Translator: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
How open are you to new experiences?
Are you open enough that you'll let me take my shoes off?
Because I think better without my shoes on.
And if you want to take your shoes off, I'm okay with that too.
I'm somewhat of an anomaly:
I have three degrees in three totally different areas.
My undergraduate degree is a Bachelor of Music.
I was a percussion major, and I still drum on things.
I have a Masters in journalism, and that is my writing credentials.
And my PhD is in psychology.
But before music, I was an accounting major.
And when I called home to tell my dad
I was changing my major from accounting to music,
if I could have read the bubble over his head,
it probably would have said,
"I'm going to have to support her the rest of my life."
Right?
So, three degrees in three totally different areas.
So, what is the connection?
Creativity.
Music is creative, yes?
Journalism writing is creative,
and I was working in an advertising agency
as a copywriter -
that was creative.
And then I went back for my PhD in psychology
and studied creative personalities.
So, I can connect the dots.
That's what creative people do.
But it also got me thinking about "what is creativity?"
So, I asked my students a question, and let me ask you:
When I say the word "creative," what single word do you think of?
Got it?
I ask my students this question,
and these are some of the answers that they came up with.
[New, imaginative, inspired, artsy, original]
You may have come up with some of these too and some others.
But one essential quality of being creative
is that something has to be novel.
And you see this in these words:
"new," "original," "different."
What they miss, and what you might not have thought of either,
is that in addition to being novel,
to be creative something has to have value.
Wow.
For someone that worked in advertising, that's really interesting.
Because we got paid very well for our ideas,
but it's more than just money that you might pay to advertising.
What if it's 16 sunflowers in a vase
painted by a guy named Van Gogh?
Does that have value?
It sells for 40 million dollars.
But what about kid art that my kids bring home in elementary school?
Does that have value?
I have some of it framed, hanging on my walls at home.
So for me, yes, that has great value.
Okay, so I leave this advertising agency, and I come into the world of academe,
and I find out there's this thing called "the creative process."
Now, when I worked as a copywriter,
I figured out my creative process, but I never knew it was a thing.
And a few weeks ago,
we had a big-time art director come talk to our students in our portfolio class,
and he started talking to them about his creative process,
and it really mapped on,
and he didn't know it was a thing either.
So, I think it's important for us to know that there is a process and what that is.
So, let's walk through that.
The first step is preparation.
You've got to put something in your brain, right?
So you start doing research, and you start thinking about stuff,
and all this stuff goes in your brain, and it starts spinning around.
This is gathering the information that you need.
For me, I also often end up cleaning my desk.
I call that procrastination with a purpose, right?
Do you guys do that too?
It's like we have to do something.
So I do that, and then at some point,
as my brain is starting to try to solve this problem,
I get frustrated.
Now, notice the little "b" in there?
That means this is not officially part of the four-step process;
this is my addition to it.
But what's interesting - that art director I told you about,
when he talked about his process, he had frustration as part of that too.
So you become frustrated;
you're trying to solve the problem; it's not working;
you hit a wall, and you walk away from it.
We call that "incubation."
So you've walked away, but what do you do?
Is there something that you can do that helps your creative process?
For me, it's something about water,
which is one of the reasons I have water with me.
Like going into a shower and having the water pour over me,
hot water just pouring over me.
I don't want fans on - I want the steam in the room with me.
I just want nobody in there,
just me and my steam and my water,
pouring, pouring,pouring down on me until the water is completely cold.
There's something about that warm water that is a creative experience for me.
Whatever that is, whatever that experience might be for you,
you might find that -
some of my students who are runners,
they say that is a creative moment for them,
that running, the beat of their feet on the pavement,
that rhythm,
kind of puts them into a trance-like place that is very creative for them.
So whatever that is, you can find that.
But at some point, the light bulb is going to go off -
illumination.
You have an idea.
It's like that moment that is magical and wonderful.
But here's the thing about illumination, at least for me.
That idea is so fragile
that it's like here it is, there it is, there it goes.
And if I don't capture it at that moment when it crosses through my brain,
it's gone.
So I have to write it down,
and if I don't have a piece of paper and a pencil with me,
I'm saying it as I'm walking.
Whatever that idea is, I keep saying it as I walk
until I get to a place I can write it down.
And if somebody stops me and says something to me,
it's gone.
It just flutters away wherever ideas go.
So, make sure when you have an idea, you know how you're going to capture it.
Okay, so now we have an idea, but the question is, is it a good idea?
Is it a good idea?
We have to go through the verification process
to figure out whether that's the case.
Does it have value?
If it does, if it works, great.
If it doesn't, well, you know, sometimes it doesn't.
Then you back up in the process and maybe take another run at it.
Maybe you need more preparation,
put more stuff in your head to spin around.
But at some point,
you are going to say you have an idea.
