website.
As with any project, it involves project planning, deadlines, and a bunch of stress sometimes. This is precisely what Dr. de Bono meant when he said our worldview, while excellent for production purposes, since, like in my case, its end goal is for commercial purposes. I had a similar feeling regarding Weisberg’s very well supported theory that ultimately, creativity stems from ordinary thinking and problem solving (2006, p. 576).
As I’ve described with my own experience, there is a significant amount of problem-solving involved in the creative process, so I can appreciate that it’s part of the equation. As with the 10-Year Rule, the brainstorming and problem-solving is also based on previous experiences of the individuals involved, who bring a wealth of real-world expertise.
What the Space Center Houston did to save the doomed Apollo 13 astronauts running out of oxygen is an excellent example of problem-solving, and it’s one of my favorite scenes in the movie by the same name. In the short video clip we watched this week, Dave Snowden summed up the situation beautifully as it relates to creativity. He said regarding the Apollo 13 situation, “what you’ve got is starvation of resource, the pressure of time, and perspective shifts – people we know are going to die – and that creates innovation” (CognitiveEdge, 2009).
Paine-Clemes describes this as the Fifth Step of the “Ten-Step Process,” which is to “Get out of the way and let the inspirations flow.” The engineers sweating in a small room while their colleagues were in distress weren’t thinking about themselves; their entire focus was on saving their friends.
She adds that when “artists become preoccupied with their self-expression, they can lose the thread that binds them to the source of inspiration” (2015, p. 62-63). I’ve felt this from time-to-time. When deadlines become too stressful, or I have too much on the plate, I’ve frozen and was unable to create at all. This is the common experience of “writer’s block,” where an author somehow loses an ability to write. Typically, they only regain their creative juices when they’ve taken a sufficient time away, or Paine-Clemes’s “Step 7 – Taking a break” (2015, p.64), and had a chance to recharge their batteries. It works for me, and when I return, I have a new sense of purpose and vigor to complete a task.
For our system to become better at “creating,” as Dr. de Bono alludes, we as a culture need to be more accepting of the notion that there are external forces outside of us that influence creativity. The fact that the NASA engineers believed a solution existed and that it was just a matter of finding it, speaks to a faith not only in their ingenuity but also in the belief that solutions always exist. It’s a belief in the Universe or Divine that as long as we’re open to hearing and using our intuition, we will be guided along the way to finding the answer.
Payne-Clemes’s quotes an Edgar Cayce’s reading to make this point. Cayce says, “‘An entity, or soul, is a spark-or a portion-of the Whole, the First Causer; and thus is a co-worker with the First Cause or Purpose, which is the creative influence or force that is manifested in materiality’” (2015, p. 41-42). When you add in the spiritual and Divine, as Cayce describes it, to our “excellent but not good enough” current system, then it’s possible to begin to understand our unlimited ability to create.
References
Andreasen, N. (2005), The creative brain: the science of genius, New York, NY: First Plume Publishing
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1999), “A systems perspective on creativity,” edited by Sternberg, R. (Ed) (1999), Handbook of creativity,” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 313-35.
de Bono, E. [CInnovationGlobal]. (2011, Oct. 10). Dr Edward de Bono at Creative Innovation 2010 – “re-thinking the future” [Video]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e20lpMyXFj4
Paine-Clemes, B. (2015), Creative synergy: using art, science, and philosophy to self-actualize your life,” Virginia Beach, VA: 4th Dimension Press
Snowden, D. [CognitiveEdge]. (2009, Nov. 10). Apollo 13″ [Video]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlmesbbPqtU&feature=related
Weisberg, R. (2006), Creativity: understanding innovation in problem solving, science, invention, and the arts, Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.