I recently got this comment on the blog from Rick.
I was going to answer it, but it occurred to me there might be a better way.
Most of these questions are about analysing creativity.
How it works, how do you encourage it, develop it, train it?
Most of the people who read this blog are creative.
So, instead of just getting my opinion, it might be good to get lots of different points of view.
How would other people answer this?
“Dave,
We’ve all heard how creativity is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration (but is it? or is that just a nice bit of word play? what if it’s actually 30% inspiration?).
But I think ‘perspiration’ is the simple bit.
Simple in the way that running is simple and gymnastics isn’t.
“Just do it”, in marketing speak.
You can get that from watching Rocky: just try harder, just punch harder, work on your right, just get up.
But was Rocky creative?
The 1% that’s ‘magic’ - why do people avoid analysing that?
How can you learn to become more creative, rather than discipline yourself to become more tenacious and pragmatic?
Everyone and anyone can have a good idea, but creativity is surely the learned skill of having good ideas consistently and on demand?
CDs don’t just look for hard workers, do they?
Is everyone a great idea generator innately, but the difference is in how hard they work?
Or - out of lots of hard workers - can some people train themselves to have better ideas?
I thought your case study of Mike was quite inspirational.
I like his idea and I can see how it was powerful and appropriate.
But I’m not sure his example teaches us how to develop creativity.
That’s what I was trying to get at.
Mike is an artist - you’ve primed us to believe he’s creative already - and when he tries hard and the conditions are right, guess what?, he has a great idea.
I guess the point I’ve been trying to make is that you yourself, Dave, are the case study we can learn more about creativity from.
What’s your take on abductive reasoning?
Is NLP useful?
I wonder if we might tempt you to tell us a little about how you’ve trained your mind to be more creative over your very impressive career, perhaps in a forthcoming blog post?
Do you train your creatives at all, beyond ‘on the job’ training?
Have you designed any exercises to develop creative thought processes?
And if so, could you give an example and some of your thinking behind it?”
When I was a copywriter I trained up a couple of junior writers and art directors, but I was relying mostly on old briefs and hunches.
I didn’t have much theory until maybe six years in, when I started reading people like Stephen Pinker and Susan Greenfield.
The idea of the mind as software running on the brain’s hardware, and the idea that education, culture, experience and memes can ‘reprogramme’ the mind linked quite neatly with many of the tools I was using as a writer to persuade audiences.
So I wonder what your take on minds, creativity and training is?
Pinker et al are academics, while you’re actually at the front line of this stuff - so I think your perspective would be incredibly interesting.”
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Looks like Rick’s learned from you already - given that he’s copied your one-sentence-paragraph blog writing style for his email. Nowt wrong with that of course.
Personally, I don’t believe creativity is something that can be taught. It can, however, be learned. By doing it. By being around it. By seeing it in action.
Because creativity - and this is just my opinion, remember - is a very, very personal thing. It’s the abstract connections in *your* brain that do the creativity bit. The more things you stuff inside your brain to connect to other stuff, the better your creative leaps. And no one but you can teach you that.
The bit you can be taught in school, on the job, from books, wherever, is figuring out how to make people understand what’s going on in your head. Which, to me, is more about craft than creativity. Which is the perspiration bit (though often, inspiration takes a lot of perspiration too).
So that’s what I think. And it might only make sense to me. But there you go.
Looking forward to seeing what others will say.
P.S. Today’s Captcha: “improper felter”. What’s yours?
Fuck a duck! Sorry, thats not advice, just my initial thought for trying to answer the equivalent of ‘what’s the meaning of life’.
Are we talking general creativity here or advertising communication?
In general terms, I would say creatvity derives from curiosity. If you haven’t got that then you are never gonna be that bothered to figure out the problem/solution for ad land. Can you be taught to be curious? I’d say so but it’s gotta be happening at a young age for it to be potentially ‘worth’ anything at a later stage. Finally, don’t stop being curious either. We all have the capacity to keep learning and that can only be a good thing.
Doesn’t the question answer itself? I mean, if you want to be creative and think up ideas don’t you just do it? I have plenty of shit ideas that I don’t tell anyone about, but I’ve learned (through hard work and education) to recognise the good ones.
All you have to do to have a good idea is have 100 shit ones.
Was that the question? Probably not.
