The Creative's Mindset

What does the word “creativity” mean to you? Do you think of creativity as a trait only some people are born with? A skill you occasionally use to solve problems? Or a way of being and thinking that shapes your day-to-day life? The psychologist Robert Sternberg studied the lives of successful creative people and found that all the creatives he studied had one thing in common—they consciously chose to live a creative life. Sternberg makes the importance of “deciding for creativity” clear in this excerpt from an interview in American Psychologist:

If psychologists wish to teach creativity, they likely will do better to encourage people to decide for creativity, to impress on them the joys of making this decision, and also to inoculate them for some of the challenges attendant on this decision. Deciding for creativity does not guarantee that creativity will emerge, but without the decision, it certainly will not.

—Robert Sternberg, “Creativity as a Decision.” American Psychologist, May, 2002.

Creativity isn’t a tool you occasionally pick out of your toolkit or a switch that you turn on and off. It’s a continuous, disciplined approach to nurturing, exploring, and developing ideas. Deciding to make creativity a core pillar of your life changes your relationship to the world around you, it changes how you prioritize and spend your time, and (perhaps most importantly) it changes your long-term relationship to your creative work. A life centered around creativity requires the adoption and cultivation of what I call the creative’s mindset. Creatives, Sternberg has found, tend to:

• Redefine problems in new ways as they work toward solutions

• Take sensible risks

• Accept failure as part of the creative process

• Question and analyze assumptions

• Challenge the status quo

• Strive to overcome obstacles

• Tolerate ambiguity

• Believe in themselves

• Delay gratification

• Love what they do

• Seek environments that foster creativity

• Defy the crowd

• Invest in their intellectual growth

• Continuously enhance their domain expertise and skills

The creative’s mindset is a particular type of mindfulness that’s focused on understanding and revealing the possibilities in life and developing the discipline required to realize those possibilities in the work you create and share with others. It’s based on the understanding that creativity is a continuous process of questioning, exploring, problem solving, and personal growth, not a hat you put on to signify that you’re now thinking “creatively.”

Beautiful Questions

Sustaining the creative’s mindset is difficult—we lose touch with the creative impulses that sparked our early explorations and work, our energy ebbs, our attention is constantly diverted by the new new thing… And yet, many artists maintain a high level of creativity and productivity throughout their lives. What pulls them away from the noise of the day and the distractions of the night? The answer is “innovative questioning.”

Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question.

—E. E. Cummings (poet), Introduction to New Poems (1938)

Cummings’ provocative phrase “a more beautiful question” inspired the title of journalist Warren Berger’s book A More Beautiful Question, which explores the power of big, ambitious questions.

A beautiful question is an ambitious yet actionable question that can begin to shift the way we perceive or think about something—and that might serve as a catalyst to bring about change.
—Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question

Warren emphasizes that beautiful questions are generally not the broad, open-ended questions that typically drive philosophical and spiritual inquiry such as:

• Why are we here?

• How does one define good?

• Is there life after death?

Questions like these certainly inspire artistic lives and work, but open-ended questions like these are too broad to lead to action. We’re typically inspired by questions we believe we can eventually answer—or partially answer. One of the hallmarks of a well-formed beautiful question is that it can have multiple answers. You may be familiar with the late Chick Corea, an endlessly innovative jazz keyboard player and composer who spent a lifetime finding new ways to answer the question “How can I, an Italian-American, combine my twin passions, jazz and Spanish/Latin music in new ways that honor and expand both traditions?” Chick didn’t answer the question once and move on—he spent a lifetime re-inventing and re-visiting his “solutions”: the compositions, arrangements, and bands he created as he explored the possibilities in his beautiful question.

Why? What If? How?

Ask yourself an interesting enough question and your attempt to find a tailor-made solution to that question will push you to a place where, pretty soon, you’ll find yourself all by your lonesome—which I think is a more interesting place to be.

— Chuck Close (visual artist), as quoted in Inside the Painter's Studio by Joe Fig

Beautiful questions, the kind that motivate us and lead to action, begin with the “Why” stage, or what Berger calls “innovative questioning.” During this stage you’re “confronting, formulating, and framing the initial question in a way that articulates the challenge at hand, and trying to gain some understanding of context.” Not every question has to begin with the word “Why,” but your question has to be stated in a way that both excites you and inspires you to take action.

Here are five questions from Berger that can help you find your “big” idea:

• What stirs me? - To find a “problem” that’s worth devoting your creative efforts to solve, start with a high interest level—meaning it touches on something that matters to you.

• What bugs me? - Frustration is the starting point for many innovations and creative breakthroughs.

• What’s missing? - Whereas the previous question may focus on existing problems or inadequacies, this one focuses on the absence of something—a product that doesn’t exist but should, a need not addressed, a perspective that is underrepresented.

• What do I keep coming back to? - Pay attention to recurring themes that keep coming up in your work or even in your conversation. It may be a sign that your big idea is trying to find you.

• What is ripe for reinvention? - It could be a product but also a classic story, a theme, or a genre.

The Why stage is focused on identifying a need, opportunity, or problem. The next stage, “What If?” is where you begin to develop ideas for addressing the need, opportunity, or problem you’ve identified. It’s the stage where we engage in idea generation (aka “divergent thinking”). For most of us, this is the fun stage of creativity. It’s about possibility, speculation, and “Aha” moments. The What If stage is seductive, especially for creatives: it’s where the innate strengths of creatives listed above shine the brightest. But creativity isn’t just about generating ideas—it’s also about transforming those ideas into reality...

The final stage of Berger’s model is the “How” stage, as in “How do I actually get this done?” It’s about narrowing down your list of ideas and options, testing your ideas, figuring out why an idea isn’t working and trying to fix it. It’s the iterative process of convergence.

In practice, the creative process isn’t usually as linear or predictable as Berger’s “Why/What If/ How” progression, but the model does provide a useful framework for navigating the creative process. As Berger himself notes:

The Why/What If/How progression offers a simplified way to approach questioning; it’s an attempt to bring at least some semblance of order to a questioning process that is, by its nature, chaotic and unpredictable. A journey of inquiry is bound to lead you into the unknown (as it should), but if you have a sense of the kinds of questions to ask at various stages along the way, you’ve at least got some road markers. Indeed, this is the beauty of “process” in general: It may not provide any answers or solutions, but, as one design-thinker told me, having a process helps you to keep taking next steps—so that, as he put it, “even when you don’t know what you’re doing, you still know what to do.

Innovative questioning is one of the essential elements of the creative’s mindset. Questions that can be acted on generate useful problems. Think of your questions as fruit-bearing trees: the fruit are the engaging problems you occasionally pick off the tree. Problems that are sweet to bite into. Problems that sustain you. Problems that you keep returning to, with pleasure.