MALE SPEAKER: Good afternoon, everyone.
And we're excited to have you all here for another
Outstanding Authors at Google Event.
And today we're going to dispatch with the formalities
and get straight to the point.
Robert Green is here to talk about his new book, "Mastery,"
so this is what happens after you get the 10,000 hours, you
get the 20,000 until once you're a
true expert at something.
What does that mean, and how you get there?
So Robert will lead us along that path, and we'll also have
time for some Q&A at the end.
So please join me in welcoming Robert to Google.
Thanks.
[APPLAUSE]
ROBERT GREENE: Thank you.
I've been a huge admirer of your company for many years.
I've blogged about it, I've compared Google to the French
Revolution at Napoleon Bonaparte, and your
competitors to the Prussians.
So you can imagine that I'm deeply honored and very happy
to be here.
My talk is about creativity.
I have a lot of, I hope, practical
information to convey.
And I know how valuable your time is, so please excuse me
if I dispense with any cute anecdotes to begin, and I just
dive right into the information part.
Now, I'm sure that all of us, or maybe most of us, have
encountered more or less the following scenario.
We have a problem to solve, a project to create or direct.
Along the way to completing this project, at certain
junctures, we have to make some decisions.
We have to choose between A, B, or C. Whether go in this
direction, over here, or over here.
We do the best we can based on our knowledge and experience.
But often after the work is done, we have the sensation
that there's something missing.
That, perhaps, we could have done it better.
What if the answer or the best decisions
involved D, E, and F?
Something that we never even considered.
What blocks or limits us from
considering these wider options?
We're all aware of great historical figures who've
indeed demonstrated the ability to consider D, E, F,
and beyond.
This is the source of their incredibly creative power to
make uncanny discoveries or to invent the kind of things that
change how we think and act.
We see examples of such people around us in the world today.
What makes some people more, seemingly more, creative and
imaginative than others?
Is it genetics, a matter of luck, is it being born into a
great family, going to the right school, et cetera?
Well, in my book, "Mastery," I attempt to definitively answer
this question.
I maintain that true creativity comes through a
process that I describe in great detail in my book.
To summarize it as briefly as possible, this process begins
with the critical first step of choosing which field or
subject to pursue.
Creative people are those who opt for career paths that mess
with their deepest interests and inclinations.
They feel a deep personal need to discover something about
the world, to solve a problem that perplexes them, to invent
something that's simply not there.
Feeling personally engaged and motivated in their work, they
focus more, they learn faster, they're more patient and
persistent than other people.
Having begun on the right career path, the first step.
The next step is to go through an effective apprenticeship,
absorbing all of the rules and standard procedures in your
field and accumulating the maximum amount of skills.
Now, I believe we all go through an apprenticeship
phase of one sort or another.
And, at a certain point in this phase, we reach a kind of
turning point or crossroads.
Either our minds will become active and experimental with
the knowledge that we have accumulated, in which case we
will slowly awaken creative energy.
Or we will become prisoners of that knowledge.
We remain conservative and conventional, our minds just
simply rotating between A, B, or C.
Well, masters are those who take the first path.
And after years of generating creative energy, they reach a
point where they have a complete
feel for their subject.
They have internalized it, they have mastered it.
They can see all the way to the end of the alphabet.
So, in my talk today I want to focus exclusively on
creativity.
And moving past that ABC syndrome that
stymies so many of us.
I'm going to be assuming that many or most of you have
chosen career paths that mesh with your deepest interests,
that you've gone through or nearly finished the
apprenticeship phase, having absorbed the necessary
knowledge and accumulated an array of skills.
You're perhaps poised at that turning point in which your
minds could take the path towards greater creative
energy or you could settle for the conventional route, never
being aware of how that settling is occurring.
My goal in my talk today is twofold.
I want to convince you that the human brain is a naturally
creative instrument.
It is designed for making connections between ideas, for
envisioning DEF and beyond.
It wants to go in that direction.
Creativity is not a function of some freakish genetic
wiring that occurs in the brains of a few people.
It is instead the function of awakening and exploiting the
natural creative energy we all possess.
Second, I want to show you what prevents many of us from
taking this path towards greater creative energy, how
we blocked and inhibit ourselves.
In doing so, I'm going to be revealing to you certain
strategies that highly creative people, past and
present, have used to move past these blocks and awaken
that natural energy.
My hope is that I will plant a seed in your brain, that the
ability to go past ABC is already there, and with a few
gentle indications of the right direction you'll find
your way there on your own, if you haven't already
found your way there.