Oh yeah, there was something about how to have ideas. I find that happens through thinking (that isn’t meant to be as facetious as it sounds). As Dave has said before, having ideas shouldn’t be a problem. The real genius is in spotting them.
What Ben said.
The 99% of hard work and the 1% of inspiration aren’t separate.
The harder you work, the more ideas you come up with. Then you can choose the one that makes you look most like a genius.
As an initial step, EVERYONE should be encouraged to be more fearless from dan early age. Encourage fearlessness of being wrong. When it comes to being creative, some people can barely put pen to paper due to an innate fear of doing something ‘wrong’. A common sight every Christmas during countless games of Pictionary.
It’s repeated to the point of cliché in our industry that you should embrace mistakes - fail more, fail better etc, but it many many people still find it hard to adopt this approach.
I said ‘pen to paper’ earlier, but obviously it is becoming easier to ‘get your create on’ anonymously via on-screen media, which might encourage those who fear the world of mistakes to let ideas flow without retribution.
Isn’t that a bit like asking a war hero “How do you be courageous?” Most really creative people I know innately look at the world from a slightly (or radically) different perspective.
Per Ben’s comment, perhaps the thing that can be taught is weeding out the good from the bad.
Good and bad ideas. Now there’s something we’d all agree on!
Although ‘being creative’ is natural thing and some people are born more that way than others, I believe it can be learnt and adopted by anyone.
Think of it like musical talent. Some people sing beautifully the first time they open their mouths and can pick up an instrument and intuitively know what to do with it. Others practice for years and get technically brilliant. It might be the natural one who has the most success or a more pleasant journey along the way, but they’re both getting creative results.
I’ve been labelled as ‘creative’ since I was a kid, but it’s only the last few years working as a copywriter and getting through art school that I feel I been able to use and apply creativity as a skill. Before I was creative only some of the time, when it just seemed to happen and people said I was. Now I can switch it on and off, use it, recognise, package it up to meet a brief. Those are two very different types of ‘creative’.
The creativity you can turn on and off is about recognising good ideas and recognising what tips and tricks lead to good ideas. You have to be analytical and able to detach from your ideas if you want to work in a creative profession full time. That’s the difference between Artists and designers, Writers and copywriters.
So basically I’m saying there are different types of creativity, and different people use it differently. The combinations are endless. People range from zero creativity to creative genius naturally. Then factor in people who are labelled as creative from a young age by parents and teachers, and those who aren’t. Then add hardwork, self awareness and the ability to analyse ideas into the mix. Again all at varying degrees in different people. Education levels. Cultural capital. Wealth. Mental health. Location. Age. Gender. I could go on. But I won’t, because being creative I’ve found better things to do than answer weird questions.
hmmm…i tend to agree with simon. the best people i’ve worked with had a reliably unique POV on things in general. So their ideas were uniquely “them”.
i never considered myself “creative” growing up because i never did anything artistic. didn’t draw or play music. just watched snooker really!
but i found that the more i committed to being creative the better my ideas were. i think we all have a unique POV but it takes a bit of courage to state to the world that you are creative and you’re going to make a living at it. that you’re going to literally live by your wits.
i think that people avoid analyzing the “magic” inspiration part because it’s kind of pointless. it’s like analyzing comedy. usually it’s just a (seemingly) new combination of existing things.
ultimately though i think people have to be internally motivated and they largely “teach” themselves by just being keen and learning and stealing from the best in their field until they develop their own voice.
Hi Rick,
I think there are some really good responses here.
People are obviously making a real effort to answer your questions in different ways.
It shows you how the creative mind works.
Are any of these helpful?
Are they going in the right direction?
While this post is up it might be a good idea to get some feedback from you, in case you wanted something different.
More technical maybe?
Well, I have been paid for a few years to do it so I guess my response would be yes. I feel creativity is something that we have educated out of us and gradually, through fear, assumptions, capacity, accountability culture, churn, the internet…our creative thinking skills become underused. Like any other thinking skills they can be practised and developed. There are thousands of creative thinking techniques that, in isolation, are mechanistic. At first. Throw them in the mix, regularly and you will get better.And devlop your own unique approaches. I’d say start with de Bono and read Dan Pink’s briliant A Whole New Mind to understand what we mean by right directed thinking skills. Read his blog. And read autobiographies of creative people who inspie you. Look at how thy approach idea generation, devlopment, refinment, execution, evaluation. Cast your net wide- avoid ad men. (apart from Dave, obviously)
I taught this stuff to headteachers then we started to think about how these processes could help them to think about tapping into the potential of everyone in their schools. It was brilliant,inspirational stuff. They were not flogging anything but helping kids to reach their potential.Oh and I’m doing it again next week with CancerResearchUk, Glue and Dare agencies. All pretty premier league players at this stuff. They share a common desire to rejuvenate and learn how to be more creative, constantly.
