Scott Berkun: Creative Thinking Hacks

How many were morning people I hate you all creative is for the nighttime in the morning is for recovery from the creative night that's my yeah alright so I'm going to talked about creative thinking the first thing I did talk to you about is a story in 1993 I was a student in college I was a computer science student but I was interested in design and I had the good fortune to work my way into a senior Design studio project class semester long project class I worked on stuff for the whole semester and I worked

in a project team as the computer science guy but contributing to the design project and in the design studio I'd never been in one before hanging out there because my project he would meet there and one day I was hanging out there was working on my own stuff and I saw a guy sitting at a big table big desk shared space kind of thing with this huge sheet of Paper like this big and he's sitting there with it with a pen and he's making boxes and he's doing little sketches box little sketch box will sketch

and sometimes he's moving quickly sometimes he's stopping and he's thinking and I'm just doing my own thing but eventually I'm just intrigued by what is this guy doing he's just making boxes and filling them in and this is like senior design studio like doesn't seem very senior to me at all what he's doing so eventually I go up and I walk over to him and say hey like what are you doing and I notice when I walk over to him these thumbnail sketches he's drawing are actually the same thing just different ideas for the same

thing and it was a design for a Walkman that so she will die am this is the active project in the class I'm sure the second project would have been designing a scroll for somebody but anyway he was designing Walkmans where to put the buttons where to put the Headphones and all this stuff and I saw absently I asked him just like what are you doing and he looked at me and he wasn't annoyed that asking the question but he seems sort of confused as to why there be a question at all when he said

was I'm designing he didn't say anything else and I didn't know the guys was like okay and I walked off I didn't think about it again then I went on in my own career I've worked as a interact designer I've worked as a project Manager I've worked on lots of lots of things lots of lots of creative projects where the whole goal is to come up with ideas for stuff and then build it and then ship it and learn and do that again and every so often I'd come back to that memory about that guy

I've always been interested in creative thinking and understanding how it works and how it's done and reading about it well from an artistic perspective headed musicians and painters come up with ideas and Development and engineers do it and scientists do it and periodically when I read all these books and this literature about creative thinking I think about that guy and I think about that guy because his answer was the right one that where's my screen it's not behind me so over there the answer is that talking about creative thinking and all of these you know

patterns of thought and approaches we could hung up on all this meta stuff when at the end of the Day the word design is a verb it's something you do the word create is also a verb it's something you do it's an activity when he told me he was designing he was right he was sitting there and working and thinking and actually coming up with ideas for stuff that's just all that it is he didn't complain about how how he had Walkman block and he couldn't cope with a design for a Walkman he was just

sitting there and working and I think that's probably The best possible advice that you can start from his creativity is a kind of work it's a kind of effort you burn calories when you are acting creatively it's not something that happens passively to you it's not about a moment or a flash of insight that's really not what creativity is it's a kind of work and if you think about as the kind of work and all the other problems that people deal with all the other situations people get into become much Simpler to manage when you're

stuck on something that's why creativity is hard it's supposed to be hard if it was easy everyone be writing novels and making movies and making plays and designing amazing things because it'd be easy so when you're stuck remember now you're actually be a creator you're facing a challenge you don't know what to do now you're actually in a moment where you're you know the opportunity to actually be professional creative person so I'm Going to talk to you for probably 18 more minutes the first eight minutes are going to be more theory kind of stuff and

in the last 10 minutes we'll be hacks little tricks and techniques and then we'll have open QA and you guys can ask you about specific tricks that you've heard about and you want to know based on all the stuff that I've read and all the research I've done if there's merit to them or particular creative problems that you face you want To hear my opinion of them or if you think I'm a [ __ ] and I'm not worth your time don't ask any questions and you all get to go off and have your day

even sooner okay so the first philosophical thing to know is this phrase that ideas are made of other ideas all ideas are simply the combination of other ideas so I want everyone to say it all ideas are made of other ideas Wow you guys are clearly morning people or your well Cap'n ated because you guys Are very loud all ideas are made of other ideas so that means that if you don't know what to do you're stuck in which Walkman design you've done seven two then you're on number eight what to do take two ideas