But before I discuss these ideas, I want to involve you
in a very short and simple exercise.
It's going to seem kind of moronic, but the purpose of it
will become clear soon enough.
I'm going to be asking all of you to close your eyes, and
for the space of a minute to try to
completely empty your minds.
Have no conscious thoughts, no mental
images, go totally blank.
See if you can do this, and what happens if you can't.
I'm going to time it.
A little gong will go off to indicate that the minute is
up, and then we'll discuss.
OK?
So, prepare yourselves for a moment.
It's going to be completely silent.
OK.
Close your eyes.
And begin.
[GONG SOUNDING]
Very good.
OK.
How many of you were able to experience total emptiness,
not a single mental image during that entire minute?
Come on, how many?
You were?
Are you a Zen master or something?
That's very good.
For the majority of you who couldn't, did any of you
experience something like the following scenario, where an
image will suddenly pop up in your mind of a person that you
know, and that will lead to an event that is associated with
that person, and that event will then lead to the
[INAUDIBLE] image of another person associated with that
event, on and on and on.
Any kind of links like that going on in
your brains, anybody?
Uh huh.
You don't have to share it with us, I want you to
embarrass yourself or anything, but where did these
images come from?
Were you somehow consciously controlling them in any way?
AUDIENCE: It was stuff on my to do list.
ROBERT GREENE: There was stuff from your to do list.
Right.
But were you consciously calling them up or did they
just come to you?
AUDIENCE: They just filled the void.
ROBERT GREENE: Are these things that come up in your
mind totally random, or is there some sort of apparent
logic to it?
Are they just totally random images from anywhere?
AUDIENCE: I think the logic is [INAUDIBLE].
ROBERT GREENE: Right.
But it's not the logic that you have in your conscious
daily life, right?
OK.
I happen to practice a form of Zen meditation.
I do it 30 minutes every morning religiously.
I've been doing it for close to three years now.
And even after that much practice, I've noticed that
it's nearly impossible for me to still the conscious mind
for more than a few minutes.
Images keep bubbling up to the surface which lead to all
different kinds of chains of connections.
The deeper I go into my meditation and the more I'm
able to somewhat still the conscious mind, the more
bizarre and seemingly random these associations are.
Well, the reason I had you do this simple exercise is to
illustrate what I consider the basic principle about the
human brain.
Its natural state is one of constant motion and
association.
It's like a smooth ball bearing at the top of an
endless incline, unless it is obstructed, unless it is made
still, it will just keep rolling and rolling and
rolling until the day we die.
It moves in constantly shifting chains of
connections, between ideas, sensations, and memories,
equally what we call the stream of consciousness.
The human brain is a dual processing system in which any
piece of information or perception is instantly
compared to another one in our short or long term memory.
To generate a sense of pattern and continuity, or to take
notice of things that don't fit into these patterns.
The brain functions through comparison and association.
If we are tired or about to fall asleep, or even if we
dream, we can suddenly become aware of the most bizarre
associations that are going on, as if the brain were doing
this on auto pilot below the level of consciousness.
In our daily conversations we might make some joke or witty
remark that is connected to something that
somebody just said.
This connection, the source of our joke or witticism would be
impossible for us to trace back because it occurs so
naturally and so rapidly.
Our conversations themselves reflect this basic pattern.
Endlessly shifting angles and chains of connection building
on what other people say.
Well this is the brain in its pure form.
Never stopping, always connecting.
And by the way, that's sort of why I think the internet is so
addictive and engaging.
It reflects this basic pattern of the
brain on a global scale.
It's like a global brain.
But this is so incredibly natural to us.
We only have to look at children.
Almost Instantly, acquiring a basic vocabulary, at the age
of three, they'll begin to make the most interesting
associations between words and ideas.
Their drawings can also bring together the most unexpected
and imaginative connections.
In my book I call this mind that children possess,
"original mind." It is marked by incredible
fluidity and openness.
But children do not create great works of art, and they
do not invent significant pieces of technology, and they
don't make discoveries about the world.
And neither do we when we daydream, or dream, or make a
joke, or change the subject of a conversation.
These are all examples of what I call "low-level creativity."
Exhibiting the natural associating power
of the human brain.
But let us add to this natural associating power of the human
brain, something else.
Years of study, practice, and experiment within a field.
With all of this experience, a great deal of knowledge is
stored in our long-term memory.
The brain has a much larger range of information that it
has access to.
Much larger than anything a child could play with.
With all of this accumulated knowledge and experience, the
mind can roam about in this vastly expanded cognitive
space making all kinds of novel, insightful associations
between ideas over here, and ideas over there.