The tools and techniques are easy and fun. You can find them. The hard bit is nailing the time + commitment to doing them followed by developing the behaviour that emerges from working like this.
The brain is lazy. It will also take the quickest route. Go the long way. Get lost. Try routes other people would take. You may find you really enjoy it. That’s when the ideas will start to happen.
http://ex-blank-page.blogspot.com/2010/01/in-reply-to-daves-great-posts-106.html
Being creative to me is about seeing abstract patterns in human behaviour and identifying,absorbing and learning from them. They are connections that look random but make the penny drop. They are difficult because they need to be ‘different’ and by definition that means identifying something that others have not used in the past.
As Dave has said earlier in one of his blogs ‘Looking at something everyone else is looking at and seeing something no one else has seen’
You can learn a craft and even hone it but to be exceptional in it, you need to have this creative ability.
You cant really create a process out of it, you can get inspiration to fire it. And nothing can be more inspiring than other creative work all around us. Humans are fundamentally a creative lot because we have the ability to discern and make choices. You need to believe that and start looking at ecah person around you, even the regular bank clerk and observe if he is doing anything different or doing things differently.There in lies the Magic !
Rick.
about creativity.
you seem to ask a lot of questions. to me that’s one of first signs of a creative mind. you question things. you don’t follow. you’re developing your own point of view. this leads me to second sign of a creative mind:
unique point of view. it’s easy to wait for others. it’s easy to copy. it’s fun to invent. it drives you. but it takes courage.
courage is no. 3. Aristotle said “Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees the others.” courage drives you to act, not just talk or think things up.
to act you need discipline. when it comes to work/ads Marcello Serpa put it greatly: “Quality comes from quantity”. simple as that. and as Deborah said before me the brain is lazy. you need to push it. you do that by acting questions.
circle closed. go back to first sign.
that’s how I see it.
\asking\ not \acting\ questions should be at the end. sorry. I obviously need stronger coffee.
There’s an interesting question within Rick’s question about the training of people with the word ‘creative’ in their job title within agencies.
I’ve worked as account director or planner in a couple of agencies with good creative reputations and I think that ‘creative’ people learn different things from different people.
Now a lot of what goes on between creative director and creative team happens behind closed doors from a planning point of view. But my observation on this relationship is that the ongoing training, such as it is, is along the lines of why idea A is better than idea B. Creative teams learn from their creative director how to be better critics and editors of their own work. A cynic might say that they learn to develop work that suits the taste of their creative director. Whatever. The point is that they learn how to identify better ideas rather than necessarily how to have them.
‘Creatives’ that end up earning lots of money do so because they consistently have ideas that no-one else in the agency could have come up with. They take briefs to places that are beyond the expectations of the people that wrote them.
I’ve also observed, as have others, that these creative high-flyers also tend to have what is known in the trade as a “good planning brain”.
In other words they have the ability to think their way into a problem from various strategic angles. They create alternative foundations for their ideas, all of which are commercially relevant, thereby giving themselves more creative options.
It is really exciting when you see a top-notch ‘creative’ planner working with a top-notch creative team. And I suspect that a lot of successful ‘creative’ people in agencies have learned more about how to think their way into alternative approaches to a brief from good planners than they have from their creative director.
Great planners are like Sherpas. They don’t do the job for the ‘creatives’ but they do make the journey a lot easier.
And great ‘creatives’ learn over time to act as their own Sherpas.
Rick, here’s the first chapter in my soon-to-be-released book on creativity, »The mental orgasm«. Hope it will bring some light on the subject.
Creativity is nothing less than a mystery. It’s as profound and complex as life itself. So enigmatic, in fact, that the great artists themselves cannot agree on what it is. Still, the artists seem to fall into eight categories:
The tormented. The courageous. The lovers. The dreamers. The mad. The spiritual. The stumblers. And the juvenile.
