Creativity (48 page)

Another way space can help creativity is by following the maxim “A place for everything, and everything in its place.” Developing a routine for storing such things as car keys and eyeglasses repays itself more than a hundredfold in time saved. If you know your home and office so well that you can find anything even if blindfolded, your train of thought need not be continuously interrupted to look for something. This doesn’t mean that your desk or living room should
always be neat. In fact, the work space of creative individuals is often messy and it tends to put off more ordered souls. The important thing is that they know where everything is, so they can work without too much distraction. Many can find papers and organize their work better when their desk is covered with clutter than when things are properly filed away. But if a clean desk makes you feel and work better, then by all means keep it clean.

The kind of objects you fill your space with also either help or hinder the allocation of creative energies. Cherished objects remind us of our goals, make us feel more confident, and focus our attention. Trophies, diplomas, favorite books, and family pictures on the office desk are all reminders of who you are, what you have accomplished, and therefore what you are likely to achieve. Pictures and maps of places you would like to visit and books about things you might like to learn more about are signposts of what you might do in the future.

And then there are the objects that we carry and that help create a personalized, portable psychic space. In most traditional societies, people always took along a few special objects that were supposed to increase the power of the owner. This “medicine bundle,” or talisman, might include the claws of a bear killed in the hunt, some clamshells found on the beach, or some herbs that revived the wearer from a difficult illness. Having these objects hanging from one’s neck provided a feeling of strength and identity. We also tend to keep in our purses and wallets items that represent our se
lf and its values. Pictures of our children, friends’ addresses, a book or movie title scribbled on a napkin—these all remind us of who we are and what we like. Choosing carefully what to carry with us makes it easier to be comfortable with ourselves and therefore to use psychic energy effectively when the opportunity arises.

Another space that is important to personalize is our car. Cars have become important extensions of the self; for many people, the car is more like a castle than the home is. It’s in the car that they feel most free, most secure, most powerful. It is where they can think with the greatest concentration, solve problems most efficiently, and come up with the most creative ideas. That is why it is so difficult to get people to use public transportation instead of their cars. Of course, it is possible that in the near future cars will be as obsolete as eating beef, and for the same reason—short
age of fuel. In the meantime, how
ever, it makes sense to learn to use one’s vehicle in the way that is most conducive to the environment as well as to the expression of creative potential.

Find out what you like and what you hate about life
. It is astonishing how little most people know about their feelings. There are people who can’t even tell if they are ever happy, and if they are, when or where. Their lives pass by as a featureless stream of experience, a string of events barely perceived in a fog of indifference. As opposed to this state of chronic apathy, creative individuals are in very close touch with their emotions. They always know the reason for what they are doing, and they are very sensitive to pain, to boredom, to joy, to interest, and to other emotions.
They are very quick to pack up and leave if they are bored and to get involved if they are interested. And because they have practiced this skill for a long time, they need to invest no psychic energy in self-monitoring; they are aware of their inner states without having to become self-conscious.

How can you learn the dynamics of your emotions? The first thing is to keep a careful record of what you did each day and how you felt about it. This is what the Experience Sampling Method accomplishes—pagers are programmed to signal you at random times during the day, and then you fill out a short questionnaire. It is possible, after a week, to have a good idea of how you spend your time and how you feel about various activities. But you don’t need an elaborate experiment to find out how you feel. Be creative and invent your own method of self-analysis. The basis of ancient Greek philosoph
y was the injunction to
know thyself
. The first step toward self-knowledge involves having a clear idea of what you spend your life doing and how you feel while doing it.

Start doing more of what you love, less of what you hate
. After a few weeks of self-monitoring, sit down with your diary or your notes and begin to analyze them. Again, it takes some creativity, but it should not be very difficult to draw out the main patterns of daily life. It’s not more convoluted than planning comparison shopping or studying stock market graphs. And it is so much more important in the long run.

You may find that, contrary to what you had thought, the few times you were with your spouse during the week you had great
conversations and felt relaxed. That at work, despite stress and hassles, you felt better about yourself than when watching television. Or, conversely, that most of the time when you were at work you felt listless and bored. Why were you so irritated with your children? So impatient with the people you work with? So cheerful when walking down the street?

You may never find out the deep reasons that answer these questions. Perhaps there
are
no deep reasons. The point is that once you know what your daily life is like and how you experience it, it is easier to begin getting control over it. Perhaps the pattern of feelings shows that you should change your job—or learn to bring more flow to it. Or that you should be outdoors more often, or find ways to do some more interesting things with your children. The important thing is to make sure that you spend your psychic energy in such a way that it brings back the highest returns in t
erms of the quality of experience.

The only way to stay creative is to oppose the wear and tear of existence with techniques that organize time, space, and activity to your advantage. It means developing schedules to protect your time and avoid distraction, arranging your surroundings to heighten concentration, cutting out meaningless chores that soak up psychic energy, and devoting the energy thus saved to what you really care about. It is much easier to be personally creative when you maximize optimal experiences in everyday life.

I
NTERNAL
T
RAITS

The next step, after learning to liberate the creative energy of wonder and awe, and then learning to protect it by managing time, space, and activity, is to internalize as many of these supporting structures into your personality as possible. We can think of personality as a habitual way of thinking, feeling, and acting, as the more or less unique pattern by which we use psychic energy or attention. Some traits are more likely than others to result in personal creativity. Is it possible to reshape personality to make it more creative?

