Creativity (47 page)

If you do anything well, it becomes enjoyable
. Whether writing a poem or cleaning the house, running a scientific experiment or a race, the quality of experience tends to improve in proportion to the effort invested in it. The runner may be exhausted and aching, yet she also is exhilarated if she is putting all her strength into the race. The more activities that we do with excellence and style, the more of life becomes intrinsically rewarding.

The conditions that make flow possible suggest how to transform everyday activities so that they are more enjoyable. Having clear goals and expectations for whatever we do, paying attention to the consequences of our actions, adjusting skills to the opportunities for action in the environment, concentrating on the task at hand without distractions—these are the simple rules that can make the difference between an unpleasant and an enjoyable experience. If I decide to
learn to play the piano or speak a foreign language but feel frustrated or bored doing so, the chances are that I will give up at the first opportunity. But if I apply the flow conditions to the learning task, then it is likely that I will continue to expand my creative potential, because doing so is fun.

It is easier to start with the most mundane activities all of us have to take care of. How can you get more enjoyment from brushing your teeth? Taking a shower? Dressing? Eating breakfast? Getting to work? Take the simplest of these routines and experiment with engineering its flow potential. How do you apply flow conditions to loading the dishwasher? If you take this question seriously and try to answer by testing various alternatives, you will be surprised at how much fun brushing teeth can be. It will never be as enjoyable as skiing or playing in a string quartet, but it might b
eat watching most television programs.

After you have practiced improving the quality of experience in a few everyday activities, you might feel ready to tackle something more difficult—such as a hobby or a new interest. Eventually you will master the most important skill of all, the metaskill that consists in being able to turn any activity into an occasion of flow. If the autotelic metaskill is developed enough, you should be able to enjoy any new challenge and be on the way to the self-sustaining chain reaction of creativity.

To keep enjoying something, you need to increase its complexity
. As Herodotus remarked, we cannot step in the same river twice. Nor can you enjoy the same activity over and over, unless you discover new challenges, new opportunities in it. Otherwise it becomes boring. Brushing teeth cannot stay enjoyable for very long—it’s an activity that just does not have enough potential for complexity. True, one can preserve the challenge of even the simplest activity by combining it with something else—for instance, while brushing teeth you might plan the coming day or reflect on what happened y
esterday. But generally it is more satisfying to become involved in activities that are inexhaustible—music, poetry, carpentry, computers, gardening, philosophy, or deep personal relationships.

Most domains are so complex that they cannot be exhausted in a lifetime, not even the lifetime of the human race. It is always possible to learn a new song, or to write one. It is always possible to find a
better way to do anything. That is why creativity—the attempt to expand the boundaries of a domain—makes a lifetime of enjoyment possible.

Habits of Strength

After creative energy is awakened, it is necessary to protect it. We must erect barriers against distractions, dig channels so that energy can flow more freely, find ways to escape outside temptations and interruptions. If we do not, entropy is sure to break down the concentration that the pursuit of an interest requires. Then thought returns to its baseline state—the vague, unfocused, constantly distracted condition of the normal mind.

It is often surprising to hear extremely successful, productive people claim that they are basically lazy. Yet the claim is believable. It is not that they have more energy and discipline than you or I; but they do develop habits of discipline that allow them to accomplish seemingly impossible tasks. These habits are often so trivial that the people who practice them seem strange and obsessive. At first many people were mildly shocked that the great Alfred Einstein always wore the same old sweater and baggy trousers. Why was he being so weird? Of course, Einstein wasn’t tryin
g to upset anybody. He was just cutting down on the daily effort involved in deciding what clothes to wear, so that his mind could focus on matters that to him were more important. It may seem that choosing slacks and shirts takes so little time that it is pretentious to worry about it. But suppose it takes only two minutes each day to decide how to dress. That adds up to 730 minutes, or twelve hours a year. Now think of the other repetitive things we have to do throughout the day—comb hair, drive cars, eat, and so on. And then think not only of the time it takes to do each of these things but of
the interruption in the train of thought they cause, both before and after. Having to choose a tie could derail a whole hour’s worth of reflection! No wonder Einstein preferred to play it safe and wear the same old clothes.

At this point, some readers may smell a contradiction. On the one hand I am saying that to be creative you should be open to experience, focus on even the most mundane tasks—like brushing teeth—to make them more efficient and artistic. On the other hand I am saying that you should conserve creative energy by routinizing as much of everyday life as possible so that you can focus entirely on
what really matters. Isn’t this contradictory advice? Not really—but even if it were, you should by now expect a certain amount of paradox in creative behavior.

The reason it is not a contradiction to be open and focused at the same time is that these contrary ways of using psychic energy share a similarity that is more important than their differences. They require
you
to decide whether at this point it is better to be open or to be focused. They are both expressions of your ability to control attention, and it is this, not whether you are open or focused, that matters. Before you have discovered an overriding interest in a particular domain, it makes sense to be open to as much of the world as possible. After you have developed an abiding
interest, however, it may make more sense to save as much energy as you can to invest in that one domain. In either case, what is important is not to relinquish control over creative energy so that it dissipates without direction.

A few more words may be needed here concerning the concept of “control” as applied to attention. It should be realized that one way of controlling is to relinquish control. People who meditate expand their being by letting go of focused thought. This way they aim to achieve a spiritual union with the energy behind the world of appearances, the force that drives the universe. But this way of giving up control is itself directed, controlled by the mind. It is very different from just sitting and gossiping, passively consuming entertainment, or letting the mind wander without purpose.

What can you do to build up habits that will make it possible to control attention so that it can be open and receptive, or focused and directed, depending on what your overall goals require?