The musician and artist David Byrne subscribes to the myth that creativity comes from torment. Actor David Duchovny seem to go along with this. According to David, creativity emanates from anxiety-evoked needs: The need to get something out. The need to get rid of something. Or to get in touch with something within.
Charles Frankel, the philosopher, explains why. He believes anxiety to be the essential condition of intellectual and artistic creation, and everything that is the finest in human history.
Then we have the curageous.
The inventor of the polariod, Edwin Land have said that an essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail. And Erich Fromm, the famous psychoanalyst, seemed to be of the same conviction by claiming that creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.
And then there are those who speak about love as the primary force of creativity.
“To fear love is to fear life”, said the great philosopher Bertrand Russel. “And those who fear life are already three part dead”. Not forgetting the finnish philosopher Esa Saarinen, who believed that creativity is the opposite of cynicism – which basically is love and hope. As Igor Stravinsky, the russian composer, suggested: “Love is the driving force behind creativity. Because in order to create”, he said, “there must be a dynamic source, and what source is greater than love?”
Now the dreamers. They feed on hope and courage. They are born optimists and believe in the power of dreams.
Walt Disney, for instance, was a dreamer at heart. He evoked hope in all of us when he proved to the world that if you can dream it, you can do it. But the greatest dreamer of them all must have been JFK. His words at the special joint session of congress 25 May, 1961 is forever ingraved in our memories:
“I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal – before this decade is out – of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.”
Now that’s what I call a dreamer.
Then there are those who gravitate to the obscure and demented.
One is Salvador Dali, the surrealist painter, who nailed the difference between a madman and himself: the madman thinks he is sane, while Dali said he knew he was mad.
George Bernard Shaw, the famous author, is another one. He advised us to fear the reasonable man. Why? Because the reasonable man adapts himself to the world while the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress, he reckoned, depends upon the unreasonable man.
As well as Frank Capra, the film director. He obviously followed his caution, simply by postulating that the more you reason, the less you create.
Of course there is a mystic dimension to creativity as well.
What if the creative potential in human beings is the image of God? At least, that’s how Mary Daly, the philosopher and theologian, pictured it.
And Michelangelo, the renaissance artist behind the famous David sculpture in Florens, claimed to have seen the angel in the marble and decided to carve until he set him free.
“Creativity is the act of putting two and two together to make five”, said Arthur Koestler, the author who wrote about holism – suggesting that everything in the world contains some sort of intentionality or a direction. Not to mention Albert Einstein, who was convinced that God answers when the solution is simple.
Did I mention the stumblers? They are living proof that mistakes, coincidences and chance (a.k.a serendipity) contribute to breakthrough thinking. More than most people think.
Take John Pemberton, for instance.
He was trying to invent an all purpose syrup that would cure whatever ails people. One gloomy day his assistant happened to spill carbonated water into the brew. Fortunately, they had a hunch about the brownish liquid: better trying before dismissing.
It tasted terrific.
And that was the mistake that eventually brought us Coca-Cola.
Mistakes, coincidences and chance are powerful stuff. That’s how penicillin got invented. And the x-ray. And vulcanized rubber, cellophane, safety glass, Scotchgard, Post-it notes, superglue, the popsicle, tea, cheese, the periodic system and cornflakes.
Finally we have those who regard creativity as no more than an innocent game.
Henri Matisse, the great impressionist painter, regarded creativity as looking at life with the eyes of a child. And the late Leo Burnett, one of the big boys on Madison Avenue (one of the real Mad Men), had a hunch about the secret of creativity:
“Curiosity about life in all of it’s aspects is the secret of great creative people”.
But Ray Bradbury went further. Way further.
The famous science fiction writer encouraged us to stop thinking. He believed that thinking is the chief enemy of creativity. Because it’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy.
So what do we learn from this?
Does this mean that we all should act as hopelessly childish, passionate, naïve and lion-hearted dreamers that stumbles through life, driven by anxiety and madness?
Why not?
It could be a fun trip.
Hi Phil,
I agree with everything you say, especially the part about creatives-who-are-good planners working with creative-planners.
Best possible combination.
Hi Dave and All,
First, thank you Dave for opening the topic up. While I don’t think we’re going to solve the nature-nurture debate on this blog, I think it’s still interesting to see what the ’special’ people think. Do you have special powers of creativity as some account managers like to claim in front of of clients?
