How to be Creative

I have been thinking about creativity and what we actually mean when we tell someone to “be creative,” because it is one of those instructions that sounds perfectly sensible until you try to follow it. Be creative. Okay. Should I stare harder at the wall? Buy a beret? Rearrange my desk? Wait for inspiration to arrive by registered mail?

Creativity seems less like a special talent and more like the ability to move deliberately between two very different states of mind: open and closed. We need an open mind when we do not yet have a clearly defined purpose, because uncertainty gives us room to contemplate, wander, associate, notice, play, and entertain ideas that have absolutely no obligation to become useful. Then, once we know what we want to accomplish, we need to become considerably more closed-minded. We narrow the field, ignore competing possibilities, make choices, impose structure, and get the work done.

Neither mode is more creative than the other. Creativity happens somewhere in the movement between them.

Knock knock.

Who’s there?

An idea.

An idea who?

I don’t know yet. That’s why I knocked.

That is roughly how open thinking works. Something appears and, instead of immediately demanding credentials, references, projected revenue, and a detailed explanation of why it deserves to occupy valuable cerebral real estate, we let it in for a minute.

Suppose I suddenly think, I should write a blog post about creativity. That thought does not yet need an outline. It certainly does not need twelve SEO headings and a graphic of a human brain with lightbulbs shooting out of it. At this point, I may not even know what I think about creativity. The idea simply interests me.

So I contemplate it.

Maybe creativity is curiosity. Maybe it is pattern recognition. Maybe creative people merely tolerate uncertainty for longer than other people. Maybe it depends on having enough unrelated information floating around in your head that occasionally two pieces collide. Maybe boredom is involved. Maybe walking helps. Maybe the whole thing is just the brain entertaining itself while pretending to work.

What do you call a brilliant idea with no practical application?

Tuesday.

The point is that during this stage, I do not have to decide. I can think about children making up games, mathematicians playing with impossible problems, scientists following anomalies, artists trying materials they have never used, somebody inventing a ridiculous sandwich at midnight, or why humans apparently looked at milk and eventually thought, You know what this needs? Mold.

Open thinking permits the useless thought.

That word, useless, deserves more respect. We live in a culture that is remarkably eager to ask what everything is for. What is this book for? What is this idea for? What is this conversation leading to? Can we monetize it? Can we measure it? Can we put it into a spreadsheet and make someone responsible for Q3?

Sometimes the answer should simply be: nothing yet.

How many creative people does it take to change a lightbulb?

Twenty-three.

One to change it and twenty-two to ask whether darkness might actually be an underexplored medium.

Open-mindedness is valuable precisely because we have not yet decided what counts as relevant. If we define the destination too early, we begin filtering information according to a conclusion we have already reached. We see what serves the plan and ignore everything else.

Sometimes that is exactly what we should do.

Just not yet.

When we are exploring an idea, wandering is productive because there is no penalty for taking the scenic route. I can begin thinking about creativity, somehow end up reading about octopus cognition, remember a conversation I had in Mexico fifteen years ago, wonder whether jokes themselves are small acts of creativity, go make coffee, notice something odd about the spoon, and return to the original question with a completely different idea.

This is not necessarily procrastination.

Sometimes it absolutely is.

Knock knock.

Who’s there?

Procrastination.

Procrastination who?

I’ll tell you tomorrow.

Eventually, however, I have to write the blog post.

At that moment the entire mental operation changes.

I now know what I want to say: creativity requires the ability to move between open and closed states of attention. Wonderful. Now stop wandering.

I do not need another theory of creativity. I do not need to investigate whether dolphins understand jazz. I do not need seventeen possible titles. I certainly do not need to reorganize the bookshelf because I suddenly believe the books will communicate more efficiently if arranged according to philosophical temperament.

Now I need to write.

This is where closed-mindedness earns its place in the hall of fame.

Once we have selected an outcome, creativity needs boundaries. We decide what belongs, what does not, which thought we are following, which thought we are abandoning, and what “finished” means. We reduce possibility intentionally because unlimited possibility is incompatible with completion.

How many writers does it take to finish a blog post?

Apparently nobody knows.

They’re still revising the opening paragraph or letting ai write it for them. 

Closure is not the enemy of creativity. Closure is how creativity becomes something other people can actually encounter.

Think about the difference between walking into a bookstore because you have forty minutes to kill and walking into a bookstore because you need a particular book. In the first case, there is absolutely no reason to proceed efficiently. You pick something up because the title is clever or the pages are beautifully painted (a trend I’m loving 🥰). That sends you somewhere else. You discover a subject you did not know existed. You read three pages standing in an aisle. You forget what time it is.

That is open mode.

Now imagine you are late for a meeting and somebody has asked you to bring a specific book.

You walk in, find it, pay, leave.

You do not need to develop a sudden scholarly interest in nineteenth-century mushroom illustration.

That is closed mode.

What do you call someone browsing a bookstore with no intention of buying anything?

Research.

What do you call someone browsing a bookstore when they have a deadline?

Dangerous.

The same distinction appears when we solve problems. If we are still figuring out what the problem actually is, opening the field is tremendously valuable. Ask strange questions. Reverse assumptions. Consider explanations that initially seem implausible. Follow the weird observation. Ask what would happen if some apparently fixed condition were changed.

“What if?” is one of the great opening devices of human thought.

What if buildings generated their own power?

What if waste were treated as feedstock?

What if computers could converse with us?

What if we put wheels on luggage?

The last one is particularly instructive because humans dragged suitcases around for an astonishingly long time before someone apparently noticed that civilization had already invented the wheel.

How many humans does it take to put wheels on a suitcase?

Millions.

But first we need several thousand years to think about it.

Once the problem becomes concrete, however, the questions change. If you are actually building the thing, “what if?” eventually has to give way to “how?”

How much does it cost? Does it work? What materials do we need? What happens when it fails? Who will use it? Can we manufacture it? Can we permit it? Does anyone actually want it, or have we simply become emotionally attached to a very expensive bad idea?

This is where closed thinking performs quality control.

Open thinking says, Suppose we could.

Closed thinking says, Show me.

Both are necessary.

One without the other produces very different kinds of failure. A person who remains permanently closed can become extremely competent at repeating established solutions. Give that person a well-defined problem and they may solve it beautifully, but they can have difficulty noticing that the problem itself has changed.

A person who remains permanently open has the opposite difficulty. Everything is fascinating. Everything connects to everything else. Every project produces six additional projects. Three notebooks become twelve notebooks. A blog post about creativity somehow becomes a theory of civilization, a proposed documentary, two patent applications, and a strong opinion about cephalopods.

What do you call a creative person with no deadlines?

Missing.

We therefore need both states, and we need to recognize which one we are in.

When I have a random idea for a blog post, I should stay open for a while. I should turn it around, contemplate it, follow whatever odd associations it produces, make jokes, contradict myself, and see whether the thought has enough substance to become something.

Then I should close.

Sit down.

Write the thing.

Open again when I reach a problem. Close when I find the solution. Open when something unexpected appears. Close when I have enough. Open while generating alternatives. Close while choosing among them.

Creativity is not endless freedom. It is a rhythm between possibility and constraint.

Knock knock.

Who’s there?

Another idea.

Another idea who?

No.

I’m finishing this one.