What we call creativity is nothing more than the ability
that some people cultivate to search wider, to imagine more
possibilities, to imagine more connections, to associate what
has never been associated before.
Namely, to go beyond the A, B, and C.
As an example of what I'm talking about, I want to look
at a particular discovery by one of the most creative
scientists who's ever lived, the 19th century scientist
Louis Pasteur.
Pasteur was trained as a chemist and mineralogist, but
later in his career he became fascinated with the subject of
germs and bacteria.
He studied them for years, elaborating a radical new
theory on how germs are created and the role that they
play in disease.
After decades of study and experiment on this field in
his late 50s, he decided to investigate the deadly disease
of cholera.
He wanted to figure out how these germs operate, and what
makes them so fatal.
As part of his research, he injected chickens with cholera
and he observed how the disease progressed.
He needed to abandon work on these experiments over one
summer, but when he came back to his lab he resumed them.
And he once again injected some cholera into a group of
chickens, which we shall call group A chickens.
These chickens fell ill, but to Pasteur's surprise, all of
them survived.
He surmised that the batch of cholera that he had injected
into them had become weakened over the summer months.
And so he ordered a new, fresh batch of cholera and he
proceeded to inject it once again into the group A
chickens, and to a new collection of chickens which
we shall call group B chickens.
All of the group B chickens died, and all of the group A
chickens survived.
Now this phenomenon, which occur totally by coincidence,
it wasn't the purpose of his experiment, this phenomenon
had been noticed before.
Over 100 years prior to Pasteur's experiment, it had
been the practice to inject people with cow pox in order
to prevent an outbreak of smallpox.
But nobody understood how or why this worked, and it was
simply limited to this one disease.
When Pasteur's group A chickens survived, news of
this incident came to all of his eminent colleagues.
And they basically all reacted in the same way.
Some of them said that the difference between group A and
group B chickens was merely a coincidence, and that a larger
sampling would reveal this.
Still others ascribed the differences to what the
chickens had been exposed to in their environment.
A third group said they didn't know how to explain it, maybe
there'd be an explanation someday, but this simply
wasn't a significant enough phenomenon to warrant any
special attention or some new theory.
Well, Pasteur was different.
He'd studied germs so intensely and much longer than
any of these other scientists.
He understood their complexity and how their behavior of
these germs did not fit into the simple
theories of his time.
He felt certain that the difference between group A and
group B chickens represented something truly significant.
As he pondered what had happened in his laboratory, he
entertained the wild, seemingly irrational
possibility that one set of weakened germs still in the
bodies of group A chickens could potentially fight off
another form of the same germs.
In other words, germs, illness,
fighting against illness.
Pasteur, in other words, had connected two pieces of
knowledge, of information, that had never
been connected before.
We might take this concept totally for granted, but
decades before the discovery of antibodies, this
represented, this idea of germs killing germs, illness
fighting illness, represented an incredible lead of
imagination.
A leap that was made possible by simply the fact that
Pasteur was willing and able to entertain more possible
theories and interpretations than any of his fellow
colleagues.
Naturally, after entertaining this hypothesis, he
worked to verify it.
And he then thereby created the science of immunology.
Well, this is an example of what I call "high-level
creativity." it is a function of two critical elements.
First, a great deal of knowledge that is stored and
organized in our long term memory.
And second, the willingness and ability to roam freely
through all of that knowledge.
This second quality is what we might call fluidity of mind.
We notice this fluidity if we've had a few drinks, or we
take some drugs, or we saw smoke some pot, or we're
feeling extremely tired.
Suddenly, it seems as if doors are opened up, and our minds
can move about more freely, and they can come upon ideas,
interesting ideas, that eluded us before.
Well, highly creative people do not need this extra bit of
stimulation.
They have managed to retain or rediscover that fluid original
mind of the child, and wedded it to all of this knowledge
and experience, giving them what I call the "dimensional
mind." A mind capable of seeing more dimensions of the
visible and invisible world around us.
High-level creativity requires these two elements.
If you have an open and fluid mind, but not enough knowledge
and experience, you will basically remain on the level
of a child.
If you have a lot of knowledge and experience, but your mind
is tight and unwilling to roam, you will come up with
the same conventional responses, the same A, B, and
C, like Pasteur's colleagues.
Well, highly creative people have both.
They have the knowledge and the experience, plus the
mental fluidity which gives them the ability to see more
possibilities in the world around them and to maximize,
to realize to its fullest, the natural connecting power of
the human brain.
