Translator: Ekaterina Shipatova Reviewer: A S
Everyone loves new ideas.
What if I told you that to increase your creative thinking,
you didn't have to drop thousands of dollars
at Creativity Bootcamp,
you didn't have to grow ironic facial hair,
(Laughter)
and you didn't have to luckily enough find a unicorn in your genetic history
on ancestry.com.
So, creativity is actually not an expensive secret only for an elite few,
nor is it a fortunate trait
that just a lucky handful of people happen to be born with.
Actually, creativity is a choice,
and any one of us can make a choice to be creative at any time.
There's a number of strategies we can choose from to increase it.
Today, I'm just going to tell you about one
that's really simple and really cheap:
take a walk.
So, you're like, "Wait a minute, that's not new, that's not a new idea,
Steve Jobs invented walking!
(Laughter)
He was famous for walking meetings.
You're not coming up with anything new!"
Well, you're right!
So, a lot of great thinkers throughout history
actually did enjoy walking while thinking -
in fact, Aristotle.
Aristotle was famous in rumor to be walking while he was teaching.
And his students were actually called "peripatetics,"
which means "to wander about."
So, the concept that walking
will make you increase your number of new ideas
is not a new idea.
However, we couldn't find any scientist
that scientifically proved this with experiments.
This is Dan Schwartz, who's now the Graduate School of Education Dean,
and I set out to empirically investigate this idea that everybody already knew.
The creative process - you know this.
From the first idea to the final product
is a long process.
It's super iterative, lots of refinement,
blood, sweat, tears, and years.
We're not thinking you're going to go out for a walk
and come back with the Sistine Chapel in your left hand, right?
So what frame of the creative process did we focus on?
Just this first part.
Just brainstorming, coming up with a new idea.
We actually ran four studies
with a variety of people who were either walking indoors or outdoors.
And all of these studies found the same conclusion.
I'm only going to tell you about one of them today.
So one of the tests we used for creativity was "Alternate Uses."
And this test, you have four minutes,
and your job is to come up with as many other ways
to use common everyday objects as you can think of.
So, for example, what else would you do with a key
other than to use it for opening up a lock?
Clearly, you could use it as a third eyeball for a giraffe, right?
Maybe. That's sort of interesting, kind of new.
But is it creative?
People came up with as many ideas as they could,
and we had to decide: Is this creative or not?
The definition of creativity that a lot of people go with
is appropriate novelty.
So, for something to be appropriate, it has to be realistic.
Unfortunately, you can't use a key as an eyeball.
But novel is the second thing, is that nobody had to have said it.
So, for us, novelty had to be appropriate first.
And then, for novelty,
nobody else in the entire population that we surveyed could have said it.
So, you might think, "You could use a key to scratch somebody's car!"
But if somebody else said that, you didn't get credit for it,
neither of you did.
However, only one person said this:
"If you were dying, and it were a murder mystery,
and you had to carve the name of the murderer into the ground
with your dying words."
So, one person said this.
And it's a creative idea because it's appropriate and it's novel.
So, you either did this test and came up with ideas while you were seated
or while you were walking on a treadmill.
They did the test twice with different objects.
Three groups.
The first group sat first and then sat again for the second test.
The second group sat first
and then did the second test while walking on a treadmill.
The third group - and this is interesting -
they walked on a treadmill first and then they sat.
The two groups that sat together for the first test,
they looked pretty similar to each other,
and they averaged about 20 creative ideas per person.
The group that was walking on the treadmill
did almost twice as well.
And they were just walking on a treadmill in a windowless room.
Remember they took the test twice.
The people who sat twice for that second test,
it didn't get any better, practice didn't help.
But these same people who were sitting and then went on a treadmill
got a boost from walking.
Here's the interesting thing.
The people who were walking on the treadmill
still had a residue effect of the walking,
and they were still creative afterwards.
So the implication of this
is that you should go for a walk before your next big meeting
and just start brainstorming right away.
We have five tips for you that will help make this the best effect possible.
First, you want to pick a problem or a topic to brainstorm.
This is not the shower effect -
not when you're in the shower
and suddenly a new idea pops out of the shampoo bottle.
This is something you're thinking about ahead of time,
and they're intentionally thinking
about brainstorming a different perspective on the walk.
Secondly - I get asked this a lot -
is this okay while running?
Well, the answer for me is that if I were running,
the only new idea I would have would be to stop running.
(Laughter)
But if running for you is a comfortable pace - good.
It turns out, whatever physical activity is not taking a lot of attention.
So just walking at a comfortable pace
is a good choice.
Also, you want to come up with as many ideas as you can.
So, one key of creativity is to not lock on that first idea.
Keep going, keep coming up with new ones until you pick one or two to pursue.
You might worry that you don't want to write them down
because what if you will forget them?
The idea here is to speak them.
Everybody was speaking their new ideas.
So you can put your headphones on and record through your phone
and then just pretend you're having a creative conversation.
Because the act of writing your idea down is already a filter.
"Is this good enough to write down?" And then you write it down.
So just speak as many as you can; record them and think about them later.
And finally, don't do this forever.
If you're on a walk and that idea is not coming to you,
come back to it later at another time.
I think we're coming up on a break right now.
So I have an idea!
Why don't you grab a leash and take your thoughts for a walk?
Thank you.
(Applause)