PNTV: Wired to Create by Carolyn Gregoire and Scott Barry Kaufman

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Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another episode of Philosopher's Notes. TV Today, another great book, Wired to Create by Scott Berry Kaufman and Carolyn Gregoire. Wired to Create Subtitle Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind this book started as a super popular blog post that went viral that Carolyn wrote called 18 Things Creative People do differently. You can google that and find it and wound up as a great book. So Carolyn is a great writer. Scott Barry Kaufman is also a great writer who also happens to run the Imagination Institute at the University of Pennsylvania for their positive psychology. He's one of the world's leading experts on creativity. And if you're into understanding the science of creativity, I think you will enjoy this book as much as I did. As always, we have a philosopher's note with a bunch of my favorite big ideas. We're going to look at five of my favorites here and we also have a growing collection of philosopher's notes on creativity. I don't know how many now, but a lot of the best books on creativity and a class on Creativity 101. If you want to learn more about my take on it. 10 big ideas, et cetera. So for now, five of my favorite big ideas. They walk through different facets of tapping into our natural wiring to create. The first thing that Scott and Carolyn teach us is the fact that we want to remember that creativity is messy. It's a messy process. If you look inside the mind of a creator, then you look at the process of creating, what you'll find is something very, very messy, even at the level of genius. Some of the world's leading creativity experts describe it as a messy, messy process. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi when he was studying creativity, he said the one word that captured these creative exemplars across all the different domains of creativity was complexity. Complexity. He said that they had contradictory extremes. Whereas most people weren't comfortable being simultaneously super aggressive and super compassionate or super selfish and super selfless, most people don't feel comfortable playing at those contradictory extremes. But creative exemplars have these extremes that are contradictory and yet somehow mysteriously and somewhat messily integrated. Csikszentmihalyi called that complexity. Abraham Maslow, who studied self actualizers, said that the number one thing about self actualizers was they were all creative, period. And he said we're all creative, but the actualizers expressed that creativity at the highest level. And he said that the apparent dichotomies between these contradictory extremes dissolved for these actualizers. What they were doing that was both. That was selfish, was simultaneously selfless, Right. And that aggression was complemented with its compassion. There's this process of finding a way to embrace our complexity that is at the heart of this process. But we want to embrace the fact that that looks messy and it often feels messy internally to the Creator and as they engage in the process of creating. That is our first big idea. And I think it might have been the kickoff quote if it wasn't the very first quote in the book. It was early on, the Walt Whitman genius quip where he says, do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am vast, I contain multitudes. That captures it well. It's messy. Embrace it. Second big idea was in the chapter on daydreaming. So an important part of tapping into your natural ability to create is both focus time, but also time stepping back and daydreaming. So there are a lot of different ways you can daydream. Woody Allen would take showers for like an hour or two. And that was his way, or whatever it was for him, that was his way to daydream. Kind of turn off his focused, rational mind and just kind of let it float around. Immanuel Kant would go for a walk. He'd walk so consistently that the neighbors and on the same exact path that the neighbors would watch him walk by. And they literally could set their watch to him. He was so consistent. Apparently he only missed one day when he got so into a book that he read for X days straight and missed that hike or that walk, Right? So they actually named the path that he took on his walk. So ritualistically Philosophers walk, which I think is so cool. Other little things, apparently he always walked alone, so he can be with his thoughts. And he always breathed through his nose. And Scott describes it as, you know, he was a bit frail, health wise. But we now know, as we discuss in our episodes and notes on breathing, breathing through your nose is a very, very wise thing to oxygenate your brain properly and the rest of your body. So it was actually a intuitively powerful way for him to tap into deeper creative thoughts as well. I would also say that back in the day, he didn't have technology. One of my big rules, when I go out of my ritualistic hike, which is my thing, a trail hikerun, no technology ever. We're going to talk about the importance of your attention and, and the fact that most people are in a continuous partial attention mode all day, every day. When you go out for these walks, leave your technology behind. You're gonna be okay if you don't have technology for 30, 45, 60 minutes, 75 minutes, gasp, unplug. Allow nature to restore you. Allow the benefits of truly daydreaming to come through by not splintering your attention via technology. Other little things in terms of walking, apparently Nietzsche said, oh, all great ideas are discovered walking. And Aristotle walked so much as he taught, and his students walked so much they were called the peripatetics, which literally means the walking ones. So walking has a very dignified history. Thoreau walked apparently for up to 4 hours a day. Charles Darwin was a big walker, etc. Etc. Whatever your style is, find time to daydream. You can even do it doing chores or menial tasks and stuff like that, but. But you want to have space to daydream. You couldn't pay me not to do my trail time. But whatever yours is, invest in it consistently. Third big idea here is creators create. This is another one of the principles. There's a myth that great creators are always great and the research is unequivocal. They're not even someone like Thomas Edison, who had something like 1093 patents to his name. Is that what it was? 1093 patents? That's amazing, isn't it? Yeah, it is pretty amazing. But how many of those actually became something significant? What would you guess? 