Creative Quest

by Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson

I still don’t know if I am truly creative. Most days I spend more time absorbing the creative work around me than actually creating myself.

Creativity isn’t Candyland—it’s

That’s one thing about being creative. Don’t be too set in your own ways. Be suggestible from time to time. Allow unexpected influences (like Torr) to shift your ideas. You can always come back to your own convictions if they’re real. But be a tourist in other perspectives.

creative problem-solving improved by around 20 percent as a result of fatigue. The professor who ran the study said that tiredness allows random thoughts in. (A similar study found that light levels of drinking achieve the same result.)

To truly get in touch with your creative side and the ideas it generates, you have to look through the organized and focused thoughts and find out what’s behind them.

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.

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.

Even though I have sixteen different jobs, it can sometimes feel like I don’t have any job at all.

how rarely I hear a full account of what I do from someone who is both paying attention and who knows enough to reflect it back to me.

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

When you make things, no matter what they are, no matter how generally you feel the impulse or how specifically you understand it, it immediately moves you into a different part of the human experience.

Being creative is the proof that we can leave an imprint on our surroundings, that we can make a mark on time.

I want to reverse this whole movement of separating artists from each other, of saying that one man or woman is more or less of an artist than another one. For that matter, 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. Time will sort out the difference between whales whittled out of balsa wood and Moby-Dick and Wale. I’ll just say that while there is a difference, it may not be as great as some people believe.

Creative things happen to creative people, especially when they let themselves go to the Zen of the moment, when they don’t allow themselves to be paralyzed either by overthinking or by laziness. They have to be in the sweet spot between the two.

creativity is narrative.

You need moments of silence where you can hear yourself.

once you are making things of your own, you’re no longer completely in anyone’s shadow.

There’s nothing quite like someone else’s brilliance, especially if it’s left-field brilliance that you don’t immediately understand, to keep you both challenged and bewitched.

He didn’t put a socially acceptable filter on it. He didn’t put a good-taste governor on it.

You weren’t supposed to banish the idea. You were supposed to embrace it.

Bowie kept going. He kept trying. He was never not a creative, never not an artist, never not a person who believed in the importance of producing.

Woodshedding, testing out new material, bouncing off each other.

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

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).

Amazon has a process that lets its team imagine big ideas. When someone at the company has one of these far-fetched ideas (“I know—let’s make a tiny tower that sits in your house and takes instructions”), they don’t start research and development, or even test-market the idea. They start by bringing the product to the press department, and they write up a release as if the product exists. It’s kind of brilliant. When it comes out, if it comes out, consumers won’t care about the nuts and bolts. They’ll care about what the product does for them, easily described, with simple metaphors—the kind of thing you can put in a press release.

Other people are answers to questions, and the biggest challenge is thinking of what question they’re answering.

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.

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

Everyone agrees that creativity is a privileged form of thinking.

I think that you have to go back and look at your own work with a clear eye. And, hopefully, with pleasure.

Every creative pursuit has its own kind of distraction.

I started to like listening to their conversation, and I profited from it. At first, it was just normal enjoyment—I liked hearing people who used different verbs and nouns, and who all seemed to have a similar set of experiences.

You still have to put in time to make connections with individuals who matter to you.

Creative people take in more than the average person—or, rather, they are less able to shut out parts of their environment.

Creative life also includes some management of other people’s creativity.

The second you become your own product, you’re heading down a chute rather than up a ladder.

Through 2016, I started to use my regular gigs at places like Brooklyn Bowl as a means to experiment with playlists. I even fine-tuned when I had more high-profile gigs, like celebrity weddings. But it wasn’t just refining my DJ set. I was working toward something big, a Unified Theory of Everything As Explained Through Music. I debuted that new set, or a version of it, at the Hamilton after-party. That was a seven-hour set at Tavern on the Green, from 11 P.M. until 6 A.M., and it went even deeper into my sense of American music and American history. I started playing Nintendo themes, Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! I was the museum curator hanging a Roy Lichtenstein next to an Andrew Wyeth to raise issues of nature and artifice, history and media. I was out there on the Tilt-a-Whirl, and the audience stayed with me. Afterward, the actress Lupita Nyong’o wrote me a love letter—well, not to me, exactly, but to my set. I was emboldened by that. How can you not be emboldened by a love letter from Lupita Nyong’o? I had started with the idea of wanting to make a perfect playlist, but now I was on a cultural-historical mission. I would relate the perfect overarching story of America—of humanity—through a DJ set. It was the same as hanging a great museum exhibit, but instead of paintings I would use songs.

Creative people have specialties. But they also have restlessness. That’s part of the paradox: how do you keep your talent sharp while still exploring ways to expand your talent? How do you keep doing the thing that you’ve been doing while also doing other things?

Therapy isn’t only about solving problems: it’s about pacing out the process of wrestling with problems.

for every hour you spend doing something, spend at least a few minutes doing something unrelated. That’s Questlove’s corollary to Gladwell’s Ten Thousand Hours.

Getting into a groove can be dangerously close to getting into a rut.

For a creative person—a person who’s following this overall path toward ideas, and the other steps in this specific process—those unexpected turns are often reinvestments.

creative people have some impulse inside of them that compels them to approach material. That material can vary. But when they approach it, they approach it with a certain attitude. It’s an attitude of change, or of active engagement, or of balancing reason and irrationality, or of channeling personal passions and obsessions and fetishes. There are lots of options.

Travel is as much about the place you’re leaving as the place you’re going.

Expect change. Demand change of yourself.

Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that departures are not relocations. You depart, but the countermovement is a return. You’re not a nomad. You’re not rootless. You have to preserve your sense of your original mission and the importance of coming back to it. It’s not so much “Wherever you go, there you are.” It’s “Wherever you go, there it is.” Your central creative ideas move with you, and you move through them. Departures don’t upend that apple cart. They just cart it around.

Who gets to determine when an artist is on track and when an artist is off track? The artist is the track.

writers to write toward the revolution no matter how tired they became.

enthusiasm isn’t the same as organized and productive critical feedback.

When I was doing my food book, the chef Dave Beran talked to me about this in detail. Dave was interested in the way that technology has given people too many easy ways to deliver feedback without similarly equipping artists to resist it.