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July 17 - August 1, 2018
From there, it took almost twenty months of grueling work to complete the song. McCartney became obsessed. While he worked on it, the people around McCartney became sick of hearing about his ever-changing song in progress.
The iconic song that is remembered as the result of a flash of genius was, in fact, a nearly two-year odyssey—one that at times wore McCartney (and his friends) down.
If you wanna be a bit more cynical, then I was loading my computer for millions of years listening to all the stuff I listened to through my dad and through my musical tastes, including people like Fred Astaire, Gershwin, and finally my computer printed out one morning what it thought was a good tune.”
What is called creative genius is really the ability to understand the mechanics of the creative curve and use it to engineer mainstream success.
In reality, Mozart worked5 long hours in a highly iterative, back-breaking process. He described a set of string quartets he composed as the “fruit of long and laborious effort.” Mozart would create numerous sketches, the music composer’s equivalent of rough drafts, as he worked through the various parts of his compositions.
fourteen years of intense practice behind him. Fourteen years of long, daily practice is not the same as being simply born a world-class composer.
This idea that creativity is something somewhat mystical runs rampant through Western civilization. Academic researchers seem especially obsessed with the idea that genius is some superior form of humanity.
high IQ did not lead to greater success.
Do you have to be born with precocious talent to be a great artist? Or can you become one through practice and hard work? More generally, is artistic talent innate? This is a key question in the study of creativity.
Nevertheless, that night he made a pact with himself: He would draw or paint every day until he became a great painter.
You may even have heard the (as we’ll discuss) faulty notion of the “10,000-hour rule.”
There are two main flaws with the 10,000-hour rule. First, it neglects to mention that it’s not simply how many hours you spend that’s important, but how you spend those hours. As I mentioned earlier, highly experienced therapists and stock pickers don’t necessarily get better results than novices.
said. “If you end up automating things, then you lose that ability to actually control what you’re doing.” If you can’t control it, you can’t improve it.
you have to engage extensively in purposeful practice.
Non-purposeful practice, which is practicing things you already know how to do, just reinforces mental processes that are already established. Purposeful practice allows the student to gain new mental methods and thereby improve their abilities.
“This idea that the body or the cells in your body would keep track of how many hours of practice you engaged in, and that there’s some magical clock at 10,000 hours that changes things is a curious belief.”
“You can influence the career choice of that brain cell.” Furthermore, if you don’t challenge these cells with new experiences, they risk dying off.
Put another way, learning causes our brains to retain new brain cells. These new cells connect with the specific parts of your brain that are being activated. According to Shaffer, “We totally un-derestimate how much we can modify our brains for improved chemistry, architecture, and performance.”
Genius is, perhaps surprisingly, far from an objective label.
The truth is that when people talk about creativity, they are usually talking about a creative output that is widely adopted or accepted (think Steve Jobs or Pablo Picasso). Of course, this is different from the ability to come up with novel ideas.
Creative genius, it turns out, is a social phenomenon rather than simply a reflection of how innovative, forward-thinking, or influential any one person is.
Obviously, this presents an obstacle for people who seek acknowledgment as creative individuals. First, they have to learn the standards and the norms of their craft. (I’ll explain how they can do this in future chapters.) Second, their work has to somehow become part of this formal subject matter. If you’re a painter, for example, you must get into prestigious galleries, museums, and textbooks. Otherwise, your work is far less likely to be considered creative; it will be seen as merely new and/or experimental.
Part of being a successful artist is being a persuasive salesperson for your own brand.
The result is that when you study the history of creative geniuses, you find people who had the opportunity to learn the right skills, the time to master those skills, and the ability to persuade others that their work had value.
All these elements—the subject matter, the gatekeepers, and the individual—have to align for an individual or a work to merit the label “creative.”
“Originality, freshness of perceptions, divergent thinking ability are all well and good in their own right, as desirable personal traits. But without some form of public recognition they do not constitute creativity, and certainly not genius.”
The more familiar something is, the more we like it.
It seems that humans have evolved to fear the unknown because it signals potential harm.
The more we’re exposed to something, the less we fear it.
Familiarity does not make us like things more. Rather, it makes us fear things less.
In this case, exposure reduced their liking for the paintings.
You can prevent dopamine activity in someone’s brain and they will still find pleasure in things.
“Dopamine is not so much about the pleasure of consuming something, it’s about the motivation to obtain something that’s signaled by dopamine,”
Dopamine, in short, is not the pleasure neurotransmitter; it is the motivation neurotransmitter.
Novelty releases dopamine and encourages us to pay attention and find out more about what’s in front of us.
We are motivated by novelty, and also fearful of the unfamiliar.
The result is that around the same time a mainstream individual is just starting to get interested in Ed Hardy, the so-called “hip” people are already tired of it.
In contrast, Nordhielm found that if she asked respondents to examine these same ads carefully, the creative curve kicked in. After viewing an advertisement ten times, the participants reported liking the underlying products less and less with each viewing.
This has critical implications for any type of creator. For example, one way to slow down the effects of the curve is to slow down exposure. That is why many luxury brands focus on exclusivity, maximizing price to grow revenues rather than distribution. The only other way to avoid the curve is to make your product addictive (think of the staying power of coffee or certain videogames).
As entrepreneurs gain experience, most start to accumulate concrete examples of a variety of concepts, and over time they rely more and more on exemplars. Using exemplars speeds up idea processing. After all, entrepreneurs don’t have to slow down and recognize the individual, distinctive elements of each and every new idea that’s presented to them. Most simply accept that this or that new idea matches an exemplar and is familiar.
In short, thanks to exemplars, intentional learning and experience make entrepreneurs far more likely to discover a useful new idea, as they can efficiently recognize what is familiar to the exemplar.
Experience makes generating familiar ideas easier, but what happens if you don’t have experience? Well, there is another way that entrepreneurs can develop exemplars and prototypes. Creative people can also use intentional consumption—see Ted, our video store clerk—to achieve similar results. We don’t need direct experience to develop prior knowledge. It turns out observing something can be nearly as good as developing exemplars and prototypes.
Exemplars don’t come from consuming just any information. They arise from consuming highly relevant material either within an entrepreneur’s field or a field they’re considering entering.
Sarandos jokes, “I guess I was using an algorithm years before I even knew what an algorithm was.” Consumption had driven his ability to understand an audience and create content they cared about.
Painters show up at numerous art exhibits. Chefs eat at cutting-edge restaurants, visit farms, and travel to food shows. Songwriters are constantly listening to music, new and old.
Although these creative artists are typically wildly busy, they consistently spend three to four hours a day—that is to say, roughly 20 percent of their waking hours—on this type of consumption. This kind of experience allows them to develop the exemplars necessary to know where an idea falls on the creative curve, as if by gut feel.
The other thing Franta realized was the huge role that novelty played in his success. It wasn’t enough to merely understand his audience and what broad types of videos they would relate to. No, he had to offer a novel twist.
This is why when we wake up, go out for a run, or take a shower, we often experience what feel to us like “flashes of genius.” Generally these are occasions when our brains aren’t overwhelmed with thoughts, the result being that we experience what seems like sudden inspiration.
Using a logical analysis approach, your brain exposes you to fragments and partial answers as it toils consciously through the problem in question. As this is happening, you are usually aware of the wrongness of your ideas, but when you’re not sure of something, you may take a risk and guess. As a result, your answers aren’t always correct.
“I think one of the problems people have with the idea of insight is if they think it’s a magical process, they think that they shouldn’t have to work hard to have an insight; but what you need to do is you have to establish a certain level of knowledge. You can’t have insights about things you don’t know anything about.”
