The Element (11 page)

Creative work also often involves tapping into various talents at your disposal to make something original. Sir Ridley Scott is an award-winning director with such blockbuster films as
Gladiator
,
Blade Runner
,
Alien
, and
Thelma and Louise
to his credit. His films have a look distinct from other film directors. The source of this look is his training as an artist.

“Because of my background in fine art,” he told me, “I have very specific ideas about making films. I’ve always been told I have this eye. I’ve never thought about what it is, but I’m usually accused of being too pretty, or too beautiful, or too this, or too that. I’ve gradually realized that this is an advantage. My first film,
The Duellists
, was criticized for being too beautiful. One critic complained about ‘the overuse of filters.’ Actually, there were no filters used. The ‘filters’ were fifty-nine days of pissing rain. I think what he was taken by was how I look at the French landscape. Probably the best photographers of the Napoleonic period would be painters. So I looked at the Russian painters of Napoleon going to the front on that disastrous journey to Russia. A lot of great nineteenth-century views on that are frankly just photographic. I would take everything from those and apply that to the film.”

People who work creatively usually have something in common: they love the media they work with.

Musicians love the sounds they make, natural writers love words, dancers love movement, mathematicians love numbers, entrepreneurs love making deals, great teachers love teaching. This is why people who fundamentally love what they do don’t think of it as work in the ordinary sense of the word. They do it because they want to and because when they do, they are in their Element.

This is why Feynman talks about working on the equations of motion “just for the fun of it.” It’s why he talks about “playing” with the ideas in “a relaxed fashion.” The Wilburys produced some of their best work when they were just trying things out and having a good time together making music. The fun factor isn’t essential to creative work—there are many examples of creative pioneers who were hardly a laugh a minute. But sometimes when we’re playing around with ideas and laughing, we’re most open to new thoughts. In all creative work, there may be frustrations, problems, and dead ends along the way. I know some wonderfully creative people who find parts of the process difficult and deeply exasperating. But there’s always profound pleasure at some point, and a deep sense of satisfaction from “getting it right.”

Many of the people I talk about in this book think they were lucky to find what they love to do. For some of them, it was love at first sight. That’s why they call the recognition of their Element an epiphany. Finding the medium that excites your imagination, that you love to play with and work in, is an important step to freeing your creative energies. History is full of examples of people who didn’t discover their real creative abilities until they discovered the media in which they thought best. In my experience, one of the main reasons that so many other people think they’re not creative is that they simply haven’t found their medium. There are other reasons, which we’ll come to, including the idea of luck. But first let’s look more closely at why the actual media we use are so important to the creative work we do.

Different media help us to think in different ways. A great friend of mine, the designer Nick Egan, recently gave my wife Terry and me two paintings he’d done for us. A couple of things I’d said in some public lectures had moved Nick in a significant way. The first was, “If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never produce anything original.” The second was, “Great education depends on great teaching.” I think both of these are true, which is why I go around saying them. Nick found himself thinking about these ideas and about how they’d applied to his own life, growing up and then working as an artist in London. He decided to create some paintings about them, and he worked on them nearly full-time for several weeks.

Each of the paintings he did for us features one of those statements and is a kind of visual improvisation on it. They are both powerful images with an almost primal energy. One of them is primarily black, with the words scrawled and scratched into the paint on half of the canvas like graffiti. The other one is largely white, with the words written in a childlike way in dripping black paint across the background. One features a glaring cartoonlike face that’s somewhere between a cave painting and child’s drawing.

At first glance, the paintings seem rushed and chaotic. But a careful examination of the canvases reveals layers upon layers of other images beneath, carefully built up and partly painted over. This gives the paintings real depth. He also laced each with intricate textures of colors and brushstrokes that become more vibrant as you look at them. All of the complexity in the paintings generates their sense of simplicity and urgent energy.

Although my words inspired them, I couldn’t have created these paintings. Nick is a designer and a visual artist. He has a natural aptitude and passion for visual work—sensitivity to line, color, shapes, and textures and to how they can be formed into new, creative ideas. He develops his ideas through paint, chalks, pastels, printmaking, film, digital imaging, and a whole host of other visual media and materials. The materials he uses on any given project affect the ideas he has and how he works on them. You can think of creativity as a conversation between what we’re trying to figure out and the media we are using. The paintings that Nick finally gave us were different from how they started out. Their appearance evolved as he worked on them, and what he wanted to express became clearer as the paintings took shape.

Creativity in different media is a striking illustration of the diversity of intelligence and ways of thinking. Richard Feynman had a great visual imagination. But he wasn’t trying to paint a picture of electrons; he was trying to develop a scientific theory about how they actually work. To do that, he had to use mathematics. He was thinking about electrons, but he was thinking about them mathematically. Without mathematics, he simply couldn’t have thought about them as he did. The Wilburys were thinking about love and relationships, life and death, and the whole damn thing; but they weren’t trying to write a psychology textbook. They were thinking about these things through music. They were having musical ideas, and music is what they made.

Understanding the role of the media we use for creative work is important for another reason. To develop our creative abilities, we also need to develop our practical skills in the media we want to use. It’s important that we develop these skills in the right way. I know plenty of people who have been turned off math for life because they were never helped to see its creative possibilities—as you already know, I’m one of those people. Teachers always presented math to me as an interminable series of puzzles to which someone else already knew the answers, and the only options were to get it right or wrong. This is not how Richard Feynman thought of math.

