Creativity requires not just a “high level of art” (i.e., expertise), but also being up to date with the “state of the art” in your field in order to make an effective and relevant contribution.
In the eagerness to “be creative”, most people forget the effort required to make this contribution. For example, although we consider people like Charles Darwin and Isaac Newton to be geniuses, we ignore the fact that it took both of them more than 20 years to make their new “art” work.
The famous phrase “genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration” (the percentages can vary by 2 points more or less), normally attributed to Thomas Edison, poorly portrays the effort required for creativity. For this effort to be sustainable over time, we must consider what Prof. Michael Hanchett Hanson called in his forthcoming book, Creative Work and Distributions of Power, the “budgets of flexibility”.
As he explained, we need to consider three different aspects:
- First, the relations between components of any system worked within budgets of flexibility, and over/under spending over long periods would stress the components.
- Second, the people involved. They need to be wise in prioritizing the long-term commitments as well as the needs of their larger environments.
- Third, the ecologies of ideas. Attention to the needs of larger systems draws on unconscious sensibility but also requires conscious awareness when using ideas. The ecology of ideas works like evolution; whether an idea survives depends on its repetition and its relation to other ideas.
In short, and for the effect of the point I’m trying to make here, each person can be flexible in situations outside their comfort zone for a certain amount of time, which can vary from situation to situation.
For example, if you have to learn how to use a new software at work, this will be uncomfortable for a while until you master it, and will therefore take up little of your budget. Now, if that software changes every week and you have to learn everything from scratch again and again and again, one day you won’t have the patience or energy to deal with it. The same goes for small situations that accumulate. You will spend a bit of your budget on each one, making it unsustainable to keep up with them all at once.
Many have experienced that during the pandemic. From one week to the next, our lives were turned upside down and we had to deal with many things at once, like family, health, work, sanity, etc. For those who were already at the threshold of the budget of flexibility (which has unfortunately become the default mode for most people), the pandemic was the final blow. And when the budget runs out, the symptoms are high stress and, eventually, burnout.
Therefore, having a low flexibility budget makes it impossible to devote yourself to any creative activity.
But that’s only part of the problem.
In today’s Attention Economy, getting around all the distractions has become one of our biggest challenges. Creativity demands time, which quickly runs out when “just 5 minutes” on social media costs us an hour. The search for entertainment, powered by algorithms and AIs, keeps us anesthetized until we realize that the day is over and it’s time to go to sleep -to do it all over again the next day.
Creativity goes far beyond the simple generation of ideas. You will need to know how to manage your resources (flexibility, attention, and time, to name a few), as well as how to put in effort and intention for prolonged periods of time until you finally get meaningful work done.