The Creative Curve: How to Develop the Right Idea, at the Right Time

by Allen Gannett

What is called creative genius is really the ability to understand the mechanics of the creative curve and use it to engineer mainstream success.

four laws: the law of consumption, the law of imitation, the law of creative communities, and the law of iterations.

Automaticity is the enemy of growing your expertise,” he 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.

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.

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.

Familiarity does not make us like things more. Rather, it makes us fear things less.

“Dopamine is not so much about the pleasure of consuming something, it’s about the motivation to obtain something that’s signaled by dopamine,” Düzel explains. The actual role of dopamine in our brains, he says, is to determine when we should approach something to learn more about it. Düzel explained that dopamine signals to our motor system that we have to do something—and only then does it trigger the learning process. Dopamine, in short, is not the pleasure neurotransmitter; it is the motivation neurotransmitter.

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.

I call this the 20 percent principle: by spending 20 percent of your waking hours consuming material in your creative field, you can develop an intuitive, expert-level understanding of the level of familiarity of an idea—where it lies on the creative curve—even without real-world experience.

“You can’t have insights about things you don’t know anything about.”

a master teacher, a conflicting collaborator, a modern muse, and a prominent promoter.