Equally, I know many people who spent endless hours as children practicing scales on the piano or guitar and never want to see an instrument again because the whole process was so dull and repetitive. Many people have decided that they were simply no good at math or music when it’s possible that their teachers taught them the wrong way or at the wrong time. Maybe they should look again. Maybe I should. . . .

Creative thinking involves much more than the sorts of logical, linear thinking that dominate the Western view of intelligence and especially education. The frontal lobes of the brain are involved in some higher-order thinking skills. The left hemisphere is the area that’s most involved in logical and analytical thinking. But creative thinking usually involves much more of the brain than the bits at the front and to the left.

Being creative is about making fresh connections so that we see things in new ways and from different perspectives. In logical, linear thinking, we move from one idea to another through a series of rules and conventions. We allow some moves while rejecting others because they’re illogical. If A + B = C, we can figure out what C + B equals. Conventional IQ exams typically test for this type of thinking. The rules of logic or linear thought don’t always guide creative thinking. On the contrary.

Creative insights often come in nonlinear ways, through seeing connections and similarities between things that we hadn’t noticed before. Creative thinking depends greatly on what’s sometimes called divergent or lateral thinking, and especially on thinking in metaphors or seeing analogies. This is what Richard Feynman was doing when he saw a connection between the wobbling plate and the spin of electrons. The idea for George Harrison’s song “Handle with Care” came from a label he saw on a packing crate.

I don’t mean that creativity is the opposite of logical thinking. The rules of logic allow enormous room for creativity and improvisation within themselves. So do all activities that are bound by rules. Think of all the creativity in chess and in different types of sport, poetry, dance, and music, where there can be very strict rules and conventions. Logic can be very important at different stages in the creative process, according to what sort of work we’re doing, particularly when we’re evaluating new ideas and how they fit into or challenge existing theories. Even so, creative thinking goes beyond linear and logical thought to involve all areas of our minds and bodies.

It’s now widely accepted that the two halves of the brain have different functions. The left hemisphere is involved in logical, sequential reasoning—with verbal language, mathematical thinking, and so on. The right hemisphere is involved in recognition of patterns, of faces, with visual perception, orientation in space, and with movement. However, these compartments of the brain hardly work in isolation from each other. If you look at images of the brain at work, you’ll see that it is highly interactive. Like the rest of our bodies, these functions are all related.

Legs have a major role in running, but a leg on its own is frankly rather poor at it. In the same way, many different parts of the brain are involved when we play or listen to music, from the more recently evolved cerebral cortex to the older, so-called reptilian parts of the brain. These have to work in concert with the rest of our body, including the rest of the brain. Of course, we all have strengths and weaknesses in the different functions and capacities of the brain. But like the muscles in our arms and legs, these capacities can grow weaker or stronger depending on how much we exercise them separately and together.

By the way, there’s some suggestion in recent research that women’s brains may be more interactive than men’s brains. The jury is still out on this, but reading about it reminded me of an old question in Western philosophy that professors often give college freshmen to debate. It’s about the relationship between our senses and our knowledge of the world. The essence of the question is whether we can know something is true if we don’t have direct evidence of it through our senses, and the usual example is this: “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” I used to teach some philosophy courses, and the students and I could debate this sort of thing in an earnest way for weeks on end. The answer, I think, is, “Of course it does, don’t be so ridiculous.” But, you know, I had tenure, so there was really no need to rush this conversation. A recent trip to San Francisco reminded me of these debates. I was wandering through a street market and saw someone wearing a T-shirt that said, “If a man speaks his mind in a forest and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?” Probably.

Whatever gender differences there may be in everyday thinking, creativity is always a dynamic process that may draw on many different ways of thinking at the same time. Dance is a physical, kinesthetic process. Music is a sound-based art form. But many dancers and musicians use mathematics as an integral part of their performances. Scientists and mathematicians often think in visual ways to picture and test their ideas.

Creativity also uses much more than our brains. Playing instruments, creating images, constructing objects, performing a dance, and making things of every sort are also intensely physical processes that depend on feelings, intuition, and skilled coordination of hands and eyes, body and mind. In many instances—in dance, in song, in performance—we do not use external media at all. We ourselves are the medium of our creative work.

Creative work also reaches deep into our intuitive and unconscious minds and into our hearts and feelings. Have you ever forgotten someone’s name, or the name of somewhere you’ve visited? Try as you may, it’s often impossible to bring it to mind, and the more you think about it, the more elusive it becomes. Usually, the best thing you can do is stop trying and “put it to the back of your mind.” Sometime later, the name will probably show up in your head when you’re least expecting it. The reason is that there is far more to our minds than the deliberate processes of conscious thought. Beneath the noisy surface of our minds, there are deep reserves of memory and association, of feelings and perceptions that process and record our life’s experiences beyond our conscious awareness. So at times, creativity is a conscious effort. At others, we need to let our ideas ferment for a while and trust the deeper unconscious ruminations of our minds, over which we have less control. Sometimes when we do, the insights we’ve been searching for will come to us in a rush, like “letting a cork out of a bottle.”

While you can see the dynamic nature of creative thinking in the work of single individuals, it becomes much more obvious when you look at the work of great creative groups like the Traveling Wilburys. The success of the group came about not because they all thought in the same way, but because they were all so different. They had different talents, different interests, and different sounds. But they found a process of working together where their differences stimulated each other to create something they wouldn’t have come up with individually. It’s in this sense that creativity draws not just from our own personal resources but also from the wider world of other people’s ideas and values. This is where the argument for developing our powers of creativity moves up a gear.