Preface for the Impatient

If you don’t care a lick about the history or definition of creativity, and just want to know how to do more, think better, and be different, then jump down here.

Introduction

As a trained graphic designer, an eventual creative professional and executive, and as huge process nerd, I have been keenly interested in creativity for decades. I want to know exactly what it is, how it can be harnessed, and ultimately to unlock the world’s innate creative potential. In it’s simplest form, it all comes down to these three words: More, better, different. Let me explain.

Creativity is…

I wanted a definition that could help me differentiate between the many different types of creativity I witnessed on a daily basis: craft, art, design, intellect, wisdom and empathy. I also wanted it to be in sync with the latest scientific studies, but also future proofed and loose enough to, flexible enough, to expand its meaning as new discoveries are made. I desired a phrase that could stand on its own three feet, like a well-grounded chair, and act like a stepping-stool to allow anyone to reach greater creative heights.

Creativity is the act of connecting things in exceptional ways.

There it is:

My simple, yet ridiculously complex definition.

ACTION → do more → Quantity → (plus) +

CONNECTION → think better → Quality → (greater-than) >

EXCEPTION → be different → uniQueness → (not-equal-to) ≠

The question of whether creativity is innate or learned (nature vs nurture) has long been debated. Are some people just lucky geniuses, born more creative than others?

I don’t think so. If you are human, you are creative; only, perhaps, in different ways. There are many facets to creativity, with a few standout attributes.

But taking action is not always easy. There is a powerful force that pumps the brakes on your momentum, that builds up inertia. In The War of Art, Stephen Pressfield calls this force the “Resistance" and believes it pushes back in proportion to how important your work is to complete. Like Newton’s Third Law of Motion, for every action in nature, there is an equal and opposite reaction. That force is procrastination—the first major hurdle in creating something from nothing.

Deadlines are a powerful tool in the creative process. They create urgency, focus, and accountability. They force us to prioritize, make decisions, and take action. Deadlines are the difference between an idea and a finished product.

The use of deadlines is not a new concept. In fact, the first recorded instance of a deadline was in 1864 when Confederate army officer Henry Wirz created what he called a “dead line” around his prisoners of war. This consisted of a circle drawn in the dirt around the prison camp, and any prisoner who crossed the line was shot on sight.

By the 1920s, the word was adopted by hyperbolic journalists and content marketers, whose publishing schedules made them feel like their lives were on the line.

In the creative world, deadlines come in many forms. They can be self-imposed, such as setting a personal goal to finish a project by a certain date. They can also be external, such as a client deadline or a competition submission deadline.

Regardless of their origin, deadlines are a powerful motivator. They create a sense of urgency and help us focus our efforts. They force us to make decisions and prioritize our tasks. Without deadlines, projects can easily drag on indefinitely, with no clear end in sight.

Pomodoro

In addition to traditional deadlines, there are also a number of techniques and tools that can help us stay focused and productive.

One such technique is the Pomodoro Technique, created by developer and entrepreneur Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s as a university student.

10 Ideas in 10 Minutes

Another tool is the 10 in 10 exercise, which I have used for years with my creative teams. In this exercise, you have 10 minutes to come up with 10 ideas, concepts, titles, URLs, or anything else related to the project at hand.

There are only three rules:

• Write down everything without judgement (the good, the bad, and the ugly)
• Make sure you each have 10 things before the timer runs out (so if you have 3 people, you need to have 30 ideas)

"Isn't one good idea enough?"

That depends on how good you want your ideas to be.

As Thomas Edison once said, "Creativity is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration." Actually, Edison used the word 'genius,' but 'creativity' fits better into my narrative (also, that's not really a photo of him—it was created by the generative text-to-image service Midjourney V5) Such is the nature of artistic license. 😛

Edison was tenacious. He didn't stop after he found a solution. Instead, he tried everything he could think of (and more) to get to a better answer, the best possible answer. Creativity is hard work. I call this the Law of 1%.

Not only do we need to break through inertia, resistance, and procrastination, but we need to keep going. We need to do more.

Imagine you want to get to a brilliant idea, or an amazing work of art. Your first version might be quite good, but in order to achieve greatness, you must wade through the mediocre ideas and the bad ideas first.

It’s not that these ideas are in the way of your brilliant idea. Quite the opposite. They are helping to form your best idea. You see, each time you come up with a bad idea, each time you make a mistake, your creative brain pivots and turns, seeks and learns.

In the book Art & Fear, there's a famous story of a ceramics teacher who divided his class in two.