The great psychologist Carl Jung, he called this "serious
play." The combination of the playful exploratory spirit of
the child, with the serious tasks and
experience of the adult.
Now let me engage in a little metaphor, or a symbol to sort
of explain more fully the idea I'm elaborating here.
Imagine a relatively small circle.
This circle represents what we know of our field when we
begin our apprenticeship.
As we proceed and accumulate knowledge and experience, this
circle keep slowly expanding, increasing the cognitive space
within which we can explore and make
connections between ideas.
But as this base expands, we confront a
paradox and a challenge.
Part of our apprenticeship involves learning the rules,
the standard operating procedures, and the paradigms
that prevail in our field.
It also involves learning how to work with other people, how
to fit into the group ethos.
When we begin work on a project we feel the pressure,
conscious or unconscious, to adhere to these rules and
paradigms, to follow the procedures that
other people follow.
To break these rules and conventions would
entail a lot of risk.
Probably a lot of criticism, and certainly a lot more work.
All of this tends to limit what we consider and imagine.
Instead of exploring that expanding cognitive space, we
unconsciously hold ourselves to those A, B's, and C's that
we have assimilated.
We've become consummate insiders, strict adherers to
the rules and paradigms in our field.
Ideas in different parts of our cognitive
space are never connected.
If we're not careful, this establishes a
momentum of its own.
Once we turn conservative and defensive with our knowledge,
it becomes increasingly more difficult to move in the
opposite direction.
Furthermore, the mind, like any muscle, tends to
tighten with age.
This is why, in the history of science and great
technological innovation, so many of the most significant
discoveries of our people who are relatively young, or who
are outsiders to the field, or who are both.
This is the paradox.
In order to have high-level creativity, we have to
assimilate a great deal of knowledge.
And that knowledge includes rules and paradigms and
conventions which make us conservative.
Highly creative people learn the value of moving against
this conservative tendency by making their minds experiment
and explore with their increasing knowledge.
Emerging from their apprenticeships they may begin
this on a relatively small scale, but they slowly
rediscover the original fluid spirit of the child.
They adopt certain strategies to force the mind out of its
conventional and conservative and defensive positions.
They learn how to loosen and return the mind to its
original fluidity.
Instead of narrowing what they consider as they get older,
they find a way to continually expand their horizons.
I want to focus now on these creative strategies that I've
just mentioned.
They form a large part of chapter five in "Mastery." I
want to focus on these strategies in the form of four
simple exercises that I believe if you adopt somehow
in your practice they will slowly loosen up the mind and
push it in this direction that I'm talking about of greater
creative energy.
These exercises are the following.
Cultivate negative capability.
Think like an outsider.
Use active imagination.
And finally, subvert your patterns of thinking.
This first exercise, cultivate negative capability, is the
most philosophical.
And it basically involves an attitude, a way of looking at
the world, that will naturally loosen up the mind.
The term negative capability comes from the great early
19th century poet and writer John Keats.
Keats was struggling to understand what makes one
person like a William Shakespeare so much more
creative and imaginative than another.
In his opinion, fear and anxiety play
a determining role.
When we are physically frightened by something in our
environment we have a particular
physiological response.
Our minds naturally narrow their focus onto what is
immediately present, preparing us for a
fight or flight response.
Well, something similar happens, although more subtly,
in the intellectual realm.
Where we are confronted with new problems or set of
circumstances, or when we begin work on a project, we
are unconsciously plagued by insecurities and anxieties,
and we don't like this.
Mysteries, any apparent contradiction, situations that
are unfamiliar and ambiguous and elude immediate
understanding, all of this makes us uneasy.
Under these circumstances, we are in a rush to come to a
conclusion, to make a judgment, to
explain what is happening.
Being able to make a judgment or explain what is happening
soothes our insecurities and anxieties, makes us feel
confident and consistent.
We can express an opinion before other people.
In this way, our egos become enmeshed in our creative work,
in our interpretations of the world.
Think of how difficult it is for us to admit that we don't
know an answer, or that we were wrong on
a particular issue.
Admitting that we don't know or that we were wrong, should
be a sign of intelligence, of a questioning nature, of a
willingness to reassess our own ideas.
Instead of that, we will hold onto our ideas with double the
tenacity if ever we are made to feel doubtful or insecure
about them.
Well mysteries, uncertainties, anything ambiguous, it all has
a similar effect upon us as a physically frightening set of
circumstances.
The mind tightens and narrows its focus, a fearful reaction.
According to Keats, the Shakespeare's of the world,
the highly creative types, cultivate what he calls
"negative capability." They can negate the
ego and it's anxieties.
