Drugs

After bringing up the Beatles is a good time to talk about drugs and creativity. After my first lecture on creativity as a new graphic design teacher, one of my students asked, "What about drugs?" Many artists have extolled drugs as opening up new ways of thinking and new perspectives. People who are open and curious will naturally be open to and curious about drugs. The danger is addiction. An addict can no longer be creative without the drug, and the side effects eventually lead to health problems and possibly death. Addictions destroy relationships and stunt your growth as a human being. Taken to the extreme, addicts commit immoral and illegal acts. This blog is loaded with healthy ways to increase creativity.

Creative Serendipity

The Beatles are a case study in how to live a creative life. The Beatles Anthology provides insight into their way of thinking through their own words. They were curious, playful, open to new ideas and new experiences, always looking for something fresh to bring to their music, unwilling to go stale. Here I will relate two anecdotes that illustrate how a creative frame of mind recognizes an accident as a breakthrough.

Paul McCartney on the cover of Rubber Soul: "You know that cover where we look stretched? That was the kind of thing that would happen then. We were all very into that kinda random, little, exciting thing that would happen. The photographer was Bob Freeman and had taken some pictures round at John's house. . . . Back in London, he was in someone's flat and . . . he had a little carousel of slides and he had a piece of cardboard stuck up on a little chair that was album-cover-sized. He was projecting the photographs exactly onto it cause you could imagine exactly how it would look then as an album cover. We had just chosen the photo and said, that one looks good, when the card just fell backwards a little bit, and it elongated the photo and it stretched. We went 'Oh, can we have that! Can you do it like that?' And he said, 'Well, yeah, I can print it like that.' 'Yeah, that's it! Rubber Soul, hey, hey!'"

George Harrison on recording backwards: "John had a tape with the rough mix of the backing track to I'm Only Sleeping. By the time he got home, he didn't realize the tape was tails out. He put it on his tape machine and threaded the tail in forward and got it backwards. That's when he came in the next day and said oh, yeah, backwards! We made him turn the tape over and play it backwards. Then John and I, or Paul and I, played guitars, just random notes, and then we reversed the tape to see what we had. That was the first time we had a backwards solo."

A fortunate accident is called serendipity. Creative people see serendipity where others see a mistake.

Copy the Masters

If you want to paint like Van Gogh, copy one of his paintings brushstroke for brushstroke. If you want to improvise like Charlie Parker, transcribe one of his solos note for note. Copying seems like the opposite of creativity, but this exercise will give you insight into the mind of a genius that you can use in your own work. Imitation is not unethical unless you try to pass your work off as someone else's, that is, you commit plagiarism or forgery. Most likely, your own self will shine through whatever you do.

The Ramone's wanted to write a song in tribute to the Beach Boys, and they came up with "Rockaway Beach"--pure Ramones and one of their greatest hits. Now I wasn't there, but they certainly listened to a lot of Beach Boys tunes and covered many of them before crafting their own original. The Ramones themselves influenced many musicians, including the Clash. Listen to their first hit "White Riot" to hear the Ramones influence and the seeds of the unmistakable Clash sound.

No one is too good to be able to learn from a master. The better the teacher, the better the student.

Example: Olympic Diving Camera

Creative people are curious and seek out new information and new experiences. The more ideas you have floating around in your brain, the more raw material you have for creative expression. Here is an example:

"On TV, a diver walks out onto a platform. The camera fixes on him. He waits. He leaps. And then--somehow--the camera stays with him as he plunges. In the instant it takes him to break the water's surface, the picture suddenly cuts to an underwater shot--and we watch in disbelief as the dive culminates in a burst of bubbles.

"The [DiveCam] is based on the brilliant insight that objects fall at the same rate regardless of mass. A Tuscan named Galileo came up with it about 400 years ago. . . . It's sophisticated, yes, but only because it's simple. They put the camera into a pipe and drop the camera.

"The idea for this wizardry came to David Neal, now NBC's Olympic production supervisor, in what he recalls as a Isaac Newton moment. It was in the lobby bar of the Ritz Carleton 13 years ago in Atlanta ahead of that city's Olympics. He and an associate has been to the diving venue where they had climbed the 10-meter platform.

"'When you stand up there,' he says, 'it makes you marvel at what these athletes will do. We were thinking: What must it be like to plummet from that height? How can we capture that sensation?'

"At which point the apple landed on Mr. Neal's head: 'Why not let gravity do the work?' On the requisite cocktail napkin, and in keeping with Sir Isaac's univeral laws, he sketched a cartoonish doohickey. . . .

The DiveCam has 53 feet of custom-extruded aluminum piping. "The falling camera rides a rail on the inside of the pipe. A glass strip runs along the pipe's full length; the camera takes its picture through the glass."

--Barry Newman, The Wall Street Journal, August 13, 2008

When Linus Pauling taught at Cal Tech, [almost*] all of his exams were closed book. He maintained that only what you have in your memory bank is available for creative thinking. If Mr. Neal didn't know Newton's laws of motion, he wouldn't have had his flash of insight.

[*see comment]

Quote: "All things are created twice," says Stephen R. Covey

"There's a mental or first creation, and a physical or second creation to all things.

"Take the construction of a home, for example. You create it in every detail before you ever hammer the first nail into place. . . .

"Then you reduce it to blueprint and develop construction plans. . . .

"You have to make sure that the blueprint, the first creation, is really what you want, that you've thought everything through. Then you put it into bricks and mortar. . . . You begin with the end in mind.

"Through imagination, we can visualize the uncreated worlds of potential that lie within us."

—from The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

The power of visualization is this: anything you can imagine you can make real, constrained only by the natural laws of the universe. Use this knowledge to travel down many roads and imagine many possible outcomes until you find the one that feels right. Work out the details in your mind and save a lot of time in the execution.

Your power of mental visualization is the most important creative skill you can develop.