The Secret to Creativity

A very intel­li­gent man once said,

The secret to cre­ativ­ity is know­ing how to hide your sources.

That per­son was Albert Einstein.

Recently, I received a email from a col­league who very kindly, com­pli­mented my work. He then went on to write:

I don’t know the sta­tus quo between fel­low ren­der­ers, but if it is any­thing like the archi­tec­tural com­mu­nity then there is a free flow of infor­ma­tion and knowl­edge tem­pered by the fact that our peers and friends are our com­peti­tors.  If you wouldn’t mind talk­ing to some­one who is a few years your junior, then please feel free to email me.

First, let me add by say­ing that “a free flow of infor­ma­tion” and it being “tem­pered” are two, totally dif­fer­ent con­cepts. You can­not have a “free flow” of infor­ma­tion if it’s being lim­ited in the first place.

When I started out as a graph­ics artist, I read all the books, online tuto­ri­als, and forums that I could find. I taught myself every­thing because I couldn’t afford sev­eral thou­sands of dol­lars in classes at the time. The infor­ma­tion that existed out on the web was fairly lim­ited. As I joined forums, I would start ask­ing ques­tions of other artists whose work I admired — hop­ing that they would part with a morsel of their tech­niques so that I could learn from them.

More often than not, I was met with a flat-out refusal. Artists sim­ply didn’t reply. A step up from that were the peo­ple who replied, but for one rea­son or another didn’t fully explain how or what they did to achieve an image. A good por­tion of their lack of expla­na­tion I blame on them not being able to clearly com­mu­ni­cate to another per­son. These artists that I’d admire could go through the process, but in order to dis­cuss their meth­ods, I found that they often lacked the “social­iza­tion tools” to break an idea or tech­nique down into sim­pler terms.

This brings me to my sec­ond Albert Ein­stein quote (which has often been mis­quoted and paraphrased):

It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all the­ory is to make the irre­ducible basic ele­ments as sim­ple and as few as pos­si­ble with­out hav­ing to sur­ren­der the ade­quate rep­re­sen­ta­tion of a sin­gle datum of experience.

In other words, try to keep things as sim­ple as pos­si­ble. The major­ity of peo­ple in this world strug­gle with break­ing down com­plex ideas into their step-by-step components.

I’d like to add another point to some artists’ per­ceived “lack of assis­tance” in tutor­ing oth­ers. Some peo­ple are sim­ply busy, or they might even be lazy. How­ever, time  and expe­ri­ence has taught me that if someone’s work is really good, then there’s prob­a­bly a good chance that they are sim­ply very busy.

Another point worth men­tion­ing is that other artists may not want to get involved with your prob­lems. On many occa­sions, I’ve encoun­tered sit­u­a­tions in which you start help­ing some­one out, and you’ll find your­self spend­ing weeks try­ing to solve some­body else’s prob­lem that wasn’t even your own to begin with. Could you blame some­one for not want­ing to help you out? I’m sure that most peo­ple have much bet­ter things to do with their free time.

Last but not least is com­pe­ti­tion. Some view com­pe­ti­tion as healthy, and oth­ers view it neg­a­tively. The fact is that most of us strug­gle in this world. Not every­one is out to become rich, or if they are — they’re often strug­gling to even get to that level in the first place. Greed aside, there are those of us whom sim­ply want to put food on our tables and even­tu­ally retire some day. All that we ask for is that we try to enjoy our jobs, and that we try to live com­fort­ably within our means.

If I told you that “I knew the secret to becom­ing rich overnight”, would you want to know? Of course you would.

If I said, “I know of a method to press a but­ton and out pops a remark­able piece of art instantly”, would you want to know that too? Yes.

How about, “my restau­rant has a sig­na­ture dish that peo­ple come to try from all around the world.” Would you want to know that recipe? The bet­ter ques­tion is, “would I be will­ing to share my recipe to you?” If I give you the recipe, than oth­ers will be able to quickly repro­duce that dish, and I will prob­a­bly harm my own liveli­hood. I’m not try­ing to be a “greedy” by not shar­ing, but rather I’m try­ing to pro­tect myself and busi­ness from falling apart. Every­thing I worked towards revolves around this one dish, and to give it away would be suicide.

There’s a con­cept that dates back to the time of early man, in which a per­son learns over a period of time the tech­niques used to get to a cer­tain point of exper­tise. It’s called an appren­tice­ship. A per­son sim­ply doesn’t pick up a ham­mer one day and declares them­selves a black­smith the next. Does a mas­ter black­smith know some secret tech­niques to achieve cer­tain results? Yes, a mas­ter prob­a­bly does.

The same con­cept of appren­tice­ship applies to almost every cre­ative field. A per­son start­ing out should prob­a­bly learn the under­ly­ing tech­niques to get from Point A to Point B. This in turn gives them a bet­ter under­stand­ing of the entire process, and will help them appre­ci­ate the beauty and sim­plic­ity of these short­cuts later on. It also gives the appren­tice the tools needed to help solve other issues instead of just rely­ing on this “one trick pony.”

In today’s world, a lot of peo­ple think they are enti­tled to a hand­out. In part, I blame this on impa­tience and shorter atten­tion spans. Some peo­ple sim­ply don’t want to go through all of the hard work to get to the end result. How­ever, I had to strug­gle all of these years through hav­ing to teach myself to get to where I’m cur­rently at,  so why shouldn’t you? Isn’t that only fair?

There is no such thing as a com­plete “free flow of infor­ma­tion.” As long as there are peo­ple in this world, this philo­soph­i­cal con­cept will never truly exist. The shar­ing of ideas and tech­niques are more rep­re­sen­ta­tive of a faucet that has been inten­tion­ally left par­tially open to drain.