They are not in a rush to come to a conclusion about the
world or any new phenomenon.
They are completely open to entertaining this idea or that
idea at the same time, while continuing to observe what's
going on around them.
They can look at ambiguous or contradictory evidence and not
be disturbed or feel the need to explain them away.
This ability to withstand what seems mysterious, to manage
the lack of knowing something with certainty, is the primary
quality of all creative people no matter their profession.
Because they feel less anxious and in need to rush to a
conclusion, they consider more possibilities when confronted
with a problem which allows for greater possibilities, a
greater range of connections and creative associations.
Let me give you two examples of negative capability in
action, one in the arts and the other in the sciences.
The first example involves Wolfgang
Amadeus Mozart, the composer.
At a somewhat advanced part in his career after he was
famous, Mozart suddenly discovered the music of Johann
Sebastian Bach.
And in looking at Bach's elaborate counterpoint, he
realized that this represented a diametrically different, and
even superior form of music to his own.
At least in its complexity.
Now, the reaction that most composers have would be to
emotionally close them self off from any uncertainty or
doubts about their own music, and to assert their own ideas
and to make themselves imagine that the music of Bach
represented something old fashioned or irrelevant.
But Mozart possessed negative capability.
He could look at two diametrically opposing forms
of music at the same time and not feel anxious.
He could explore them and try to synthesize the differences
between them.
He decided to spend a year intensely studying Bach's
counterpoint and finding a way to incorporate it, which he
later did with his operas, creating a whole new style
that revolutionized music in the West.
In physics, at a very early age, at the age of 16, Albert
Einstein was struck by the paradox in the following
thought experiment.
A man standing on earth looking at a light beam and
the sky, and another man theoretically moving at the
speed of light alongside that light beam in the sky, that
both people would see that light in exactly the same way
in exactly the same form.
That is what Maxwell's law on the absolute speed of light
necessitated, but how could it be so?
Certainly somebody moving at the speed of light would see
that light before it could travel far enough
to appear as light.
In other words, he would see it as
electromagnetic particles.
Well, for 10 long laborious years, Einstein thought only
of this paradox and thought experiment.
Without straining for quick answers or simple conclusions,
in a complete state of negative capability,
considering every possibility, until it finally bore fruit
with his theory of the relativity in time and space.
The special theory of relativity.
What possessing negative capability will do for you is
help you push past the impatience and the anxiety
that make you come to conclusions too early on in
the process.
Here's how you could potentially adopt negative
capability in your life.
First, you practice it on a micro daily level.
In your personal relationships, you counter the
tendency that we all have to label and categorized the
people that we encounter, the people around us.
Your goal is to judge these people much less and to
observe them more.
People are infinitely complex and they never fit into the
little categories that we have of their behavior.
Your goal is to move inside their prospective, try to see
the world from their point of view, to get a more nuanced
and individualized sense of who they are.
This will instantly make you less anxious, less judgmental,
and more perceptive.
Now, you apply this to your work.
Before you begin on a project, I know it's difficult, but you
throw out as many assumptions as possible.
It may be difficult, but you open yourself up to other
possible theories, interpretations.
The kinds of interpretations and theories that you never
usually entertain.
You speculate and think about the information in front of
you, but you control that constant desire to rush to
some sort of conclusion.
Third, and finally, you learn to embrace
uncertainty and chaos.
Life is inherently chaotic and it doesn't fit
into our tidy formulas.
Not only does this not make you anxious, but you find
chaos and uncertainty deeply exciting and stimulating.
Slowly adopting this as an overall philosophy will
naturally loosen the mind up and give it
greater creative flow.
You will naturally consider more options and
possibilities.
The second exercise, think like an outsider, is related
to a notable phenomenon in the history of creativity.
Some of the most important discoveries, inventions, and
innovations within a field come from people who are
trained in a much different field, and who have an
outsider's approach.
Louis Pasteur was a classic example of this.
He was trained as a chemist and mineralogist, so he
brought a much different way of thinking to the subject of
medicine and germs, a method that was
infinitely more creative.
Albert Einstein was a complete outsider.
His two most important discoveries came when he was
working at the Swiss patent office.
Google itself exemplifies this idea.
It is, perhaps, the most successful business on the
planet founded by two men who are relatively complete
outsiders to business and who, therefore, structured and
directed their company in a very novel
and creative fashion.
I could go on and on and on with this list, including many
great artists.
There are two important reasons why outsiders
generally have a creative advantage.
First, they are less steeped in and burdened by the
conventions of the field that they are attacking.
They ask a different set of questions.
They approach problems from unconventional angles.
