The
ability to see things in a fresh way is vital to the creative process,
and that ability rests on the willingness to question any and all
assumptions. This is personified by Paul MacCready, one of America's
most prolific inventors. His best-known accomplishment is the invention
of the Gossamer Condor, the first human-powered airplane to fly a mile.
Says MacCready: "To design the Condor, I had to pretend I'd never seen an airplane before. If you have too much knowledge of what didn't work in the past and what you think can't work, then you just don't try as many things. The Condor needed to be light, and the only way I knew I had the absolute minimum weight was if it broke occasionally. If it broke about every 25th flight, that was just right. And that's the way we designed it. Now, that's a terrible way to make an ordinary airplane, but it was very good for this particular vehicle. Breaking wasn't a failure; it was a success."
In creative problem-solving, a mistake is an experiment to learn from, valuable information about what to try next. People often pack in their efforts because they are afraid of making mistakes, which can be embarrassing, even humiliating. But if you take no chances and make no mistakes, you fail to learn, let alone do anything unusual or innovative.
Says MacCready: "To design the Condor, I had to pretend I'd never seen an airplane before. If you have too much knowledge of what didn't work in the past and what you think can't work, then you just don't try as many things. The Condor needed to be light, and the only way I knew I had the absolute minimum weight was if it broke occasionally. If it broke about every 25th flight, that was just right. And that's the way we designed it. Now, that's a terrible way to make an ordinary airplane, but it was very good for this particular vehicle. Breaking wasn't a failure; it was a success."
In creative problem-solving, a mistake is an experiment to learn from, valuable information about what to try next. People often pack in their efforts because they are afraid of making mistakes, which can be embarrassing, even humiliating. But if you take no chances and make no mistakes, you fail to learn, let alone do anything unusual or innovative.
While creativity takes hard work, the work goes more smoothly if you take it lightly. Humor greases the wheels of creativity. When you're joking around, you're freer to consider any possibility—after all, you're only kidding. Having fun helps you disarm the inner censor that all too quickly condemns your ideas as ludicrous.
This is why in brainstorming sessions the operative rule is that anything goes and no one is allowed to dismiss an idea as too absurd. People are free to generate as many ideas as they can manage to think of, no matter how wild they seem. In one of those ideas, there is often the seed that can eventually grow into an innovative solution.
Researchers report that when teams of people are working together on a problem, those groups that laugh most readily and most often are more creative and productive than their more dour and decorous counterparts. Joking around makes good sense: Playfulness is itself a creative state.
When creativity is in full fire, people can experience what athletes and performers call the "white moment." Everything clicks. Your skills are so perfectly suited to the challenge that you seem to blend with it. Everything feels harmonious, unified, and effortless.
That white moment is what psychologists call "flow." In flow, people are at their peak. Flow can happen in any domain of activity. The one requirement is that your skills so perfectly match the demands of the moment that all self-consciousness disappears. If your skills are not up to the challenge, you experience anxiety; if your skills are too great, you experience boredom.
When skills and challenge match, then flow is most likely to emerge. At that instant, attention is fully focused on the task at hand. One sign of this complete absorption is that time seems to pass much more quickly—or much more slowly. People are so attuned to what they're doing, they're oblivious to any distractions.
Neurological studies of people in flow show that the brain expends less energy than when they are wrestling with a problem. One reason seems to be that the parts of the brain most relevant for the task at hand are most active, and those that are irrelevant are relatively quiet. By contrast, when one is in a state of anxiety or confusion, there is no such distinction in activity levels between parts of the brain.
Flow states often occur in sports, especially among the best athletes. In his biography, basketball star Bill Russell describes those moments as ones of a nearly supernatural intuition: "It was almost as though we were playing in slow motion. During those spells I could almost sense how the next play would develop and the next shot would be taken. Even before the other team brought the ball inbounds, I could feel it so keenly that I'd want to shout to my teammates, 'It's coming there!'—except that I knew everything would change if I did."
While in a flow state, people lose all self-consciousness. The Zen idea of no-mind is similar: a state of complete absorption is what one is doing. Says Kenneth Kraft, a Buddhist scholar at Lehigh University who has spent many years in Japan, "In Zen the word 'mind' is also a symbol for the consciousness of the universe itself. In fact, the mind of the individual and the mind of the universe are regarded ultimately as one. So by emptying oneself of one's smaller, individual mind, and by losing the intense self-consciousness, we are able to tap into this larger, more creative mind.
The idea of merging with the activity at hand, which is basic to flow, is intrinsic to Zen. "It's taught in Zen that one performs an action so completely that one loses oneself in the doing of it," Kraft explains. "A master calligrapher, for example, is working in a no-minded way."
No-mindedness is not unconsciousness, some kind of vague spaciness. On the contrary, it is a precise awareness during which one is undisturbed by the mind's usual distracting inner chatter. Says Kraft, "No-mindedness means not to have the mind filled with random thoughts like, 'Does this calligraphy look right? Should that stroke go there or here?' It's just doing. Just the stroke."
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