So, creativity is really a commonly used word, but I think the downside of that is that we all have some intuitions about what creativity means and what it is. And they may be very sound common sense intuitions but they're not necessarily correct. So, Jeff, what are some myths you've heard about creativity as you've talked about it over the years? The one that always gets me is the light bulb. It's a light bulb that goes off. Right. Right. I mean, there are lots of them though, that you have to be a creative person. You know, you're born with. Some kind of genius. Some kind of genius or you know, craziness or something like that or there's a lot about randomness. You know, things just happen or you would happen and notice something. Yes, it's interesting all these examples, seem to involve the idea that creativity is somehow out of our control. Yes. But that's not necessarily the case, is it? It's something that happens to you. No, it's a it's a process, it's a skill, you can learn.We can get better at this. Right. So, clearly we need to do some myth busting before we move forward, right? A little bit of myth busting. Another myth that we've heard a lot about is that creativity is something that happens to us, as opposed to being something we do. So we're just vessels of divine inspiration that just comes to us from the muses from above, right. Lightning strikes, you're unconscious just offers something up out of nowhere. Things like that. But it's wrong on every level. So, the first one is you know the things that happen suddenly. Creative aha moments. But that's nuts. Think about it, you lose your keys, you lose your phone and you run around your house and then eventually you go, oh! That's where I left my phone. Sometimes you don't. Fair enough. But that's a sudden insight, but it's not creative. Yes. Yes. Yes. And a lot of times these sudden insights seemingly quote unquote sudden insights happen after years and years of training and preparation, right. So, just you put the last piece in the puzzle and it feels like, you know it fits and it feels like an insight, right. But you've spent hours fitting together all of the other pieces to make that happen and so it's really not quite as sudden as it seems. Right. Yes. Chance favors the prepared mind and we're just not powerless bystanders to our own creativity. There are things we can do. Another tempting myth is to view creativity as something that is purely random, right. The old lightning strikes kind of view of this, right. And there's actually, there are a lot of important inventions like everything from the post-it notes and Penicillin to chocolate chip cookies, right. Popsicles. Yes. Were actually invented partially as a result of random events. But there were a couple of problems with this perspective. One is that, it's incredibly inefficient to rely on randomness and hope that it's going to systematically generate creative ideas. So, monkeys typing Shakespeare. So, relying on that is your creativity strategy is probably not such a good idea. The second problem is that, we have to be able to recognize random events that are important. For that it requires insight and so randomness is only interesting for creativity and so far it is recognized and used. So, there is some, it's a really limiting point of view to think of creativity as random. But it's also that, it's a mistake to think of it as just an ord-that every idea is equally thinkable and is it just that we're going to stumble upon it. So, the way I think about well think about riddles, right. So, okay, now I get to tell you a riddle. Right. So, okay what grows up while growing down? Yes. All right, so there's what, and you're probably thinking, I don't know what to think. Right. I won't tell you what I was thinking. So, the idea is that there's so many possibilities you don't know what to think. But, it's important to distinguish between, sort of what I know and don't know and what's currently just not conceivable, what's literally framed out of the picture in this case. So, in this case what grows up while growing down? I don't know. Stairs. Stairs go up and down but they don't really grow. Okay, that's not right. Well, maybe, plants, right. So, plants grow up and they have roots that grow down. So, maybe that's an answer to the riddle or maybe there's like a carrot. A carrot actually grows further down as it gets bigger, so maybe that grows up while growing down. So there's a process of playing with ideas and seeing what fits. And is there at the end of the process you could pick something that it seems like random, you picked it and it's correct? Yes. But also that in thinking about it that way, we have completely disregarded other possibilities. Right. So, let me give you a totally different direction on the same riddle, right. Which is, well grows up while growing down. Well, down means a direction, down. But down also means feathers, right? So, a goose grows up, that is gets bigger while growing down as in feathers. Right. While I'm thinking about the plants and the carrots, the goose one is completely inconceivable. Right. Because it's a totally different way to think about the riddle. As we've seen, we've sort of immediately formed a perspective on what down is, and that precludes us from seeing other perspectives and changing our view of the problem, right. That's the problem with noticing. That randomness can happen but you framed out and it's inconceivable to you to think about it that way and you'll never see it. Right. And so down could be falling from the sky and I don't notice it. It's random, right. Right. But I need insight to actually see how it fits into the bigger picture. That's right. And we also want to give you a more systematic process for being creative on a regular basis, right. As opposed to just relying on random events. Chance isn't enough. Right. Another myth we've heard is that creativity is somehow all about personality. That, in order to be creative you have to be one of these eccentric lone geniuses with crazy hair that really doesn't have any friends. It is emotionally unstable, right. We've all heard those kinds