1093 patents. Congratulations, Thomas. How many of those became really powerful, practical, great inventions? Well, Scott and Carolyn tell us. You can count them on your hand, basically. And Edison is actually more of an example of creative failures than he is in creative success. Yet we look at him and say, yeah, yeah, he's just perfect. And we forget the fact that he had all those failures to go to get those few truly big innovative gains. It's the same exact thing with Mozart, with Beethoven, J.K. rowling, another success story denied by 12 publishers before she published what became the best selling series of books in history. So embrace the fact that you cannot be a great creator. No great creator has ever been great. All the time. It's just not the case. And creators, researchers have seen, can't judge the quality of their own work. But what we've also seen via research is those great creators. If you want to predict who's going to be the greatest creator by looking back historically, right, you'd see that quantity goes with quality. Oftentimes we think that you need to produce less if you want to produce higher quality, but it's actually not the case. Higher quantity equals higher quality. And again, it's going to be spotty. Not everything's going to be great. But that higher quantity of production tends to be correlated with higher quality ultimately. So keep that in mind as you focus your attention, which is the focal point of our next big idea. As I mentioned before, Scott and Carolyn tell us that researchers talk about the fact that we are in continuous partial attention mode all the time. Basically, we're multitasking all the time. We're kind of sort of doing this, but we're also doing that, and then we're doing this and we're doing that. And if you want to tap into your latent potential and the fact that you're wired to create, but what are you capable of? You need to discipline your mind. We talk about this all the time. Why? Because your attention, your ability to do deep work is a 21st century superpower. As Eric Barker says via Cal Newport, being able to put your mind where you want, when you want, for how long you want, and go deeply into your creative work is unbelievably powerful. And yet most of us are in this state of continuous partial attention. The stats on how often people check their smartphones always staggers me. Do you know the numbers? How often would you guess the average American checks their smartphone? What would you guess? 150 times a day, which averages every six and a half minutes. Every six and a half minutes. I gotta check my phone again. Yeah. What happened? Oh, what happened? Oh, what happened? Guess what? You do the math on that. It's absolutely impossible to create anything great. All those great creators that we admire, they were not splintering their attention all day, every day and creating their great work. It's just not possible. So think about that. Go back and check out the note and episode on the rise of addictive technologies. Figure out how you can learn to focus your attention and know that all that continuous partial attention stresses you. It increases your stress levels while decreasing your creativity. Last time I checked, that's not a good set of math. And there you go. That leads us to our fifth and final big idea, which is genius seal or genius stamp. So Scott and Carolyn talk about, you know, the origins of genius and creative talent. A lot of different cultures had to have had different explanations for it. I really like the ancient Romans, mythology around it and description of it. They said that everyone had their own genius. Back in the day, ancient Roman times, everyone was said to have their own genius. Even communities had their own genius, right? Someone wasn't a genius, wasn't like this person was a genius, that person wasn't. Everyone had their own genius. It was kind of like a little mini me guiding spirit. And if the individual did something amazing, it was said their genius had done it. And Elizabeth Gilbert talks about this in one of her popular TED talks. And she says that her job is to simply create the conditions through which that genius can show up. She's not responsible for actually creating anything. She's responsible for showing up and creating the conditions such that her genius can come through. It's a beautiful, beautiful frame. And that's how we want to think about it. We need to create the conditions such that the best within us can come through more consistently. Steven Pressfield talks about this. He calls it a muse. His whole point of winning the war of art, doing the work and turning pro is what to fight resistance and show up, let inspiration strike at 9am because you're in your chair doing your work or whatever time it is for you. Stephen King, the great writer in On Writing, tells us his museum is a man muse. This guy is kind of scruffy, right? He lives in the basement, Stephen King tells us, shining, polishing his bowling trophies and smoking cigars. And he grunts at Stephen, right? But King tells us he's got the magic dust. So King needs to show up and do the work and have his ritual such that that man muse, the bowling tough guy right in the basement, can come and sprinkle the magic dust. We need to show up, create the conditions, which include, by the way, turning off your smartphone, not splintering your attention all day, every day, but creating a focused mindset such that we can allow the best within us to shine through. And as we do that, we want to remember that. Another researcher told us that in addition to some of the things we've talked about here and all the things we've talked about here and a bunch of other things, great creators tend to find their own style, right? They have a personal seal, one of the researchers calls it. It was as if they had their own characteristic way of doing things, and they were willing to let that shine forth. So it's like the genius comes through in our own way. Ralph Waldo Emerson described it as a stamp. You need to stamp whatever you do with your own personality. Let your enthusiasm shine through powerfully as you do with what you are here to do, creating the conditions for that goodness to come through, focusing your attention, not constantly living in that continuous partial attention mode. Count how many times you Check your smartphone today and then count how many times you or how many minutes you spent in deep work. Make sure your deep work time is much greater than your other time creators create. There's the myth that great creators are always great. They're not, but they show up. They're consistent. And when you're consistent, you produce a high quantity. You have a greater shot at both mastering your craft and getting to a point where you can create something at a great level. This is kind of like the 50 pounds equals a example we talked about in Art and Fear. Then we have our Philosopher's Walk. My preferred way to daydream. Think about yours. Get on it. Remember Nietzsche? Remember Aristotle and Kant? And then we have it's messy. The number one rule of creativity. Embrace the fact that the mind and the process of a creator, even at a genius level, is messy. Embrace the complexity of your own personality. Be willing to play at contradictory extremes as you integrate your identity. Find a way for your own genius expression to come through and give your gifts to the world. Pretty please. I hope you enjoyed and I look forward to sharing more soon. For now, have another awesome creative day. See you.

Isn't it a bit odd that we went from math to science to history, but somehow missed the class on how to live? For some wacky reason, optimal living 101 never made the schedule.

Of course, it's too late to go.

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