It is difficult for adults to change personalities. Some of the habits that form personality are based on temperament, or the particular genetic inheritance that makes one person very shy, or aggressive, or distractible. Temperament then interacts with social environment—
parents, family, friends, teachers—and some habits are strengthened, others weakened or repressed. By the time we are out of our teens, many of these habits are strongly set, and it is difficult to invest attention—to think, feel, or act—in any other way than what our traits allow.

It is difficult, but it is not impossible. Strangely, in our culture we spend billions of dollars trying to improve our looks, but we take a fatalistic attitude toward our personal traits—as if it was beyond our abilities to change them. If all the energy expended on dieting, cosmetics, and dressing up were turned to other uses, we could easily solve the material problems of the world. Yet most of that energy is wasted because how we look, or how much we weigh, is more difficult to change because it is more dependent on genetic instructions than are personality traits. And, of cou
rse, improving who we are is a great deal more important than improving how we look.

To change personality means to learn new patterns of attention. To look at different things, and to look at them differently; to learn to think new thoughts, have new feelings about what we experience. John Gardner was by temperament extremely introverted. He was shy and retiring, undemonstrative and unemotional. This worked well for him up to a certain point, but when in his forties he became a foundation officer he realized that he was intimidating the applicants who were coming to ask him for support. As they described their projects, they were hoping to get some reaction, some
signal from him, and all they got was noncommittal silence.

At that point he decided to become more extroverted. He forced himself to smile, to make small talk, to show some vulnerability in conversation. It wasn’t easy to change these deeply ingrained habits, but every little success made him a much more effective leader and communicator—the domains in which his creativity eventually asserted itself most strongly. He never became an out-and-out extrovert, but he now impresses an interlocutor as warm and caring—which was always potentially a part of his personality, but he had been unable to show it.

If we go through life with habits that are very rigid, or inappropriate to the kind of job we do, the creative energy gets dammed up or wasted. Thus it helps to consider how to apply what we learned about the personalities of creative individuals to the traits that may be useful in everyday life.

Develop what you lack
. All of us end up specializing in some traits, which usually means that we neglect traits that are complementary to the ones we developed. For example, if someone learns to be very competitive, he or she probably has a hard time cooperating; an intuitive, subjective person usually ends up mistrusting objectivity. Even though Aristotle figured out twenty-five centuries ago that virtue consists in the golden mean between such opposite traits as courage and prudence, we still take the easy way out, which is to be one-dimensional.

As we know, creative individuals tend to be exceptions to this rule. In chapter 3 I presented the ten main dialectic poles that describe their personality. The point here is that everyone can strengthen the missing end of the polarity. When an extrovert learns to experience the world like an introvert, or vice versa, it is as if he or she discovered a whole missing dimension to the world. The same happens if a very feminine person learns to act in what we consider a masculine manner. Or if an objective, analytic person decides to trust intuition for a change. In all of these cases,
a new realm of experience opens up in front of us, which means that in effect we double and then double again the content of life.

To start, it makes sense to identify your most obvious characteristic, the one that your friends would use to describe you—such as “reckless” or “stingy” or “intellectual.” If you don’t trust your own assessment, you can ask a friend to help. When you have identified a central trait, you can begin to try its opposite. If you are basically reckless, take a future project, or relationship, and instead of rushing into it plan your moves carefully and patiently. If you are stingy, splurge. If you are an intellectual, get someone to explain to you why football is such a great sport and
try watching a ball game in light of this knowledge. Keep exploring what it takes to be the opposite of who you are.

At first it won’t be easy and will seem like a waste of time. Why try to save money when you enjoy being spendthrift? Why trust intuition when you are so comfortable being a rational person? Breaking habits is a little like breaking your own bones. What should keep you trying is the knowledge that by experiencing the world from a very different perspective, you will enrich your life considerably.

Shift often from openness to closure
. Perhaps the most important duality that creative persons are able to integrate is being open and receptive on the one hand, and focused and hard-driving on the other. Good scientists, like good artists, must let their minds roam playfully or they will not discover new facts, new patterns, new relationships. At the same time, they must also be able to evaluate critically every novelty they encounter, forget immediately the spurious ones, and then concentrate their minds on developing and realizing the few that are promising.

Because this is such a central trait, it is particularly important to practice it. Take some task you often do at your job—for instance, writing a weekly report on a project you are involved in. Start with relaxing your mind; look out the window if you can, or let your eyes roam unfocused over the desk and the office. Now try to grasp what are the most important issues about the project. Grasp not only intellectually but also at a gut level, emotionally. What’s
really
important? What gives you a good feeling about it? What scares you? Or try to get images in your mind, like scenes in a film.
Picture the people involved in the project. What are they doing? What are they saying to each other?

Then start jotting down some words on a pad, or on the computer. Any word that comes to mind concerning your feelings about the project or the movie in your mind. Words that describe facts, or events, or persons. When you have a few words down, see if you can string them together into a story—it should not be too difficult. The story you glimpse at this stage represents your strongest feelings about what is happening on the project.

It is at this point that the emphasis might shift from openness to discipline. Begin to choose words carefully, keeping in mind the goals of your department, division, or the corporation as a whole, as well as the interests, tastes, and prejudices of the bosses who will read the report. You want to be effective and convincing. So muster all your skills to write a report that conveys your beliefs as clearly and succinctly as possible. If you manage to be intuitively receptive at the beginning, and rationally critical later on, the report will be considerably more creative than if yo
u relied exclusively on one of these strategies.