for two other things and combine them together and see what happens it might not be good might not be interesting but it'll be a new idea be a new formulation whenever you're stuck it means you're no longer seeing things in components so Break them down into pieces now this little theory it's not nothing revelatory about this but we forget it because usually we hear about some new ideas presented to us as a concrete solid thing and usually this is some mythology about the person who came up with that idea that some of that a flash

of insight and it came to them in a moment a flash of brilliance no one had ever had that idea before which is complete [ __ ] but we hear those Stories we like those stories that romanticizes the idea of creativity but you can find lots and lots of examples in fact I believe all examples of ideas are de Rivel so equals mc-squared theory relativity Einstein did not invent any of the main components of this theory he didn't invent the idea of energy he did not invent the equal sign did not invent the notion of

the speed of light did not invent squaring numbers he didn't invent any of those things What was his what's the significance of his work he found a way to combine those things in a new way they had significant meaning but his idea was based on other ideas this is a diagram of a very famous algorithm does anyone know what it is five four you get a free book three get two books one and this is a diagram for the PageRank algorithm Google's PageRank algorithm billion I guess were disappointed now somebody didn't say it but they

didn't raise their hand sorry They'll post facto credit the whole idea was based on academic papers if you ever read academic papers the bottom they reference all the papers the person who wrote that paper read that was their inspiration for PageRank it took an idea from another medium academic papers and so an opportunity to take that idea and transpose it onto a new medium the web they took an old idea reused it and now they are very wealthy music is a similar story the last my generation was court Of on the cusp of hip-hop and

remixed music and sampling and all that stuff and it's seen as this crime against the creators the original creators have worked a sample stuff and reuse it but the history of music is about reusing stuff this guy is Mozart Mozart ripped off stuff from Bach it's true Mozart did not invent chord progressions he's not invent the piano he did not invent the black keys or the white keys he did not invent the guitar he did not invent Thousands of thousands of things that he used and eventually recycled or regenerated or combined in a new and

unique way to create things that were beautiful and amazing but if you talked to him he would say interesting interesting sidenote about genius and the notion of prodigy you so you ask any of these people who did you learn from who are your inspirations they could always cite people who they who's not in the case of Mozart but in the case of Modern musicians albums that they listen to again and again and again and part of what was going on there is there was a they were internalizing some of those ideas and then when it

came time to create for themselves they had this inventory of ideas to combine and reuse so if ever you're stuck the thing you want to start with is figuring out how to combine and he is in a different way it's about combination so that's part one of my sequence on theory part two is Inhibition there's this very stupid puzzle who has seen this puzzle before okay not that many of you okay I'm going to inflict some stupid on you for the next three minutes for those you have not seen this so there's a phrase I'm

sure all of you ever heard which is think outside the box who hears heard that phrase whoever's ordered that phrase oh you have to come on so it's a stupid phrase I don't like it it comes from this puzzle and usually people use That as like a stupid cliche way to get you to be creative it's sort of like saying so don't be stupid like think outside the box like somehow that's gonna provoke you now into being smart oh I thought we were supposed to be inside the box today I'm sorry I didn't know it

was Wednesday which is out of the box day anyway that that phrase comes from this puzzle and the puzzle is usually get presented you on a piece of paper and you're given a pen and the Goal is that the challenge is with a pen you put able to put the pen down once and you can only draw straight lines four straight lines how can you draw four straight lines such that without raising your pens such that it touches every dot that's the puzzle you think about it for five seconds I'm all over on your head

what you might do don't work by themselves it's not a team project yet team projects are later So the solution which I will show you now is basically the only way you can possibly do it is you have to draw at least one line that is outside of the box and the you know the the intended lesson here is that this there's false constraints in all problems we assume no I didn't tell you how you had to only stay within the lines I didn't tell you a thousand different things we assume them and then we

