“TAKE A BREAK” or “JUGGLE WITH DIFFERENT TOPICS” – A Path to Creativity
“TAKE A BREAK” or “JUGGLE
WITH DIFFERENT TOPICS” – A Path to Creativity
Mario
D’Couto
It is human nature to want to improve and this means that
we tend to be instinctive hill – climbers. Whether we’re trying to master a
hobby, learn a language, write an essay or build a business or anything for
that matter, it is natural to want every change to be a change for the better.
But it is also easy to get stuck if we insist on never going downhill.
Mistakes are part of the creative process and the more we
make, the better we get at that particular skill. This, of course, would be
possible if we have an open and a curious mind for as Einstein said that the
true purpose of education is to train the mind to think and for that reason it
is priceless. So, if you want to write a good song, write a bad song; if you
want to write a good poem, write a bad poem and so on. The point is to get
better by doing it. It is like getting a stinging hit on your hand for which
your hand obviously begins to pain. But here’s the point, when you expose that
same portion of your hand over a series of occasions to be hit, your hand
develops a certain resistance.
There is a story told about the famous jazz pianist,
Keith Jarrett. On 27th January 1975, a 17-year-old Vera Brandes (now
a music producer and a media effects researcher) was asked to host the show for
Jarrett’s concert. The concert was sold out. But when the piano was checked a
few hours before the concert, it was found that some of the keys were not loud
enough, which was an inconvenience for Jarrett. Due to his uneasiness with the
piano, he decided not to play and just when he was about to leave, Brandes
begged Jarrett not to leave as she would be answerable to 1400 soon - to – be furious concert goers. Jarrett agreed.
But the irony was that what seemed like an impossible thing became one of the
main highlights of Jarrett’s career. In fact, the performance that night was
probably his best and most memorable ones.
Keith Jarrett was already a highly accomplished pianist.
We might imagine his performances as habitually scaling peaks in the Alps. When
faced with the unplayable piano, with its harsh treble and anaemic bass, it was
as if a random disruption had plucked him from an Alpine peak and deposited him
in an unfamiliar valley. No wonder he was annoyed. But when he started to climb,
it turned out that the valley was in the Himalayas and his skill enabled him to
ascend to a higher and more wonderful destination than he had ever reached
before.
Many disruptions will be most powerful when combined with
creative sills. The disruption puts an artist, scientist or engineer in unpromising
territory – a deep valley rather than a familiar hilltop. But the expertise
kicks in and finds ways to move upwards again: the climb finishes at a new
peak, perhaps lower than the old one, but perhaps unexpectedly higher. All they
needed was an unexpected shock to force them to seek out something better.
As long as you’re exploring the same old approaches, you
could get more and more competent at dealing with that place and your cliché
become increasingly cliched. But when we are forced to start from somewhere
new, the clichés can be replaced with moments of magic.
Distractibility can indeed seem like an issue or even a
curse. But that’s if we are looking only at the hill – climbing part of the
creative process. Distractible brains can also be seen as brains that have an
innate tendency to make those useful random leaps. Perhaps, like Keith
Jarrett’s unplayable piano, distractibility is a disadvantage that isn’t a disadvantage
at all.
According to Brian Eno, the enemy of creative work is
boredom and the friend is alertness. To be alert means to be faced with a
situation that is beyond your control so you have to be watching it very
carefully to see how it unfolds, to be able to stay on top of it.
Erez Liebermann Aiden is not a chart – topping musician
although he has been many other great things. For instance, he was a physicist,
an engineer, a mathematician, a molecular biologist, historian and a linguist
and he has won some big scientific prizes for his work (all before he turned
40).
Ed Yong, a science writer, describes Aiden’s working as
nomadic. He moves about, searching for ideas that will pique his curiosity,
extend his horizons and hopefully make a big impact. This is what he says, “I don’t view myself as a practitioner of a
particular skill or method. I’m constantly looking at what’s the most
interesting problem that I could possibly work on. I really try to figure out
what sort of scientist I need to be in order to solve the problem I’m
interested in solving.”
The nomadic approach isn’t just about feeding Aiden’s natural
curiosity, although he has plenty of it. The benefit is that this approach
helps whenever he has hit a dead end. For example, there was a time when in his
mid – twenties, he was working on the sequence of the human immune system.