I read something interesting recently about memes (a theory about self-replicating ideas which spread through and define cultures). Could creativity be a meme? A mode of thinking which owns us as much as we use it?
Johnny: taking your notion a little further, do you see creativity as something learned-but-automatic, like a martial arts kata or riding a bike? A process which becomes less conscious with practise?
John W: I’m intuitively attracted to the idea of creatives as curious people. The best writers I’ve worked with have all had the ability to acquire a nerdy interest in any subject or product. That’s certainly the David Ogilvy style. Not sure I’d say the same for art directors though - are they a different breed? Or are they just as curious but somewhat more taciturn about it all?
Ben Kay and Tom Sharp: it’s a fair point, but it does look like you’re treating the mind as a mysterios black box where ’stuff just happens’. How, then, does a creative better themselves? Is it just a case of doing more work - effectively trial and error? What’s the value of hiring young creatives then? And if there is a je ne sais quoi that justifies hiring inexperienced creatives, how do we spot it? Or does this explain the spaghetti-against-the-wall placements system the industry uses to hire them?
Paul F: I like the idea of creatives as the people in the room who are prepared to be wrong. But is fearlessess actually generative or is it a catalyst for creativity? To get a little Plato about it: are the ideas waiting outside the box for someone to discover them, or is ‘fearlessness’ the room you must be in before you can be creative (ie: you can be prepared to be wrong, but sooner or later you have to be right more often than you are wrong - and where does that come from?)
Simon Billing: soldiers are trained to do things the rest of us would baulk at. Bayonet training, for example, is important in conditioning soldiers to make messy, personal kills (more difficult than pulling a trigger). When courageous soldiers are interviewed, they often say they were just following orders, or that they didn’t think, or that they were looking after a comrade. All of these traits are induced - deliberately - by army training and organisational culture. So we know what it takes to condition ordinary people to perform extraordinarily courageously - how might we take similar material and inculcate creativity?
Cat: you seem to be edging toward a cultural explanation of creativity. Immerse people in creative challenges and their minds will adapt to overcome them. Does that imply that a creative department’s culture must be different to other areas of agency life? That would be a decent rebuttal to those who sometimes bemoan creatives dressing down and acting as primadonnas. Could we take it further though? Does creativity need the notion of the creative as special/different/mysterious in the same way that old painting and pickled sharks need to fetch ridiculous prices for society to get anything out of Art?
Vinny: fair enough, but how do you explain some people being more unique than others? There were 3bn people alive in 1960, when modern advertising came into its own. There are 7bn alive now. Are we more or less unique? The probability of someone having a ‘unique POV’ has surely more than doubled in that period. That should be concerning, since increasing the supply of creative people might reasonably lead to a reduction in their price!
Deborah: I think I come at this from a similar perspective to yours. Thank you for the additions to the reading list!
Sunitha: another attractive notion - the creative as holistic explorer, the magpie who makes the links others won’t. I used to take my creative team on outings to museums and encourage them to jump on a bus and change their scenery in order to get them inspired. I never knew if it was helping, or just flakey bollocks. It seemed to work for me though. I cracked one of my more challenging briefs surrounded by the Elgin Marbles. I’ve also found that creatives who did something else for a living before advertsing (tree surgeon, scuba instructor, accountant…) often make those connections very well indeed.
Riki: coffee might indeed be the answer. When the first coffee houses opened in England, the kind feared a popular revolution and tried to shut them down. Why? Because water quality was often so poor that weak beer was less likely to make you ill. Most of the population, most of the time, was mildly inebriated and sedated. Coffee turned these people into nutters. Before coffee, nobody would attemt to write a dictionary! So perhaps caffeine is the key…
Phil Adams: I’ve always thought good senior people have a touch of the planner about them. Similarly, someone once said there’s no such thing as a junior planner - I think there’s truth in that too. I think your observation of creative departments discussing work is a valuable one. We did it in our teams when I was a writer and my planning team does it too. What I have noticed is that account managers and media planners are far less likely to ‘just talk about advertising’ - that discussion of what makes a good or bad ad, and what an ad is trying to achieve. If I had a penny for every time someone floated the idea of an advertising appreciation session…
Per: your book sounds very interesting. I think creativity for artists and adpeople does need to be somewhat different. The artist has the freedom and challenge of a blank canvas; the ad creative has the focus and challenge of briefs and deadlines. Nonetheless, the traits you identify are quite similar to what other posters have observed.
