Chapter 9

Sharpen your edge

How to borrow the secrets of creative superstars to have more ideas

More, not better

We know from multiple studies that over half of all breakthroughs, in every walk of life from architecture to anaesthesiology, baking to biotechnology, clinical psychology to cookery, are generated by the top 10 per cent of people in that specialty.⁴ These individuals become known as the creative superstars in their field. What’s interesting is they all share a simple, but immensely powerful, secret. See if you can guess what it is from the following list:

• The mathematician Paul Erdős co-authored more than 1,500 research articles.
• Pablo Picasso painted about 20,000 pieces of art.
• Horror novelist Stephen King has written 50 novels and around 200 short stories.⁵
• Johann Sebastian Bach composed a musical composition every week.⁶
• Albert Einstein published 248 academic papers.⁷
• Thomas Edison filed over 1,000 patents.
• Richard Branson started around 100 companies under the Virgin brand, and he’s still adding to the group today.⁸

You might think, to emulate the success of creative superstars, you need to aim for the highest-value ideas. The problem is, while that sounds plausible, it just doesn’t work. Top entrepreneurs, artists and scientists don’t succeed because they have better ideas than most people. It’s because they have more ideas. Their mindset is: quantity leads to quality. They spread their bets more widely across the roulette table of life to increase their chances of a jackpot.

The French philosopher and writer Émile-Auguste Chartier once observed: ‘Nothing is more dangerous than having just one idea.’⁹ This reminds me of the wisdom of experienced gamblers and investors. They know full well that most of their bets will not deliver the goods, so they need to build a portfolio. This truth is demonstrated by the lives of great creators. Despite his prodigious output, Picasso is remembered mostly for his black-and-white, anti-fascist painting Guernica, and a relatively small collection of other art works. Einstein is heralded for just four papers on relativity. Scarcely a handful of Erdős’ mathematical insights became influential. Most critics rate Stephen King’s novels The Shining and It as his best work, leaving scores of his other books as also-rans. At the age of 16, Branson dropped out of school to found his first business – a student magazine. It promptly failed. The long road to billionaire status has spanned 50 years. Along the way, he’s suffered a string of commercial disasters including Virgin Brides, Virgin Cola and Virgin Cars.¹⁰

The surprising truth is the majority of the work flowing from the test tubes, business plans and musical instruments of our creative idols is no better than ours. Or, at least, no worthier than the work of their contemporaries. However, because they initiate so many potential projects they can kill the least promising concepts before they even leave their notepad. The higher volume means a sufficiently large number still make it into production to increase their odds of a smash hit. By pushing open countless doors, creative superstars vastly increase their chance of finding something unusual or interesting on the other side. Of course, prodigious quantity has to be underwritten by determination. Superstars know they need to expect failure, and keep going anyway. D.B. Weiss is the co-creator and showrunner of the global smash-hit Game of Thrones, the TV adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s series of fantasy books. He admits: ‘I’ve failed very consistently for many, many years. It’s sort of the bedrock of my life’s process.’¹¹

This ‘more-is-better’ approach works across creativity in all fields. Animators at the film company Pixar developed a staggering 100,000-plus storyboards (the step-by-step plot sequences) for their hit CGI animation WALL-E. Many of the scenes and plot twists just didn’t work. But, from this huge mass of effort the final storyline emerged.¹² It’s the same funnel-like process for the freelancers who submit the iconic cartoons published by The New Yorker magazine. Every week, 50 or so freelancers email up to 10 sketches for consideration by the editors. Before they hit ‘Send’, however, each freelancer has already brainstormed around 150 ideas just to select the 10 they proposed. The Darwinian progression ends up looking like this: 7,500 concepts dreamed up by freelancers; 500 submitted; 12 printed in the pages of the magazine.¹³

Professor Dean Keith Simonton, a psychologist at the University of California, was determined to uncover how scientists rise to the top of their chosen field. To find out more, he built a database on the world’s most renowned researchers. He confirmed beyond doubt that this quantity-leads-to-quality principle works in the sciences too. However, he also uncovered a fascinating paradox: superstar scientists also publish more unimportant papers than mediocre scientists, simply because they write so many.¹⁴ It turns out creative superstars not only produce damp squibs, near-misses and outright failures. Surprisingly, it seems they actually experience failure more often than the rest of us because they create so much. No wonder the two-time Nobel Peace Prize winner in Chemistry, Linus Pauling, advised: ‘The best way to get a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.’¹⁵