constrain our ideas based on these made-up assumptions and Creative people as the theory goes creative people are less inhibited about those constraints or they're better at identifying assumptions and saying do we have to do this do we have to do that can we rip this out can we not follow that and by that alone by ripping those constraints out they then find ideas other people won't find so in this case this is the classic solution to the puzzle but it turns out there's other solutions to the puzzle they're even More creative it's possible to do

it in three lines if you go further outside of the box then it's also possible to do it in one line if you make a really fat line I didn't say what size the line was a line is just a you know the distance between two points filled with something right so the the whole theory here this I mean this this goes this goes this is based on very old fairly old psychological theory that we have all The stuff going on in our minds Freud was a big poet about this the the collision between our

subconscious and our conscious minds and the will that we have we want to follow rules and constraints and fit in but then the subconscious that we have it's always Terry against those rules and pushing against them and people who are who would call creatives or who are better being creative they have a better connection between those two things Somehow they're able to connect their subconscious unconscious together in a way that provoked that generates more ideas or better ideas but the simple lesson here though is that as you remove constraints as you remove assumptions even if

you're not any smarter even if you're not any more interesting as a person if you're able to identify those constraints and remove them you will see ideas and ways to solve problems other people won't that's it there are Exercises you can do to help you find the constraints some it's very logical project managing kind of techniques so a lot of creative types never learn them but you can't sit down and make what what are we assuming about this design problem make a list of them then go through and go through them a second time and

go can we get rid of this one can't go for that one get rid of that one if you find one or two constraints that everyone else is assuming or true That or not that's your gold mine now you have a whole weight a whole direction to go that you wouldn't have seen before the third thing the theory wise has to do with environment and one of the stupid annoying things about most books and lectures about creative thinking that we try to model our behavior on other creatives it's sort of like saying I want to

be different just like that guy I'll be different but just like everybody else and it doesn't work Everyone is different and unique and part of it makes you creative is that you see problems differently you have a different background and if it heritage a different set of experiences and when you bring that to bear on a problem it's your uniqueness that makes things interesting what this means is that you have to pay attention to which environments or what situations you you seem to be the most creative in it's not it's really gonna be what you

want It's not necessarily gonna be like I'm not a morning person it turns out that I might want to be a morning person there might be advantages to working and working more creatively in the morning I can I know from my own habits and behavior I tend any more creative at night therefore if I want to do creative work I have to work at night and the story for some people environment poor for everybody you have to start paying attention to the environments that you End up being more productive creatively and it could be it

could be a cube I'm sure there are some people in the world that this is their preferred place to be it's not mine it's probably not yours but it could be it could be that it's solitude that you work best when you're off alone somewhere in the quiet maybe in nature maybe sitting in a coffee shop where you don't know anyone there's some passive white noise activity going on it could be that it could be that's when You're around other people that you really get your juices flowing and your mind gets active when there's someone

else that you're working with on a problem together you can bounce stuff back and forth that dynamic is how you get empowered and what drives you to do the work of creativity it could be that but there's no one answer to this the only answer is yours and one of the things going to talk about in the hack section or how to figure that some of That stuff out but you have to start by paying attention to your own your own habits and your own your own peaks of creative activity related to this - is

this this doesn't get talked about much in like art school or design school or writing programs but there's a lot of support for the notion that our minds are wired around physical activity and it's called kinesthetics it's the fancy name for but it basically means if you know anyone who likes to go for walks When having a some problem trying to solve they want to go for a walk or they want to walk down the hall or even people who pace when there's something they're working on that's kinesthetics that somehow their mind is more comfortable

and doing certain kinds of thinking if their body is moving and the neuroscience background for this is very simple if you imagine what we were like five million years ago or 20 million years Ago you know little frog like reptilian creatures who really had a hard time surviving all of our brainpower was spent paying attention to our physical environment and figure out how to be agile how to run away from predators and how to collect food or break into things and so our minds the oldest parts of our brains are wired on physical activity and