Half the class was told they’d get an ‘A’ for producing fifty pounds worth of pottery, which would be weighed at the end of the course. The other half was asked to make just one perfect pot.

As the story goes, the students who focused on quantity, the ones who made mistakes but kept pushing for more, overwhelmingly beat the group of perfectionists who were meticulously sweating over every detail without gaining any experience through failure.

While this tale isn’t entirely factual (the original experiment was done by a photography teacher, not a pottery teacher), the wisdom, as with most good stories, holds true.

It's clear that if you're not learning and playing with these tools, figuring out how to incorporate them into your processes to drive up quantity and speed, you will be left behind. AI won't completely replace creative professionals, but creative professionals using AI will replace those who don't. Of course, there will always be a market for traditionalists, but expect it to be even smaller.

In it’s own way, quantity might be the single most important consequence of creativity. It jumps the gap between zero and one, from nothing to something.

AI dramatically boosts quantity, for good and for bad, allowing anyone with a computer to stop looking at a blank page and bring something into the world.

Hopefully my theory holds true, that the more you create, the more you have to choose from, and the more you have to choose from, the greater your chances of being great.

Quantity promotes Quality, and a virtuous cycle of creativity begins.

In 1994, Steve Jobs famously said in an interview with WIRED magazine that "creativity is just connecting things.” Jobs himself demonstrated this by creating the Apple ecosystem and connecting all of our credit cards to the App Store, which has made Apple the world's most valuable company at around $2.4 trillion. Everything within their beautiful walled garden is connected, from Sidecar to AirDrop to Universal Control.

Jobs' simplified definition of creativity mirrored his world view of simplifying technology: learn everything so that you know what to do with it, how to process it, and how to present it.

Creativity is intrinsically intertwined with curiosity and information seeking, of finding insightful connections between various spheres of knowledge. It traverses culture, art, science, technology, literature, and every other discipline known to humanity.

Finding connections encourages us to dig deeper and go further afield, encountering ‘Eureka’ moments when you least expect them, but having done enough legwork to recognize them when they arrive.

Perfectionism

But where and when do you stop making connections, going down the next rabbit hole? The shadow side of having access to an almost infinite amount of information is that there’s always more to know, ways to improve.

This connection to everything, everywhere, all at once can cause overwhelm. It can prevent us from ever finishing a project. What if I got it wrong? What if I could have done it better?

One way to make better connections is by creating a mind map, or as I like to call it, “connect the thots.”

If you’re not familiar with mind mapping, it’s a simple and effective way to spread out the depth and breadth of your knowledge, and to poke around the fringes of your idea or topic, probing the borders and often uncovering interesting associations.

When making connections, look for things that make you go "huh?" or "aha!" Things that stand out to you as surprising, interesting, or essential.

And of course, GPT is fantastic as a partner in this task. It puts the "T" in T-shaped learning, being quite capable of going both deep and wide on just about any piece of information that has been published.

Stanford professor Tina Seelig is a renowned expert in the field of creativity and has lectured around the world. One of the techniques she is known for is "framestorming," a customized version of the QFT, or Question Formulation Technique (which we’ll get into below ⬇️).

Seelig believes that quality of our answers depends heavily on the questions we ask. There are closed questions and open questions, both with their own outputs.

The How Might We (HMW) challenge statement is a common way to stay focused on a particular issue you are trying to solve. It is popular in design thinking sprints and UX design. But it can really be used for anything.

I call it a “challenge statement”, because it presents the ultimate goal or wicked problem in the most articulate way possible without getting too bogged down in details.

The QFT, or Question Formulation Technique is a systematic way of asking questions to improve the quality of output. This technique was established by educators Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana in their book, "Make Just One Change," which was written to help students improve their critical thinking skills.

A quick breakdown of the QFT is as follows:

1. Ask all the questions Record every question you have regarding this challenge. (eg. How long is it going to take? Will you need help? What tools or services are necessary?) This is where you can use your HMW Challenge Statement as a focal point. The rules for asking these questions are simple:
1. No solving (you will be tempted to try and answer these questions, but that is not the point of this exercise)
2. No editing (write down the questions exactly as they are asked)
3. No judging (there are no wrong or ‘stupid’ questions, especially during a QFT session)
2. Refine the questions After recording all the questions, the next step is to refine them.
1. Close open questions (If a question is too open-ended, try asking it in a way that requires a yes/no answer. For example, “How will we consider where to open our next office?” might be turned into, “Are we going to open a new office this year?”
2. Open closed questions (Exactly the same as above, only the opposite. Take yes/no questions and ask them in a way that opens them up to multiple answers. Instead of, “Are we going to revise the images in this book?” we could ask, “How are we going to revise the images in this book?”)