Melt your ice cubes

Why do some people become more creative through their life, and some lose this gift? Let’s start right at the beginning. When you were small, you knew very little. Your mind was like a clear glass of water. Every time you learned something new, it was simply poured into the glass to freely mix and combine. Because your intellect was more flexible, it permitted new knowledge and thoughts to intermingle, sparking all kinds of connections and associations. Later in life, you attended senior school and were taught in subject-specific lessons. Naturally, you started to define, label and segregate what you knew into separate categories. Slowly, history became walled off from chemistry; economics separated from gym class. Passionate hobbies disengaged from ‘real work’. The water in your glass became more like a frozen tray of ice cubes with separate compartments for the mini-specialities you developed over time. This division of disciplines makes perfect sense for analytical thinking: when you’re required to dissect subjects to find the single correct answer. During analytical thinking you follow specific rules and a particular set of logical steps in order to arrive at an agreed solution. Along the way, you consciously judge, criticise, refine, or kill thoughts and ideas. Psychologists call this whittling-down process ‘convergent thinking’.

But, what happens if you are posed the intriguingly creative challenge of ‘How would you re-think and improve an alarm clock?’. Here, convergent thinking doesn’t help much. Your analytical mind would select the ice cube labelled ‘alarm clock’, then put it in a ‘mini-glass’ for closer examination. The problem is this cognitive container only holds your past associations with alarm clocks. So, no matter how many times you shake the glass, you end up, at best, with a slightly better version of the same thing.¹⁶ A question such as this requires convergent thinking’s rowdier sibling: ‘divergent thinking’. Divergent thinking opens the door to spontaneous, free-flowing, non-linear reasoning. It warms up a number of different ice cubes and mixes them together into a new concoction. If you’re lucky, this offers you a new, improved type of alarm clock. Divergent thinking generates different choices. You are then able to whittle them down in convergent-thinking mode, as the diagram in Figure 9.1 suggests.

Figure 9.1 The diverge–converge creative process

There are some schools attempting to challenge the ice-cube model. One in Vermont in the USA has begun to bring a creative mindset into every subject.¹⁷ For example, geometry is taught through the lens of abstract art. Interestingly, the head teacher reports maths scores have more than doubled since the experiment began. However, promising approaches such as this are in the minority. Most schools and organisations tend to place analytical, convergent thinking on a revered pedestal. Divergent thinking is either not recognised or not combined with convergent thinking. Sometimes, it may even be frowned upon.

The absence of respect for the power of divergent thinking is why these environments are often efficient, if unintentional, creativity killers. It’s not surprising that many of the synonyms for diverging away from a fixed topic are viewed as potentially negative: wandering, digressing, rambling, conflicting, straying, deviating, disagreeing, to name just a few. To solve the alarm clock question, or any other creative task, you need both divergent and convergent thinking. To reclaim your creativity, re-incorporate divergence back into your thinking style. Figure 9.1 makes it look like divergent–convergent thinking is a straight-line process. Indeed, it is a good idea to diverge before you converge. In reality, they often follow each other, like a puppy chasing its own tail. You might produce a mass of ideas, narrow them down and then return to diverge again before coming back to choose the best one. What’s more important is to be aware of which mode you need – and to think accordingly.

Why laughter is advisable

Every year at the Edinburgh Fringe comedy festival, there’s a vote for the funniest joke. In 2018, Adam Rowe won with this one-liner: ‘Working at the Job Centre has to be a tense job – knowing that if you get fired, you still have to come in the next day.’ A year earlier, Ken Cheng triumphed with: ‘I’m not a fan of the new pound coin, but then again, I hate all change.’ In 2016, Masai Graham’s gag prevailed: ‘My dad has suggested that I register for a donor card. He’s a man after my own heart.’¹⁸

Whether you inwardly chuckle at these quips or not, you’ll notice all three have an identical structure: a set-up line followed by a punchline. The set-up line is like a train approaching on straight rails. It’s there to fool you into believing you know where the joke will go next. The punchline derails the train, redirecting it in an entirely unexpected direction.¹⁹

Just like creative thinking, jokes take you to somewhere surprising. Researcher Edward de Bono spent decades developing techniques for what he called ‘lateral thinking’: solving problems by seeing them creatively in a new or unusual light.²⁰ Like humour, lateral thoughts don’t emerge from traditional step-by-step logic. Both take a left turn off the straight road of rationality to deliver an unexpected, but delightful, resolution.