Okay, so that's the four-step process, but I have added another step
because you can't just have an idea, you have to do something with it.
So I've added "elaboration" to my process, as an extra step.
And the interesting thing about this:
there's a funny little word hidden inside there, do you see it?
Labor, labor.
This is something you have to work at.
Executing an idea takes work to make it be the idea you want it to be.
Now, perhaps you go through a process like this yourself
and figure out how that works.
But here's the really important thing about the creative process
and why I wanted to talk about it -
is that it takes time.
It takes time.
You can't just say, "I'm going to have an idea."
You know you have to come up with some preparation.
You know you're going to get frustrated.
You know you're going to hit the wall and have to get away from it
and then come back when the light bulb goes off
and see if it's a good idea
and then actually do something with it.
Big problems, small problems, heavy-duty problems, right?
They all follow into that same area.
Okay.
So, I'm on this journey.
I've sort of figured out what creativity is:
it has to be novel; it has to have value.
I figured out the creative process,
but I still haven't figured out where ideas come from.
So let's go back to my psychology credentials,
and there's this theory called "the five-factor model of personality,"
also know as the "Big Five,"
the idea that all of our personalities -
each one of you have five dimensions in your personality.
And it's on a very scientific continuum,
from not very much of it all the way over to a whole bunch.
So, the first one is neuroticism.
So how neurotic are you?
Are you not very neurotic or are you really, really, really neurotic?
The next one is extraversion.
Are you an introvert, an extrovert or some way along that continuum?
How conscientious are you?
If you're disciplined, if you're a planner
then you're probably on the more conscientious side.
How agreeable are you?
Are you friendly, cooperative, compassionate?
If so, you probably score high on agreeability.
The last one is openness to experience.
Openness to experience.
Do you like to learn new things?
Do you like to travel just for the experiences?
If you are open to experiences,
this is the one most closely related to creativity;
being open to experience has real value.
Intuitively, this makes sense, doesn't it?
I love to talk to people at airports.
Do you like to talk to people at airports?
I may be that person who talks to you,
and you're like, "I don't want to talk to people at airports."
But I'm that person.
I like to know where they're from, where they're going,
what they're going to do.
And I've learned some really interesting things
talking to people at airports.
I once went out with a guy to dinner, and he ordered escargot.
Now, let me tell you up front:
that's a snail, and I don't like squishy stuff;
I don't eat squishy stuff.
But he asked me if I wanted one, and I said,
"Okay,"
and I tried it,
and it was really surprisingly good -
of course it was dripping in butter, and what isn't good dripping in butter?
I once jumped out of a perfectly good airplane.
Yep. I went skydiving, and I had gray hair when I did it.
This is what leads to creativity:
these moments, these experiences
are the fuel that give us the ideas that lead to our creativity.
So, let me apply this through a personal story.
When I graduated with my journalism degree,
I had squirreled away some money,
and I bought a round-trip ticket to London;
I bought a Europass, and I bought a youth hostel card.
I did the backpacking thing across Europe.
And at one point, I decided I wanted to go to Berlin.
And so I get on the train,
and this was in the early '80s,
so this is when we still had West Germany and East Germany -
as in communist East Germany.
So, you travel through Germany,
and you come to East Germany to get to Berlin,
because Berlin is in the center of East Germany,
and when the train would stop,
on the platform was a guard with a gun and dogs
to make sure that nobody got on and nobody got off.
Every stop.
I'm still not sure why we stopped; nobody got on and nobody got off.
So we get to Berlin,
and I drop my stuff at the youth hostel,
and I go to the Brandenburg Gate -
because I was a music major, and that was a big deal -
and the Brandenburg Gate [is], of course,
on the dividing wall between East Berlin and West Berlin.
So as I'm walking along the wall,
they have these platforms that you can climb up and look over the wall.
So, of course, I wanted to look over the wall.
So I climb up, and as I look across onto the other side,
to the East Berlin side,
there are guard towers, guards with guns.
The guards are looking at us, and we're looking back at the guards.
There is no man's land with razor wire going through it
and, of course, the wall.
And the wall curls through town, so you can see both sides of the wall.
And on the East Berlin side, of course, it's pristine;
there was nothing on the wall.
And on the west side, it looked like this.
It had color; it had graffiti; it had artwork;
it had everything along this wall.
And remember, I had just finished getting my journalism degree.
For me, this was a visualization
of what free speech and no free speech looks like.
Wow.
Where do ideas come from?
I never would have made that connection if I hadn't actually gone to the wall.
So these are the raw ingredients for your ideas:
being open to experience.
So, I found my answer, what I was searching for:
how to be more creative.
If you want to be more creative, be open to new experiences.
Try something new.
Give your brain something new to spin around.
And you may not have realized it, but you started it tonight.
You came to a TEDx talk
and watched somebody do it without shoes on.
So, what are you going to do tomorrow?
Thank you.
(Applause)