touching things and feeling things so when you touch and feel things you're Activating parts of your brain that are very old and very powerful and engaging that can help you connect and make your mind work in a more natural way everyone's different Einstein was one of these people who like to walk there's quite a few physicists actually who had this habit Niels Bohr well there was another one that if you wanted to meet with him to talk about some kind of physics project he'd say let's go I'd be like what was like we're going for

a Walk I thought we were working we are working we're going for a walk that was the conversation that would ensue and there's more specific examples of this Jackson Pollock you know he's famous for these elaborate abstract paintings but he became part of the work he actually felt most comfortable standing on top of the paintings that was how he felt he was part of the work and his body and all of his energy could be connected to the stuff that he was making so Environment persistence this is my last bit of theory so we're gonna

switch over to hax in about two minutes so you're bored with the theory stuff you're almost ready for hacks persistence most of the attention around ideas and how ideas work is focused on idea generation and a new generation is not really the hard part it can be for some people can be if you're in a bureaucratic company or a large group it can be a problem then but once you have An idea there's this long road you have to go through to bring that idea to fruition whether that's you know designing a mousetrap or or

building a website or or writing a book or a novel or play the idea for it is important but there's always going to be this long succession of work that involves micro and medium sized level of creativity in order to bring this thing all the way through so this is famous quote that everyone knows is Thomas Edison is one Of these prototypical creative you know thinker guys genius is 1% inspiration and I know internet preparation or perspiration perspiration preparation piece then I represent P it's all about the piece famous quote and there's some truth this

I don't think those numbers are quite right but there's some truth to this but at the same time though this you don't want to and I believe this is true persistence is important but at the same Time is a counterpoint to this which is beating your head against the wall again again again assume that persistence will create an idea for you or create inspiration isn't always true either so how many of you guys know who Tesla is Tesla most of you awesome very cool is that from the movie The Prestige that you guys know him

what's the story anybody know what a Tesla invent oh you guys have been outed as not knowing anything about Tesla anybody Direct-current if you made a radio so any time I used Wi-Fi you should thank mr. Tesla anyway Tesla Edison work together made very different views on the creative process so this is the kind of stuff that Edison would say Tesla said this if Edison had a needle to find in a haystack he would proceed at once to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search I was a sorry witness of

such doings knowing that a little theory and Calculation would have saved him 90% of his labor which is true Tesla was actually probably a much better inventor than Edison crappy businessman lousy marketer probably a better inventor I show both of these stores because persistence is important but there's no reason why you have to pick between working hard or working smart if you're going to do anything creative you're going to do a project you're going to deliver to fruition so other people can See what you made it's going to require both of these things so the

1% 99% thing probably isn't right but the other polarity probably isn't right either so I'm gonna take a sip of water now and then we're going to talk about hacks for 10 minutes okay now hacks there are lots of these things there are lots of these things depend on your questions I could probably offer a lot more I've spent a lot of time researching how different Creatives in different fields how they I deal with these different problems I usually teach a class at the University of Washington and creative thinking and some of these hacks came

out of that too just by spending a semester talking about ways to develop ideas and seeing where people got stuck some of these hacks came out of just that it's that experience to hack number one this is the most important one is keeping some kind of journal all of us given how our Brains work and how our how neurons function the fact that we survive and you exist means that there are ideas going through your brain all the time all the time conscious unconscious semi-conscious drunk sober I usually go into your brain all the time

some of those IDs are good a lot of them are bad but some of them are good the problem the primary problem most of us have is that we depend on our memories for remembering our ideas our memories are Awful you know the movie memento that's us I think about you all have notes and like lists of things you want to do and you put them all over the place to keep believing the system's working but really it's not that's us and so the first step as a creative person you're thinking about how to be

more productive with your ideas or capture more of them you have to record them somewhere this was the first assignment people in this Class got everyone had to keep an idea journal and that meant that any time they had an idea about anything something want to make for dinner an idea for a movie something about the project they were working on something about it could be anything it doesn't matter write it down write it down write down your ideas capture them somewhere and then a day goes by a week goes by two weeks go by

