LSW#24 🎨We Get Creativity All Wrong
Why copying is good, quantity is better than quality, & excellence is mundane
Welcome to the Leading Sapiens Weekly! In this edition, we examine three common myths about creativity that unnecessarily hold us back.
If you find my writing helpful, please help spread the word.
Do you consider yourself creative? For a long time, I didn’t consider myself as such. But it was primarily due to not really understanding how creativity works.
One common mistake is thinking of it as only applicable to artistic pursuits. But you need creativity to be effective at leadership, as much as you need it in making pitches to execs, or coming up with breakthrough ideas.
Over time, I learned three counter-intuitive aspects that completely transformed how I understood creativity and my practices:
Copying leads to more originality
Quantity is more important than quality
Excellence is plain mundane, even boring
1. Copying makes us more original
We usually think of creativity as innate, and copying as the opposite of being original. That’s why when browsing a Vincent van Gogh exhibit, I was pleasantly surprised to find that :
He didn’t start out as an artist until the age of 27
A significant part of his early years was copying other artists’ works
The image below is one of the “copies” that Van Gogh made.
Think about this for a second — one of the greatest artists ever, didn’t show any signs of greatness in childhood, and got better by copying others.
This is both freeing and scary. Freeing because it means any of us can get good, if not the greatest. Scary because it puts the onus on us — a lack of creativity is not an excuse anymore.
Recent research shows how copying leads us to become better originals:
Takeshi Okada and Kentaro Ishibashi, creativity experts at the University of Tokyo, ran a series of experiments… What they found poses a serious challenge to the way most of us have been taught to think about creativity.
…Not only did copying an artist’s drawing inspire far more creative illustrations later on, it did so by stimulating ideas that had nothing to do with the copied artist’s work. In other words, copying didn’t simply lead people to mimic an established approach. It unlocked a mind-set of curiosity and openness that motivated them to take their work in fresh, unanticipated directions.
…The process of copying—of carefully analyzing a particular work, deconstructing its key components, and rebuilding it anew—is a transformative mental exercise that does wonders for our thinking. Unlike the experience we get when we passively consume a work, copying demands that we pay meticulous attention, prompting us to reflect on both subtle details and unexpected techniques.
…But it’s more than just heightened scrutiny. Copying also forces us to contemplate the decisions an artist made and sensitizes us to opportunities we typically overlook. In so doing, copying challenges our default approach. It opens us up to novel ways of thinking, prompting us to find creative opportunities buried within our own work.
— from Decoding Greatness by Ron Friedman
One of the earliest known “copiers” was Benjamin Franklin, who got good at writing by simply trying to reproduce other writers’ works.
2. Quantity leads to quality
We usually think of quantity and quality as opposites — having to sacrifice one for the other. But when creating, quality can often be a detriment.
Below is an example where focussing on quantity paradoxically produced better quality:
The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.
His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pounds of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an “A”.
Well, come grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work-and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.
— from Art & Fear by David Bayles, Ted Orland
We impose unnecessarily high standards on ourselves, not realizing that the more we do something, the better we’ll get at it naturally. But, this also means we won’t be perfect at first.
How many times have we not applied to a position simply because we didn’t check all the requirements, or because we are not “ready” yet?
How many projects did we not start because of a lack of skill on day one?
3. Mastery is mundane
When we look at a masterpiece like Van Gogh’s, we are seeing only the finished product. Everything that led to it — the artist’s doubts, iterations, mistakes, pivots, adjustments — is all invisible to us. Obvious, but easy to forget. Same is true for elite performance in sports, or any domain.
Getting better requires doing mundane things for long periods of time, and also something most of us simply can’t, or won’t. Outcomes are glamorous, getting there is anything but.
Being the best is actually boring. This was one of the key findings in Daniel Chambliss’s seminal study The Mundanity of Excellence.
In the pursuit of excellence, maintaining mundanity is the key psychological challenge.
… Ignorant of all of the specific steps that have led to the performance and to the confidence, we think that somehow excellence sprang full grown from this person, and we say he or she “has talent” or “is gifted.”
But of course there is no secret, there is only the doing of all those little things, each one done correctly, time and again, until excellence in every detail becomes a firmly ingrained habit, an ordinary part of one’s everyday life.
Getting a good idea of the mundane actions required to get to our goals, increases our chance of success.
I did a deep dive into Chambliss’s study. You can go to the main article by clicking the button below.
I hope you find these ideas as useful as I have. Curious to know about your experience. Reply to this email and let me know.
That’s it for this edition. Have a great week!