Thanks again Dave for making this a topic on your blog. Do any of the responses so far strike a chord with you?
Personally, I don’t like black boxes and mystery. I like to take things apart and see how they work, even if it gets a little uncomfortable or difficult. Dan Dennet, the American philospher, has a theory that thinking about thinking is a discipline which transformed our species into modern humans. Before we started talking to ourselfs, he argues, there was no useful concept of ‘I’. So I’m quite attracted to the idea that a better creative is someone whose mind has adapted to carry the ‘creativity meme’ and reinforce it, and that successful agencies and creative departments are those which spread it internally, like a religion.
I’d love to know what your view is Dave.
Apologies for the spelling errors. The most confusing is probably kind for King, relating to the coffee point. Laptop keyboards are bloody nightmares.
In a way, this post is related to the previous. The more you try to understand creativity, the more MustDo-s you end up with, and there’s a high risk of losing perspective. That’s why I’m with Paul Arden on this: “ASTONISH ME. Bear these words in mind and everything you do will be creative.” Creativity IS mystery. Drop the mystery and everything you do is polite conversation. Remember, the real amazing thing is producing natural light, not refracting it into rainbows, no matter how attractive you might find the rainbows.
Looks like you’re getting a lot of opinions Rick. So it’s up to you who you agree with.
To answer your question: I’d like to disagree and say that creativity is a conscious hard-thinking process - it would certainly justify the time we spend on things. But as life goes on, I find that often, the less hard thinking I/we do, the better the creative output. Things tend to fall into place.
So perhaps it is a little like riding a bike. But then, a bike is ridden in different ways. If you’re coasting along (doing everyday bread-and-butter work) it’s a fairly automatic process. But if you’re mountain biking (pitching or starting out somewhere new) it takes a lot more effort.
It’s a bit of a crap analogy, but you see what I’m getting at.
And with regard to memes, I reckon the ‘idea’ of creativity is a meme. Whereas actual creativity is just a thing that sort of happens. Which perhaps reinforces the idea that some people are just inherently creative?
Dave, thanks for opening this up to debate - great fun!
Hi Dave, thanks for posting this. Reading through the comments has been truly enlightening and inspiring. I was going to leave my 2 cents here but ended up writing a full article. I don’t mean to steer anyone away from your site if you fancy checking it out it’s here:
http://redswish.co.uk/on-creativity/
Keep up the great writing Dave, I discovered your blog before Christmas and have been checking it every morning since!
Nathan
I just remembered this.
A friend of mine is a copywriter, now a CD at one of the Landor offices. Whenever he was stuggling to find ideas, he would externalise his failure to something disposable. He’d say “This pen isn’t working for me anymore” and hurl it in the bin. He’d change chairs because “This chair isn’t working for me anymore.”
For my friend, doubt is the greatest enemy of creativity.
He surrounds himself with extraordinary objects. Not just a pair of speakers, but a pair of 40 year-old valve-driven speakers with a 20-minute anecdote behind them. Not a normal shirt, but one with a Harry Hill collar or six-button cuffs (with a design rationale he would explain in detail at the drop of a hat).
He treats objects as if they were fetishes, like Native American shamen might use. He surrounds himself with stories. Imbues objects with the power to help or hinder him.
He’s the least hippy or spiritual person I know. Last time we met, he was toying with logical positivism. But the fetisism worked for him. It was how he’d trained his mind to spew out great creative ideas on-demand.
Best writer I ever worked with.
My dad played football professionally and he taught me to kick a ball properly. For many years I played football to a decent standard but never to his. So i learnt to play, but i never achieved greatness. Greatness requires ‘the magic’. And the same goes for creativity. I believe creativity can be taught if you are open to it. Whether you ever become great at it, well that’s another question.
My first day at art school i was told to draw a skull on a table. So i picked up a pad and a pencil and diligently began to draw. Mistake. No one told me to sit in front of the skull. No one told me to use a pad or a pencil. This was my first lesson. And the most important one. Creativity requires you to not accept the norm and approach things from a different angle. So i should have stood on the chair and drawn it from above dipping a stick into some ink perhaps. Or any other unique and different way to capture the skull. And for me, that can be taught. To what level of creative genius you reach, i’m afraid that requires a combination of luck and some magic.