Not surprisingly, scientists have discovered both humour and creativity tickle the same parts of your brain. Researchers who study laughter and its effects on the body are called gelotologists. Since the 1950s, they’ve established a close relationship between humour and creativity.²¹ When they scan the brains of people convulsed by mirth, they find hilarity is a very complex cognitive function that lights up areas across the brain – as does creativity. Your left brain hemisphere ‘sets up’ the joke, while the right one helps you to ‘get it’.²² Funny people and situations help you to see the world differently by defying customary expectations.

The insight from these studies is this: try not to take divergent, creative thinking too seriously. In a study on effective brainstorming, researchers pitted product designers against improv comedians. They were surprised to find the comedians generated 20 per cent more ideas (called fluency) than the professional designers. In addition, the ideas they produced were rated as 25 per cent more creative (flexibility). Intriguingly, the study also found that many of the warm-up games used in improv comedy training could be effectively adapted to product design, because they strongly promote associative thinking. When this was tested, it boosted idea output by a sizeable 37 per cent.²³ If you’ve ever watched an improv comedy show, they usually have a funny version of the alternative use test somewhere in the mix.

Connect the dots

Louis Braille was not alone in combining ideas. Albert Einstein categorised creativity as ‘combinatorial play’. Nathan Myrhvold is a prolific inventor; Bill Gates once said he was ‘the smartest man I know’. Myrhvold has been named on patents covering topics ranging from digital displays and 3D graphics to surgical staples and genomic selection. His interests range even wider than this. He writes cookbooks and has invented a new kind of nuclear reactor, as well as researching both dinosaurs and asteroids. Asked how he comes up with innovative new ideas, he was clear: ‘A spark of creativity is taking ideas from one place and applying them in another place – in an utterly different context.’²⁷

Fusing two ideas together to make something original is the foundation of all creativity. In 1440, the German goldsmith and craftsman Johannes Gutenberg realised there was a huge opportunity if he could speed up the process of printing. He combined the existing technology of movable type with the screw mechanisms used in wine presses. The resulting printing press empowered the mass production of books and the rapid dissemination of knowledge throughout Europe.²⁸ Five hundred years later, two promising computer scientists on the Stanford University doctoral programme were also interested in making information more freely available. They were curious about an emerging technology called the Internet. They realised few other people were studying how one web page connected to another. They realised hyperlinks might function like citations in the academic world (one of the students happened to be the son of a professor). The young men were Larry Page and Sergey Brin; the resulting company was called Google.²⁹

What Braille, Gutenberg, Page and Brin managed to do, psychologists call ‘remote association’. This term refers to connecting distant items, such as:

• a pinecone and reading without sight
• wine presses and printing
• academic citations and Internet links.

In 1964, the Hungarian–British author Arthur Koestler attempted an ambitious and elaborate general theory of human creativity. In his book The Act of Creation he coined the phrase ‘bi-association’: the blending of elements drawn from two previously unrelated patterns. When the late Steve Jobs wasn’t busy reinventing industries, he was an eloquent commentator on the process of innovation. He once described creativity as ‘connecting the dots… When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something.’³⁰

All of these different observers of creativity are describing the same thing: your mind’s ability to introduce two ideas to each other that were not previously acquainted. We already covered the most effective day-to-day approach to make this more likely: the human superpower of curiosity. Everyday learning and questioning means you naturally bump up against unfamiliar notions. Your brain then effortlessly gets to work fusing, combining and merging them together. However, occasionally, you might want to be more intentional in connecting two dots. Here are a few proven routes to make the introductions.