As we fine tune our focus, and ask the right questions, we get a better understanding of the challenges we have set for ourselves in any creative setting.

As the quality improves, and we go wider and deeper, our ideas and connections become more specific and unique.

Focusing on quality, niching down, and expressing ourselves more intentionally can lead directly to novel ideas that haven’t been broached before.

Quality promotes uniQueness, and the virtuous cycle of creativity continues.

Exceptional ways of creativity are not limited to the realm of art or design. Spanish Chef Ferran Adrià’s approach to molecular gastronomy and his search for perpetual novelty is a testament to the power of thinking differently.

Adrià was adamant that everything he created be different. His mantra, which he internalized from a talk by French Chef Jacques Maximin in 1987, was “Creativity means not copying,” sending Adrià on a lifelong quest for culinary novelty.

This mentality launched the molecular gastronomy movement: from liquid olives that popped in your mouth, to dishes made entirely of foam. Adrià even had custom cutlery made for certain dishes, like a spoon with a clip on the handle that held aromatic herbs that affected the olfactory senses while eating his soup.

Creativity is the act of connecting things in exceptional ways, or what scientists call the production of effective novelty.

For some, this is the crux of creativity, the holy mountain, the element sometimes referred to as ‘creative genius’: originality.

But finding the right ratio of originality to familiarity can be a difficult balancing act. We want our work to stand out, but we also want it to stand in—to be accepted and loved.

Outlier not Alien

In other words, we are desperate to be original, maybe even a little bit weird or strange, but we don’t want to be completely alien. We don’t want our work to be utterly unrelatable (unless that’s the point, in which case you’ve already succeeded with your audience of one: yourself).

The 3% Rule of Change

The 3% rule, coined by the late fashion designer and entrepreneur Virgil Abloh, is another technique that emphasizes the need to balance familiarity and novelty. To sell something familiar, you need to make it surprising, but to sell something surprising, you need to make it familiar. He often stated that “a creative only has to add a 3% tweak to a pre-existing concept in order to generate a cultural contribution deemed innovative.”

In other words, turn a big twist into a small tweak.

Impostor Syndrome

So what’s the right amount of different, of uniqueness? We often compare how we think, feel, and create with those around us. But remember this, comparison is the death of joy (which is why Instagram is so depressing).

We see tend to over-estimate the creative abilities of our idols and under-estimate our own.

Brain Borrowing (Lateral Thinking)

Edward de Bono was a fascinating thinker on the subject of creativity, often talking about preconceived notions and entrenched neural pathways.

He made it his life’s mission to teach “lateral thinking,” a term he coined to promote the idea of thinking sideways, of jumping tracks, of being in someone else’s brain for a few moments.

“Breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in a different way” was essential to de Bono’s creative philosophy.

Self-Destruct Button

So how do we overcome the paradox of using our own brains to think differently?

One method is called Problem Reversal, or as I love to call it, the Self-Destruct Button exercise.

Essentially, you imagine what it would take to fail—to fail so spectacularly that everything around you would be destroyed. Your reputation, your body of work, your ideas, your company… everything.

This is by far and away my favourite creative exercise, and the one that best replicates borrowing someone else’s brain, because it will always make you think of something you wouldn’t have thought of otherwise.

Random Word asks you to pick an object, any object, preferably something unrelated to your project, or perhaps something already sitting in the room.

As we’ve seen these tools paradoxically can help you to be more of yourself and express your unique characteristics and way of thinking, but also to be less of yourself and not get stuck in your own synaptic grooves.

So whether you want to change something by 3% or 97%, the point is to express yourself and let new things out into the world.

This might inspire others to follow, get them motivated to make their own unique creations, which wondrously leads to even more creation.

Creativity is the act of connecting things in exceptional ways.

The creative algorithm can be summed up in three simple words:

More. Better. Different.

More

• action requires tenacity and creates quantity.
• doing the work is essential for creation to happen, and persistent action creates a body of work that consistently improves over time

Better

• connection requires curiosity and creates quality.
• thinking of the right questions will reframe the answer and get you closer to your desired purpose

Different

• exception requires courage and creates uniqueness
• being vulnerable, stepping out of your comfort zone and thinking laterally will get you to new places