By the way although my dad achieved a childhood dream he never became one of the greats. He tells me he never quite got the breaks. So as i say, luck is involved in my opinion. But the harder you work, the luckier you get.
So…different strokes for different folks?
You can ‘use’ young creatives by getting them to generate loads of ideas and helping them to see which is best. Then they learn and they can do it. Fewer shit ideas will find their way to you. As a junior I often came up with the same idea as the ‘winning’ team, but either I failed to spot it or I wouldn’t be able to execute it as well. The idea is only the start of the long process where a senior creative earns his/her wage.
Look at Volvo Twister: the idea is that a man uses the product under extreme circumstances. Same idea as VW snowplough and a billion others, but what Tom and Walt did with it was what made them and the ad great.
agree 100% w Phil. the planning part is my favorite part of advertising.
rick, not sure what you mean. i think everyone is unique. but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re any good! the availability of pen and paper doesn’t make everyone James Joyce.
Off topic but this is fun! http://www.baconorbeercan.com/
Short answer for becoming more creative: Take more showers.
Longer, less-concise answer: As obvious as it sounds, creative people are like artists. Just as anyone can learn to write better or paint better or dance better, you can learn little tricks to make yourself more creative.
But all the hard work in the world won’t make up for talent. I know people who have painted their whole life, but still don’t approach the genius of Picasso, Rembrandt, or Giles.
That being said, I also believe that creativity comes in many different forms, not just the “artistic” areas. Talented lawyers, bond traders, even plumbers are great because they approach their own particular problems in unique ways. You may never compare a plumber with Picasso, but whoever invented the drain snake was one smart cookie. (Not to mention he/she has impacted more lives in this world than Picasso ever will…)
~Graham
PS - re: reCaptcha: “The ounces”
This all makes my head hurt, wonder if a banana will ease the pain?
Bananas always ease the pain! great source of potassium and fun!
Personally I think that anyone can be taught to do anything given enough time, even ‘naturals’ need help to focus their talent.
Hi Rick,
Nathan Beck (above) has a great line on his blog link that sums it up for me.
“Creativity can’t be taught but it can be learned.”
Creativity is an itch that you have to scratch. How do you get an itch? Well, there are all manner of ways but they don’t involve playing it safe.
Dave, great debate. Thanks for the kick off…
Could we do this live, over a glass of wine?
This has been really interesting.
I’m actually quite intrigued by the number of commenters who seem to find the topic uncomfortable - a box it doesn’t feel right to look in. It’s often artists, actors and creative people - those who can comunicate most eloquently about other subjects - who find it difficult to describe their own processes.
We’ve some who think creatives have an x-factor (genes or interesting backgrounds) and others who think it’s about normal people exposed to creative environments (where they can fail, discuss, explore, connect etc.)
There’s a general feeling that creativity is a plant you can water and grow in decent soil - but you can’t shape it like a bonsai. There’s still a sense of the mysterious about that, but I think it’s because most commenters are fond of the idea of the creative as someone holding a unique perspective. So you can provide an environment where people with unique perspectives can flourish, but overt training is seen as a conformist threat; you might kill the unique perspective.
So do creatives genuinely have a different perspective? Or are they merely people given an evironment in which they’re told and expected to be creative, allowed the time to think, to inspire themselves, to be holistic, and to have 100 shit ideas for each good one?
The way our industry recruits young creatives supports the ‘unique perspective’ theory. It implies that the unique perspective of a creative is difficult to spot or test for, so we encourage lots of them to throw themselves at the wall and hire the ones who stick. (Contrast this with the WPP graduate scheme for non-creatives).
I think it’s been a fascinating discussion - thank you Dave for kicking it off.
Rick,
I kept my response quite short because I wanted to write a longer post about it next week.
‘Creativity’ is a question that lasts your whole life after all.
Richard King, you’re right.
Bananas have eased the pain in my brain. Are you a doctor?
What would you recommend for pains in the butt caused by months and months of election preamble?
Rick,
I believe creativity is a red herring. Great ads (and art, and literature, and pornography) without exception come from that 1% inspiration.
The 99% perspiration is purely the best way to nurture that 1% to show up more consistently.
Thankfully, the perspiration stuff is really fun - fill your brain with as much information, art and entertainment as possible; analyse why these things do or don’t work or don’t work; and let your neurons join the dots.
Don’t aim to be creative. Equip yourself to be inspired.