Take charge of your schedule
. Our circadian rhythms are to a large extent controlled by outside factors: the rising sun, the commuter train schedule, a job’s deadline, lunchtime, a client’s needs. If it works for you, it makes perfect sense to abandon yourself to these markers so that you don’t have to decide what to do when. But it is also possible that the schedule you are following is not the best for your purposes. The best time for using your creative energies could be early in the morning or late at night. Can you carve out some time for yourself when your energy is most efficient? Can you
fit sleep to your purpose, instead of the other way around?

The times when most people eat may not be the best for you. You
might get hungry earlier than lunchtime and lose concentration because you feel jittery; or to perform at the top of your potential it may be best to skip lunch and have a midafternoon snack instead. There are probably best times to shop, to visit, to work, to relax for each one of us; the more we do things at the most suitable times, the more creative energy we can free up.

Most of us have never had the chance to discover which parts of the day or night are most suited to our rhythms. To regain this knowledge we have to pay attention to how well the schedule we follow fits our inner states—when we feel best eating, sleeping, working, and so forth. Once we have identified the ideal patterns, we can begin the task of changing things around so that we can do things when it is most suitable. Of course, most of us have inflexible demands on our day that cannot be changed. Even John Reed has to keep to an office schedule, and Vera Rubin has to adapt h
er curiosity to times when telescopes are available for observation. The needs of children, spouses, and bosses must often take precedence. Yet time is more flexible than most of us think.

The important thing to remember is that creative energy, like any other form of psychic energy, only works over time. It takes a certain minimum amount of time to write a sonnet or to invent a new machine. People vary in the speed they work—Mozart wrote concerti much faster than Beethoven did—but even Mozart could not escape the tyranny of time. Therefore, every hour saved from drudgery and routine is an hour added to creativity.

Make time for reflection and relaxation
. Many people, especially those who are successful and responsible, take the image of the “rat race” seriously and feel uncomfortable, even anxious, if they are not busily at work. Even at home, they feel they must be always cleaning, working in the yard, or fixing things. Keeping constantly busy is commendable and certainly much better than just lounging around feeling sorry for yourself. But constant busyness is not a good prescription for creativity. It is important to schedule times in the day, the week, and the year just to take stock of your l
ife and review what you have accomplished and what remains to be done.

These are times when you should not expect any task to be done, any decision to be reached. You should just indulge in the luxury of reflection for its own sake. Whether you intend it or not, new ideas
and conclusions will emerge in your consciousness anyway—and the less you try to direct the process the more creative they are likely to be. It may be best to combine these periods of reflection with some other task that requires a certain amount of attention, but not all of it. Preferably this should involve some physical or kinesthetic component. Typical activities that facilitate subconscious creative processes are walking, showering, swimming, driving, gardening, weaving, and carpentry.

Neither constant stress nor monotony is a very good context for creativity. You should alternate stress with periods of relaxation. But remember that the best relaxation is not doing nothing. It usually involves doing something very different from your usual tasks. Some of the most demanding activities like rock climbing, skiing, or skydiving are relaxing to people who have desk jobs because they provide opportunities for deep involvement with experiences that are completely different from the usual.

Learning to control one’s sleep patterns can also be very important. Some very effective businesspeople and politicians pride themselves on sleeping very few hours each night, and they claim that short sleep makes them feel more energetic and decisive. But creative individuals usually sleep longer and claim that if they cut down on sleeptime the originality of their ideas suffers. It is impossible to come up with a single amount that is ideal for everyone. Like everything else, the important thing is to find the length of time that best fits your own requirements. And don’t feel guilty if you
sleep a few hours more than is considered normal. What you lose in waking time will probably be made up in terms of the quality of experience while you are awake.

Shape your space
. We saw in chapter 6 that surroundings can have an influence on the creative process. Again, it is not what the environment is like that matters, but the extent to which you are in harmony with it.

At the macro level, the question may be whether you feel you would be happiest if living at the seashore, surrounded by mountains or plains, or in the bustle of a big city. Do you like the change of seasons? Do you hate snow? Some people are physically affected by long sunless periods. There can be many reasons why you might feel trapped in the place you live, without a choice to move. But it’s a
great waste to spend your entire life in uncongenial surroundings. One of the first steps in implementing creativity at the personal level is to review your options of life contexts and then start thinking about strategies for making the best choice come true.

At the midlevel, determine what sort of community you want to sink roots in. Every city and rural area have neighborhoods that are stratified in terms of price, centrality, type of activities available, and so forth. As with everything else, we are limited in the choice of exactly where to live—very few can afford to live near the Pebble Beach golf course in California, the Lionshead ski run in Vail, Colorado, or on Park Avenue in Manhattan. But even as redundant housing developments are slowly swallowing the landscape, there is still much choice left of where one can live, m
ore than most of us care to exercise. And it is important to live in a place that does not use up a lot of potential energy either by lulling the senses into complacency or by forcing us to fight against an intolerable environment.

At the micro level the choices are much more readily available to everyone. We all can decide what kind of environment to create in our home. As long as there is a roof overhead even the poorest among us can organize space and collect things that are meaningful and conducive to the use of creative energies.

The house of a Hindu Brahman or a traditional Japanese family is likely to be bare of almost all furniture and decoration. The idea is to provide a neutral environment that does not disturb the flow of consciousness with distractions. At the other extreme, a Victorian home bursts with dark, heavy furniture and knickknacks. In this case, the owner’s sense of control is bolstered by lavish possessions. Which is the best way to go? Obviously none of these environments is better in an absolute sense. What counts is which solution allows you to use attention most effectively. It i
s easy to find out which microenvironment best fits your self: Try different kinds and pay attention to your feelings and reactions.