Creative Quest

by Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson

The issue isn’t whether people can tell that you’re creative. If that’s what you’re worried about, wear a beret. The issue is whether you can connect to your own creative impulses. Creativity is a fire.

Pay attention to seeds. We’re back to botanical metaphors here. Big ideas grow from those little things. Writers tend to be people who are sensitive to words. Artists are sensitive to color and line. If you want to encourage your own creativity, try to pay attention to the creative acts of others. More than that: try to pay attention to the ways in which the things that you didn’t think of as creative acts are actually perfect examples of creativity.

None of this is especially consequential except to suggest that there are patterns and links everywhere, and if you are trying to remain in a creative frame of mind, you should let your brain find its way to them.

It’s not about letting everything in, but it is about refusing to keep things out.

Being creative is a mix of unfocusing your eyes in the right way, while still remaining focused on the picture.

Figure out whether you’re a morning person (like me) or a night person (sadly, also like me), and schedule your tasks for that time.

No. No, I do not run out of ideas. There are secondary processes that matter much more, like refining an idea, perfecting execution, connecting an idea with the right audience, accepting critical assessment of it. But run out? No chance of that.

Again: creative people are always having ideas. That’s not the trick. The trick is learning how to capture them without being captured by them, how to display them without exposing too much of yourself, how to move forward while remaining unafraid to also move sideways or backwards.

Don’t imagine what you will become—imagine what you won’t become. It helps to reinforce which parts of your creative identity you can’t live without, and which might be there only because you’ve been told by someone else that they should be there. Imagining what you won’t become is a necessary refining process.

Deciding what you’re not before you decide what you are lets you stand strong in your own category.

She makes things because it makes her feel like she can change things. It’s a world where we grapple all the time with our insignificance, where things happen around us and to us. Being creative, in whatever form, is the proof that we can leave an imprint on our surroundings, that we can make a mark on time.

when people start down the road to their own creative satisfaction, people like Tariq distort the field. They generate unrealistic expectations.

I want to broaden the definition to include anyone who is making something out of nothing by virtue of their own ideas. I include the dad who likes doing craft projects in the garage. I include the mom who sings on weekends and has started after twenty years to write songs again. I include armchair poets and sideways thinkers. I include the world, not because every creative project is equal in conception or in execution, but because every creative project matters to someone.

Studies have shown that creative people tend to be more sensitive to the feelings of others and to fluctuations in the social fabric around them. At the same time, they are often less equipped to deal with those things. The result can be withdrawal from the world. Defense mechanisms, depression. Creative production is not only a way to avoid those pitfalls, but a way to connect those people to the rest of the world. Creativity creates connectedness.

Deciding what you’re not before you decide what you are lets you stand strong in your own category.

the importance of being both present and absent, of being both there and not-there. This is the mental strategy, the Jedi mind trick, the Zen exercise. You have to be both entirely consumed by the moment and also a million miles away.

something makes you very uneasy, especially if it’s something that’s being done in a creative field where you have experience, pay attention. Your mind is telling you that there’s more to process than just your surface reaction.

Be receptive.

Wise Up Ghost, the album that the Roots made with Elvis Costello back in 2013,

Where creativity is concerned, pure originality is at least partially a myth. People are heavily invested in that myth because they have egos, or because they are selling a brand. But it’s not fully real. Young creatives shouldn’t worry about it. Or rather: I think I can tell you with some confidence that you’ll be worrying about it forever, so don’t worry about the fact that you’ll be worrying about it.

Attach yourself to people who are doing things you don’t quite understand.

And then he gave a more detailed explanation of cutup, specifically how Burroughs developed a method of his own. He took an existing piece of writing, something that had already been printed, like a book or a magazine article or even a few paragraphs that you have written yourself, and you cut it up and rearrange the words, and you force yourself to see meaning in the arbitrary jumble. And then he identified some prominent songwriters who used the method—I think he mentioned David Bowie and Kurt Cobain,

the whole point is to keep moving forward. The point is to generate ideas in a rush, and not necessarily to think too much too early about whether or not they work. They work in the sense that they exist.

Creative life sometimes means knowing when deviation from the plan should become the new plan.