After months of hardwork, for some reason, the project crashed. What was worst
was that somehow, he found it difficult in getting back to reconstruct what was
used to study [he had catalogued all the lego bricks in the set – all the
different genes that could be deployed to fight germs (this is because human
antibodies are built from a lego -kit of different genes, snapping together
quickly to meet challenges of constant invasions from viruses, bacteria and
other nasties)].
Now, during this time Aiden had gone to an immunology
conference, wondered into the wrong talk and ended up solving a ferociously
difficult problem – the three – dimensional structure of the human genome – by combining
everything he had learned in failing to sequence antibodies within obscure idea
he’d stumbled upon from mathematical physics.
This was not a fluke but a strategy. Aiden seeks the
hardest, most interesting problems he can find and bounces between them. A failure
in one area gives fresh insights and new tools that may work elsewhere. With this
particular skill, Aiden was able to accomplish many other feats. For instance,
Aiden helped Google launch ‘Ngrams’, graphs showing the popularity of words
across history thanks to a quantitative analysis of 5 million digitised books. He’s
now moving on to a similar analysis of music. This poses some formidable
technical challenges but fortunately Aiden already solved a key one which he
was failing to sequence the human immune system.
It has also been found that many top scientists like
Alexander Fleming and Louis Pasteur constantly switched topics while
researching. In the field of entertainment, David Bowie had collaborated with
John Lennon, acted in a feature film called “The Man who fell to earth”,
composed its soundtrack, drafted his autobiography and co – wrote Iggy Pop’s
albums besides working on his own.
Michael Crichton is another example. In the 1970’s and
1980’s, he had written several novels, directed the mid-budget sci-fi thriller “Westworld”
and written non-fiction books about art, medicine and even computer programming.
By 1994, Crichton had the astonishing distinction of having created the world’s
most commercially successful novel (Disclosure), TV show (ER) and film
(Jurassic Park).
Charles Darwin, throughout his life alternated between
research in geology, zoology, psychology and botany, always with some projects
in the foreground and others in the background competing for his attention. Besides
that, Darwin had a great interest in earthworms. In fact, the study of earthworms
was like his breakaway from routine whenever he was puzzled or at a loss during
his work.
With all this being said, there are some practical
benefits by following this pattern,
1.
The first practical benefit is that multiple
projects cross – fertilise one another. The knowledge gained in one expertise
provides the key to unlock another. Erez Aiden would move back and forth across
his network of enterprises, solving an impasse or one project with ideas from another
or unexpectedly fusing two disparate lines of work. Dick Drew did much the same
at 3M. The psychological benefit behind this kind of a task is that it provides
a fresh context that is exciting. While having several projects can be
distracting, the other side of the coin is that variety grabs our attention
like a tourist gaping at details that a local would find mundane.
2.
The second benefit is that while working
on one particular project, the mind unconsciously processes the solution for
another task. This unconscious processing is an important key to solving
creative problems. John Kounis, a psychologist at Drexel University, argues
that daydreaming strips items of their context or as David Bowie once put it, “The
idea of mixtures has always been something I’ve found absolutely fascinating,
using the wrong pieces of information and putting them together and finding a
third piece of information.” That’s a powerful way to unlock fresh
thoughts.
3.
A third benefit is that each project in
the network of enterprises provides an escape from the others. In a truly original
work, there will always be impasses and blind alleys. Having another project to
turn to can prevent a setback from turning into a crushing experience. It is
like when one tries to use the field to grow the same crop indefinitely, it is
not going to work. One will have to refresh the soil by planting something new
or simply take a break. This principle or method or ideology can be applied to
many other fields as well. For instance, if one business model founders, an entrepreneur
can move to something fresh; the writer can pull out some old jottings, the
scientist can turn to an anomaly he or she had long wanted to investigate and
so on. What would have been a depressing waste of time for a simple – minded person
can become a creative lease of life for someone with several projects on the
go.
Thus, coming back to the topic “Take a break” or “Juggle
with different topics”, keeping in mind the words of Brian Eno, the answer
lies somewhere in between, which is to say that by switching between topics,
that in itself, becomes a break which stimulates new and fresh ideas subconsciously
for other problems and situations or even the one which you may be struggling
to deal with.