of stereotypes. But in fact what we really want to argue here and convey is that, creativity is also a process, and it's a skill that you can learn and that once you understand how to be creative, everyone can learn to be more creative and it doesn't depend on your particular personality. It's also the case that being creative also depends on the context in which you work. So, you can engineer the context to make everybody more creative than they ordinarily would be. So, creativity is not just about having a particular kind of eccentric personality. Another other tempting myth is to view creativity as just purely a matter of intelligence, right. So, if we know how to measure IQ, so, let's just had an IQ test and we can figure out who's likely to be creative and who isn't. There's actually some evidence that suggests that, that might not be the best way to go about it, right. Yes. I think after you hit about 115-120 on the IQ scale there's no difference. Right. In eminent creators in IQ. So, there might be some intelligence to make world famous brain endeavors but after that. You need enough smarts to know things, to master your area. There's a certain point, the most creative person isn't necessarily the smartest one in the room, there's something else going on. And smarts, we have a few different views of smarts, right raw, IQ, horsepower. And then there's sort of domain knowledge. I mean, there's this great story about Murray Gell-Mann, the physicist, Nobel Prize winning physicist. He's giving lectures on everything, I mean just an incredibly intelligent well read guy. His car breaks down with a news reporter in the middle of the desert, and he says, it must have overheated and he gets out a bottle of water, pops the hood and the reporter says, let's wait for the tow truck before Murray Gell-Mann emptied the water bottle into the engine of the car. So, I don't get smart you are like you don't. You need knowledge. You need knowledge. Yes, you need to know what you're doing, right. Yes. And that's separate again from, can I change how I'm thinking about this situation. Right. So, understanding the underlying process of creativity is again important for understanding how this works. If it's about changing perspectives, even the smartest people can get locked into their perspectives and not be able to get out, right. Absolutely. And so we need to look at creativity as something that's a little bit more complex than just raw IQ. Yes. Asimov, famously smart guy, Isaac Asimov like IQ of 160 and he wrote hundreds of books on every topic under the sun. So, he tells this story in his autobiography of going to take his car in for a repair. I'm on car repair. You're stuck with me now. Right, and so his mechanic says, all right, you know Doc you know you're really smart. So, here's one for you, right. You know a deaf and mute guy walks into the hardware store and goes like this. Right. So, the guy at the store brings him hammer and he wiggles his fingers, he brings them some nails. Right, he gets what he needs, right. So, okay now a guy who is blind walks in looking for scissors, what does he do? Asimov report is going like this, right. The car repairman says, he's blind. He just says, can I have scissors, please. Right. So, smart people can get stuck just as easily as anyone else, right. And so, you know smart people don't have a monopoly on creativity. So, there's a lot more to it than that. You got to be able to switch perspectives. Standing in front of the main library here at the University of Illinois, reminds me of one of the big misconceptions about creativity, which is that, in order to be creative you just have to know a lot of stuff. And in this day and age, we have almost perfect access to information. We can Google whatever we want, we can go to libraries, consult encyclopedias, we can consult big sources of data. But just knowing a lot of stuff doesn't necessarily mean we're going to have any kind of insightful understanding of what we know. And creativity requires insight, not just knowing what is currently known. If we can't develop a particular perspective on that information it's unlikely that we're going to be able to use all that information to reach creative outcomes. Another misconception is that creativity is really just about discovery. It's through the creative, insights can lead to discoveries, but it's also true that you can sort of force discoveries by randomly combining different things that you know and sort of looking under every nook and cranny and searching for solutions to problems. But doing so at random, again without any sense of what you're looking for or why you're looking for it or any kind of insightful understanding of what you know and why you know it. So, creativity again doesn't just happen because you know things, and it doesn't necessarily happen through this sort of rote sort of process of combining different pieces of information. What you really need is insight. And so, all of the research that's been done on creativity points to a few important conclusions. One is that we can be more creative and we can reach more creative outcomes through a deliberate process. We don't necessarily need to be creative geniuses and we don't necessarily have to just wait around for creative insights to occur at random. So, what we're going to turn to next is really a deeper understanding of the creative process so that you can use that process and go through that process over and over again systematically to reach creative solutions in a predictable way rather than just waiting for creativity to happen. So, we may have signed up for this class with a few myths about creativity that all revolve around the idea that creativity is out of our control, it's random, it's something the geniuses do. But what we really want to convey is the idea that creativity is a skill that you can learn to be creative through a very systematic process, and that's what we're going to convey to you. And that's what this course is all about, improving your creativity toolkit so that you can be more efficient more effective at being creative. It's not out of your control.