And second, they are often trained in totally unrelated
fields, and so can make interesting and creative
connections between two very different forms of thinking,
like science and business, or chemistry and medicine, or
engineering and design.
Now, we can't all consciously follow such a path.
But even within the careers that we're pursuing, we can
train ourselves to think like outsiders and help loosen up
the mind in the process.
A great example of this would be somebody that I interviewed
and profiled in my book.
A contemporary master, her name is Yoky Matsuoka.
Yoky was one of the original heads of innovation for the
Google X project.
She is now the senior vice-president in charge of
technology at Nest Labs here in Silicon Valley.
She was trained as a electrical engineer and
roboticist.
And early in her career she was asked to help design the
hand of a full scale robot that was being developed at
the MIT robotics lab where she was getting her Ph.D.
Now, in the past, all of our fellow engineers basically
attacked this idea of designing such a
hand in the same way.
They would place in this hand all sorts of very cleverly
built motors that would give the hand
maximum grasping power.
They would load most of these motors in the palm, because
that's where there was the most space.
But in packing the palm with all of these motors, they
would render it completely inflexible and so this hand
could not make even the most simple grasping maneuvers.
These hardware engineers would then fob off their design to
software engineers hoping that they could program back in the
flexibility that they had lost.
Hardware engineers are trained to think in a certain way.
They're trying to focus on the mechanical and technical
aspects of a problem and stay within that circle.
To speculate, to think of something wider or larger,
would be too unconventional and would require too much
work and effort.
Well, Yoky decided on a much different approach.
Thinking like an outsider, she asked the kinds of questions
that other engineers ignored.
She wondered about what made the hand so dexterous and
powerful in the first place.
How did it evolved into being so powerful.
What is the role played by the palm in grasping objects and
how does it work in tandem with the thumb.
Asking these larger questions made her extend her research
to biology, neuroscience, evolution,
biomechanics, and so on.
She decided to build an elaborate model of the hand
itself including all of the tiny bones in the knuckles.
In the process, she learned the importance of having a
rounded, flexible palm, and the role that certain bones
play in grasping objects.
Now, all of your fellow engineers scoffed at her
method, and the apparent waste of time that it represented.
In the end, however, her outsider approach led to many
more creative decisions.
For instance, she decided to keep the palm rounded and
flexible and place motors in different parts, substituting
flexibility for power.
In this way, her hand later on became the industry standard
for prosthetics, one that was infinitely more lifelike an
effective for users of this hand.
Following this outsider approach, Yoky was able to
avoid the ABC syndrome and that technical lock that
stymied all of her other engineers.
To think like an outsider requires basically two things.
It basically means to take advantage of any training that
you have had in any unrelated field which almost
all of us have had.
It also means to take advantage of the incredible
explosion of information that we are now all have access to
and to expand your searches on any project to seemingly
unrelated fields.
By applying what you know from a different field and by using
this expanded research, you will naturally absorbed and
use different patterns of thinking.
This will make you ask a different set of questions
before you begin your project.
And asking a different set of questions is almost half of
what it takes to be creative.
The third exercise, use active imagination,
is deceptively simple.
Often, what separates creative from conventional thinkers is
that they simply search wider.
They use their minds to generate possibilities that
others don't think of, then they work to verify what they
came up with.
We saw a classic example of this with Pasteur.
Another great example is with Henry Ford.
Early on in his career, in the earliest years of what would
later become the Ford Motor Company, Ford was anxious to
speed up production of cars.
He saw the automobile as the ultimate consumer product.
But in order for it to become that, he had to greatly
increase production rate in his factory.
So he spent a couple days looking at his employees on
the factory floor and trying to imagine how he could get
them to move faster from car to car.
Suddenly, one day, he imagine
something completely different.
He imagined the men standing still and the
car's coming to them.
He didn't know what that really meant, but he decided
to try it out, and lo and behold, it increased
productivity by such an incredible exponential rate
that it could now become the consumer product that he
envisioned.
Things like antibodies or assembly lines, they seem so
obvious to us now, but they're never obvious in the present
and they involve an incredible leap of what I call "active
imagination." The difference between regular and active
imagination is that the latter is used consciously to reach
very, very practical results.
It's not imagination for coming up with wild things,
it's imagination used for very practical results.
Think of the active imagination as a kind of
creative muscle that you're developing.
First, within the loose constraints of what you're
working on, you open your mind up, you give a
complete free rein.
You entertain almost every possibility that you could
imagine or visualize.
You engage in what Charles Darwin calls "fools
experiments." this is the fun, play part of serious play.