If you’re a writer, imagine the blurbs that will be on the paperback. If you’re a painter, imagine what people will say when they’re standing in front of your canvas. This is another example of being present but not-present: you are the creator but also the eventual audience. When you’re on the outside of your own work looking in, you’ll be able to see the overall shape of it, which will help you to realize that you’re on the right track (or, alternatively, that you’re not). It’s also a way of journeying to the center of what the idea will eventually become.

Amazon has called this process “backward thinking.”

Begin each day by believing the opposite of everything you believe.

Collaboration isn’t about what’s there so much as what’s not there. It’s the jigsaw puzzle with a few pieces missing and a pile of bright pieces nearby.

Those kinds of combinations—unexpected ones, but ones where both parties are determined to produce an outcome that lives up to their respective creative reputations—are absolutely necessary. They may not always make for the best music, but they always make for the best creativity. They force you to define yourself again, which is vital for a midcareer creative.

Every successful collaboration is also a fight for your own creative life.

Being a collaborator is a constant learning experience. You quickly learn your strengths and your weaknesses. Admittedly, I’m not always a good communicator. I am not always straightforward about asking what I want out of a creative partnership. I am not always clear with myself on the difference between doing the work and running the operation. It can be difficult to deep-dive inside yourself and figure out all the things about you that work and don’t work, let alone the things that work and don’t work in collaboration with someone else.

creativity depends on not filtering your ideas so much that strange or unexpected ideas disappear.

Be receptive to ideas that sound strange. Maybe be receptive to those ideas especially, because the tendency is to be dismissive.

If you felt tall your whole life and started hanging out with the Knicks, you’d have to adjust accordingly. Collaboration can be like hanging out with the Knicks. You’re not as tall as you thought you were. But you have other qualities that you didn’t notice until you stopped being preoccupied with your height.

Sometimes you have to rep for the idea you don’t want, because you know in advance that the creative process will reverse your suggestion. Sometimes you have to agree with everything you’re presented while you’re putting a third party up as a kind of agitator.

Achievers and Creatives can stand in the same place and erase the idea that there is any real distinction between the two.

If you think you’re creative, you are. And maybe the more arty you are, the more you need to yin-yang it with an achiever: it produces results and reduces anxiety.

The skim, the superficial, the way things get replaced so quickly, is the enemy not only of deep thoughts, but of creative thoughts.

The Connect Effect Think of two artists you know, who you consider to be very different, and imagine what project they would make if they collaborated.

Questlove and Annie Lennox or peter gabriel

People with limited ideas of things call this cheating. It’s not. It’s inspired imitation. Making your own version of existing works keeps you on your toes. It keeps your machinery humming along.

Copying, or covering, is always a valuable creative exercise. It gets you going. It restarts your brain and encourages you to look for the way things are built.

I know when a genius is in the room and talking.

stealing from others, stealing from yourself, making the old new, and discovering ways to jump-start and sustain your creativity through all of these behaviors.

It was a funk appropriation of the liberating principles of the headiest jazz.

such a wonderful sentence. not sure what it means but I love it.

“Good Times,” by Chic. The song was a major hit in the disco era, but also became the foundation for one of the first hip-hop anthems. The bass line of “Good Times,” played by Bernard Edwards, was the basis for the first huge rap song, Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight.”

what?!! need to listen for that, or even what that means.

I wanted to let one tower stand in for that basic Chic sample and let the other tower add accents that would call to mind some of the many songs that used “Good Times” as their basic sample: not only “Rapper’s Delight,” but also the Beastie Boys’ “Triple Trouble,” Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust,” Blondie’s “Rapture,” and Vaughan Mason & Crew’s “Bounce, Rock, Skate, Roll.”

what?!! need to listen for that, or even what that means.

“Somewhere at its heart,” he wrote in an e-mail, “[creativity] is the ability to see something else. In the end everyone looks at essentially the same words, notes, colors, problems, answers, numbers, cities, people—all, or at least meaningful subsets of each, are in some sense available to us all. But creativity has to do with how you arrange and construct what you pull out of those familiars.”

I was always in the Internet. I was always in the middle of all the mouse clicks. What I had to learn was how to get out of something before I got back into anything else.

you got to get in to get out - carpet crawlers.

In general, with things unpleasant, the rule is, the sooner you hit bottom, the faster you surface.

You have to remember that you’re insignificant, but also that you are potentially more significant than all the noise that’s being supplied to you at every moment.