On modern creativity and cross-pollination

The current state of people attempting to become creative and productive is continuously reading more and more books on each respective topic.

The problem with these texts is that the authors are typically much more well-read on a wide gamut of ideas, but only share the final learnings with the reader. Why do the authors not reveal that in their youth they may have been avid readers of comic books and learned to make parallels between the world and Spiderman? Why do they not reveal that in working as an artist for a decade and studying the strokes of a paintbrush, they became better engineers?

Naturally, it is not mandatory for every author to recount every experience they have ever gone through to their audience, but with topics such as creativity and productivity, discounting the experience and the true method becomes a form of unintentional lying by omission.

It would be like attempting to teach someone complex calculus before they ever learned basic arithmetic, or showing someone how to dive before they can swim. The results aren’t as catastrophic but the frustration felt by the reader at their lack of ability to progress is.

Common advice about helping others become more creative, such as time-boxing — a method where you break apart your work session into small chunks of time, falls short when a person is not innately curious or particularly playful. Using slapdash games before a brainstorm to help boost that creativity is only a band-aid solution and will not in fact help that person “unlock”.

Why do we not reveal to people that the reality about creativity and productivity lies in the ability to observe a variety of fields and see the patterns and commonalities between them? Why do we not reveal to people that importing an idea to boost creativity into offices can be taken from a kindergarten class, and not just the umpteenth book on “Boosting creativity in the workplace”?

This is not a eulogy on the creativity once common that has been killed by modern times. In fact, in reading the latest biography on DaVinci by Walter Isaacson, it is apparent that this has merely been the human condition for a long time, and we still refuse to learn.

“This constant search for basic, rhyming, organic form meant that when he looked at a heart blossoming into its network of veins he saw, and sketched alongside it, a seed germinating into shoots” — Adam Gopnik on DaVinci