Creativity: A Short and Cheerful Guide

by John Cleese

Another myth is that creativity is something you have to be born with. This isn’t the case. Anyone can be creative.

discovered, they organised what was known as a “smoker”—short for the old-fashioned phrase “smoking concert.”

And in the morning, I’d wake up and make myself a cup of coffee, and then I’d drift over to the desk and sit at it, and, almost immediately, the solution to the problem I’d been wrestling with the previous evening…became

became quite obvious to me! So obvious that I couldn’t really understand why I hadn’t spotted it the night before. But I hadn’t.

Weirdly, I discovered that the remembered version was actually an improvement on the one that Graham and I had written. This puzzled the hell out of me.

So I began to realise that my unconscious was working on stuff all the time, without my being consciously aware of it.

Even rather more demanding activities that require learned skills involve the same principle. You can shave, or dress, or tie your shoelaces without having to concentrate

But what they didn’t tell me was that while this way of thinking is absolutely right for solving certain kinds of problems, it’s no good at all for other kinds.

This basic truth became much clearer to me when, twenty years ago, I was lucky enough to read a wonderful book by Guy Claxton, called Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind.

He goes on to give various examples: “A mechanic working out why an engine will not fire, a family arguing over the brochures about where to go for next summer’s holiday, a scientist trying to interpret an intriguing experimental result, a student wrestling with an examination question: all are employing a way of knowing that relies on reason and logic, on deliberate conscious

thinking.” He calls this kind of quick, purposeful thinking “Hare Brain.”

Then, he argues, there is another kind of thinking which he calls “Tortoise Mind.” This, he says, “proceeds more slowly…It is often less purposeful and clear-cut, more playful, leisurely or dreamy. In this mode we are ruminating or mulling things over, being contemplative or meditative. We may be pondering a problem, rather than earnestly trying to solve it.”

“Tortoise Mind,” for all its apparent aimlessness, is just as “intelligent” as the much faster “Hare Brain.”

deliberate modes of mind are particularly suited to making sense of situations that are intricate, shadowy or ill defined…when we are not sure what needs to be taken into account, or even which questions to pose—or when the issue is too subtle to be captured by the familiar categories of conscious thought—we need recourse to the tortoise mind…This type of intelligence is associated with what we call creativity, or even ‘wisdom.’ ”

The first was that the creative architects knew how to play.

The second was that the creative architects always deferred making decisions for as long as they were allowed.

When MacKinnon talks about “play,” he means the ability to get enjoyably absorbed in a puzzle: not just to try to solve it so that you can get on to the next problem, but to become really curious about it for its own sake.

Most adults, by contrast, find it hard to be playful—no doubt because they have to take care of all the responsibilities that come with an adult’s life. Creative adults, however, have not forgotten how to play.

It simply means they are able to tolerate that vague sense of discomfort that we all feel, when some important decision is left open, because they know that an answer will eventually present itself.

They explained to me that if you have a decision to make, the first question you must ask

“When does this decision have to be made?”

Well, it would be foolish, because if you can wait longer, two incredibly important things may happen. You may get new information. You may get new ideas.

But creative people are much better at tolerating the vague sense of worry that we all get when we leave something unresolved.

The greatest killer of creativity is interruption. It pulls your mind away from what you want to be thinking about. Research has shown that, after an interruption, it can take eight minutes for you to return to your previous state of consciousness, and up to twenty minutes to get back into a state of deep focus.

But perhaps the biggest interruption coming from your inside is caused by your worrying about making a mistake. This can paralyse you. “Oh,” you say to yourself, “I mustn’t think that because it might be WRONG.”

Let me reassure you. When you’re being creative there is no such thing as a mistake.

until you’ve gone down it. So, if you have an idea, you must follow your line of thought to the end to see whether it’s likely to be useful or not.

As Einstein once pointed out, if we know what we’re doing when we’re investigating something, then it’s not research!

You create boundaries of space to stop others interrupting you. You shut the door and put

up a “DO NOT DISTURB” sign; or you go and hide somewhere people won’t bother you.

As Hindus say, the mind is like a chattering, drunken monkey. On and on, and all completely trivial and uninvited.

Now, if you find all this a bit “touchy-feely,” read what Einstein had to say on the subject of ideas:

Take August Kekule von Stradonitz, the German organic chemist who discovered the structure of benzene. Once,

It is, however, very important that when you first have a new idea, you don’t get critical too soon.

This back-and-forth process is called iteration. It’s what creative people do all the time.

“Write about what you know”

That is what Bill Froug said. Jeff.Dunbar told me this.

Of course you must write what you know about.

Then, if you become successful and really want to write about a subject you have absolutely no knowledge of, you can do a lot of research first. (If you really, really want to.)

you admire—an idea that really appeals to you personally. If you start working on that, you’ll make it your own as you play with it. You’re learning, and learning from something or someone you admire is not stealing. It’s called “being influenced by.”

you find the notion of borrowing like this a bit dodgy, look up a fellow called Shakespeare. He stole all his plots, and then wrote rather creatively.

other times, you may think of a major addition, or change, such as when Steven Spielberg realised during the making of Jaws that the audience did not need to keep seeing the shark.

The Buddhists have a phrase for this—“Beginner’s Mind”—expressing

seems that it’s rare for someone creative to maintain a constant high level of freshness.

Feynman spent a lot of time playing the drums. The great mathematician

John Conway spent much of his time playing games. Playing…keeps you “fresh.”

Then…listen carefully. But at the end of the day, you and only you must decide which criticisms and suggestions you accept.