You use notebooks, sketches, diagrams, models, prototypes
to help externalize the products of your imagination.
Once you have gone through this you now enter the second,
serious part of the process.
First, you choose one or few of the more promising
possibilities that were generated by your imagination.
And now you actively work to test, verify, or confirm it.
This might entail launching a beta version on the public.
Once you have feedback, now go back into the first part of
the process in a shortened form, using your imagination
to perhaps take what you have into an even better and higher
form, circling constantly through this process in
shorter and shorter cycles until you've got something
that's both incredibly imaginative and incredibly
realistic and practical.
By developing this, by going through this over and over and
over again, you will develop your imagination into an
incredibly powerful creative muscle.
OK.
I'm nearing the end.
The fourth and final exercise may be the most
important in some ways.
It's called "subverting your patterns of thinking." And
it's based on the idea that our minds tend to fall into
certain habits, and patterns, and grooves that severely
limit what we consider as possible.
Well, creative people have the ability to move against these
patterns, to actively subvert them and thereby expand what
they consider.
One pattern that we often fall into, and we're very rarely
aware of it, is our tendency to always
focus on the end result.
The finished product.
How to make that product as perfect
and powerful as possible.
We live in a goal oriented culture.
To see a contrast, we would have to look at Asian cultures
in which thinking about process, and structure, and
how the parts relate to the whole, are given much more
emphasis and importance.
In a goal oriented culture, when there is a set back or a
glitch, we naturally focus on the end result.
So if, for instance, I'm writing a book and the book
isn't coming out as I had imagined, I will think about
the ideas and my style of writing and how I can improve
these ideas and the communication of them to give
the book more wallop, more effect.
But often the source of the problem is the structure of
the damn book, the organization of the chapters,
how one idea is linked to another.
So many books start off well but completely fall apart
because of faulty, faulty structure.
We can say the same thing about businesses.
The problem is in how the products are produced, how the
personnel in the company is structured and organized, the
decision making, the chain of command, et cetera.
Napoleon Bonaparte affected the greatest revolution in
military history by thinking deeply about the structure of
his army and how to organize it so it could be faster and
more fluid in the attack.
Thinking about structure, process, organization, they're
not natural to us.
But in making ourselves do it we will naturally expand what
we consider giving ourselves more possible creative
associations and connections.
Another habit we fall into is our tendency to be mesmerized
by patterns themselves, by trends, by paradigms, and by
how all the information that we're looking at somehow fits
into these patterns and paradigms.
Well, highly creative people have the ability to look at
what doesn't fit into patterns, the anomalies that
cannot be assimilated.
An example of this is very close to home.
In the 1990s the prevailing paradigm in internet searches
was established by companies such as Alta Vista, which
ranked searches according to how many times a subject was
referred to in an article.
Now this worked reasonably well, but sometimes it would
yield the most bizarre and incredibly unhelpful results.
Almost everyone at that time thought that this was a
temporary glitch that would eventually be ironed out.
Well, while at Stanford, not so very long ago, Sergey Brin
and Larry Page looked at these anomalies themselves.
And in pondering these anomalies they came up with a
much different form of search, one that ranked according to
links like citations in a scientific journal.
Thinking outside the prevailing paradigm, they came
up with a much more powerful and creative form of search.
Anomalies are incredibly eloquent.
They indicate new paths, trends, ways of thinking,
problems that should not be ignored.
Paying attention to anomalies will naturally
expand what we consider.
Related to this pattern bias, is our fixation on what is
immediately present to the eyes and minds.
We focus on what has happened in a set of circumstances as
opposed to what didn't happen.
Well, highly creative people can think in an added
dimension, that of the invisible and the absent.
An example of this way of thinking, although in
literature, is with Sherlock Holmes.
He was constantly thinking like this.
In the story Silver Blaze, for instance, he figures out that
the murder must have been somebody that was very
familiar to the victim because the family dog did not bark in
the presence of the murderer.
Now, this way of thinking in the real world led to one of
the more radical and interesting
innovations in medicine.
Prior to the 20th century, doctors would only focus on
germs and bacteria and dangerous agents in the
environment and how to protect the body from them.
Well, looking at the disease of scurvy at the turn of the
20th century, the scientist Gowland Hopkins suddenly
turned this around.
Instead of thinking of the germs that might be
responsible for scurvy, he looked at what was absent from
the picture.
What the body was not producing, namely, vitamin C.
Thinking in this way led to a total revolution in our
concept of health.
It lead to vitamins and preventive medicine.
Thinking about what is absent, what didn't happen, is a
highly creative form of thinking.
Well, I've loaded you up, like pack mules, with far too much
information.
I'm sorry about that.
The good news is that almost all of this information and
even more, if you're a masochist, is available in
chapter five of my book, "Mastery." I'm going to leave
you with one final idea that I believe encapsulates and
conceptualize all of this tonnage of
material I've given you.
And the idea is the following.
Think of creativity as the ultimate synthesis of the
child and the adult within you.
We carry both of these within us.
The child being the remnant of our earliest years, when we
were more imaginative and exploratory and fluid.
Now, normally, we keep the adult and the child within us
rigidly separated.
We let the child out in our free time, when we socialize,
or go to parties, or watch a movie, or play games or
sports, or go on vacation.
This is also when our minds are freer, more fluid, maybe a
little bit less productive, but they're
freer and more fluid.
The adult dominates our work world and our careers.
This is also when our minds become a lot tighter, as we
try to fit into the narrow role of business person,
engineer, writer of self help books, et cetera.
By keeping the adult and the child rigidly separated, we
completely dry up any creative potential
that we want to have.
The goal is to find a way to distill and incorporate that
playful, exploratory, fluid spirit of the child into our
disciplined, experienced, work.
It is not that we alternate sometimes between the child
here or the adult there, but that we fuse the two together
into one inseparable whole, that whole being the creative
individual.
That's it.
Thank you very much.
Thank you for your patience.
And I'll entertain any questions that you might have.
[APPLAUSE]
AUDIENCE: I have a question with regards to emotional
intelligence and how that's related to creativity.
I would think that the negative capability is related
to the capability of the person to avoid the emotional
part that tends to focus you on solving the immediate
problem, coming from your emotional attachment
[INAUDIBLE].
ROBERT GREENE: Well, I was limited to however long I have
for this talk, but I do have a whole thing in there about
emotional intelligence and the role that it plays in
creativity, a whole section in chapter five in the book.
So for instance I talk about the emotions that tend to get
clogged and kind of tighten us up so that we
can't become creative.
One of them being, for instance, curiosity.
We lose our sense of wonder and curiosity as we get older.
We tend to have the feeling that we know everything.
And this is extremely dangerous.
And it severely limits what we consider.
And negative capability is basically very much related to
that childlike feeling of wonder.
Children don't sit there going around at the age of 6 feeling
like, I know what that cloud up there means.
They don't.
And they open themselves up to all kinds of possibilities.
So I go through a range of other emotions that tend to
attack us as we get older and that severely tighten and
limit the mind.
And believe me, I cover emotional intelligence.
Yes, sorry.
AUDIENCE: This question may be more relevant to your
[INAUDIBLE].
So one thing I've noticed is that a lot of these historical
examples [INAUDIBLE]
modern innovators [INAUDIBLE]
a group of people working together that are all very
creative and they all have a bunch of different ideas of
things we should varying, but there's not [INAUDIBLE].
So what's your advice on convincing a group that
[INAUDIBLE]?
ROBERT GREENE: Who are you trying to convince, people
within or without?
AUDIENCE: Usually other people within the same organization.
ROBERT GREENE: So you're not asking about-- he's asking
about working in a group, like most people do, and coming up
with creative answers and trying to convince others that
your group has somehow come up--
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] --what do you do when you have too
many creative ideas and there's not enough bandwidth
to even experiment with all of them?
ROBERT GREENE: Well, normally, I talk in the war book, "33
Strategies of War," of the dangers of group think.
So hopefully in your brainstorming sessions you're
not getting the dangerous thing known as group think.
And what group think means is that people tend to funnel
their ideas into what they think the heads of the company
want to hear for political reasons.
Creativity is unconventional, it's iconoclastic, it doesn't
recognize rules or limits, so hopefully you're not doing
what I just mentioned.
If that's the case, you need an adult, you need somebody in
there who's doing for the funneling process.
It's like when I talked about active imagination and it's as
if you never went into the second part of the process and
you were only doing the first part, which is imagining every
possibility and never getting to the point of testing and
verifying it.
The point of that testing and verifying thing, I call it in
the book it's like a cycle--
I can't even remember-- a current, that's slowly
winnowing down your idea into something practical.
You need an adult or a person within the group--
I'm not meaning the adult literally--
but you need somebody in there who's sort of directing this,
and who can sort of make the decisions between, this is not
a reasonable idea, we need to winnow this down and take
three or four or five of the most realistic
of all of your ideas.
If it's just every one for themselves I don't know how
you can necessarily get around it.
It's a structural problem.
[APPLAUSE]