now you have an inventory of all the stuff that's been Going through your brain that has been recorded through the wonderful technology of writing now your ideas persists a lot of they're going to be awful they're not even going to make sense to you especially if you write in your journal and you're drunk which is some I do I don't know that guy okay it's kind of scary but yeah the ideas I'm thinking now haven't even been junk with me anyway it's now captured for you and You can look back on it whenever you like

and you'll find stuff that's really good and really meaty that you can then pull out and go I'm gonna work on this now it has to be some way that you hold on to and persist your ideas how many of you currently keep some kind of idea Journal how many so keep your hands up Wow okay more people more hands went up this Bazaar those you keep your hands up if your journal is digital drop your hand fascinating Okay so moats just so I'm gonna report back to you most people you can drop your exam

sorry the end of the talk your hands would still be up but I feel awful most of you who raised your hand with a keeping a journal its physical I mentioned before by kinesthetics there's definitely something our fingers have the one of the most dense areas of nerve endings in our body that means our brains are activated by when we use our fingers When you're writing you are using your hands and fingers the way your brain is processing whatever you're doing or writing is going to be different it doesn't guarantee again everyone is different it

doesn't guarantee you're gonna have better ideas when you write with your hands I mean instead of typing on a computer but you probably will it's at least worth it worth an experiment to try and I'll talk more about switching modes later anyway this is a stack of All the journals of people in the class had and the assignment really was no one's here to look at it I was the only thing I would do is the flip through the book at the end of the semester see if you had at least 20 pages which was

about the equivalent of you know two pages a week for the class that's all that I cared about volume and part of the idea here is also about inhibition that unlike your work projects or things you work on with other people your Journal is just for you there's no reason to be afraid to put stuff in it if you're afraid of your own ideas then your problem is not about creativity your problem is you need therapy of some kind like because if you're afraid of what's going on your mind so what's going your mind all

the time you just now see it it's written down that's a different kind of problem you have to want why you so inhibited about just these are just Ideas if you're a creative person that's something you have to learn to let loose have some safe place to let it loose you might not want to show that to your kids or your spouse your friends or your parents but yours private security can lock it if you want put it under your bed but ever you want to do that's yours and that keeps your mentality fresh now

that ideas you're open to your own ideas hack number two is about escaping how many of you have gotten a good idea in The shower how many of you shower bathe bathing of some kind good it's important for professional longevity bathing the reason why we get ideas in the shower there's a couple of reasons one is one of the few places we have that's actual you get actual solitude there's nothing coming at you there's no inputs there's just relaxing water no one's talking to use nothing look at you close your eyes you actually calm most

of our Days now we're not very calm we're interrupted by everything we consume all these different kinds of media lots of stuff is thrown at us all the time sometimes were listening to television while we're on the web we're doing all the stuff it's coming in when there's that much input it's not harder for your brain to give you output it's just it's just that simple the more theoretical way to think about what goes on in the shower it's a book called flow by the Guy's name I can't pronounce Csikszentmihalyi I practiced it five times

but I've forgotten it now anyone know how to pronounce his name thank you you get a book whoever said that yeah you after the talk anyway his whole theory about this stuff based on studying people he gave people pagers and he paged them and find out what their state was they did all this research to figure out when people were in flow which we would call you know Being in the zone or being very creative and he identified that our brains process ideas and process problems in three stages roughly in three stages the first stage

is understanding your learning about the problem trying to figure out how it works you've gotten all the inputs that you can about the problem you could come with a couple of ideas then you're kind of stuck now the second stage is incubation I mentioned before about inhibition That our subconscious and conscious minds have to work as a pair most the good stuff comes from your subconscious mind that's where all of these adjacent pairs are found all these weird connections are made between things it's your subconscious mind it's your subconscious mind has to process this stuff

for a while before it can give you a good idea it's any time when you're not actually working on the problem that's why you may work on something in Your stuck and then three days later you're comping the solution like where'd that come from where it came from what's your subconscious brain it wasn't the muse or wasn't some wasn't some you know angel on your shoulder wasn't some mystical thing that was your subconscious brain processing this stuff and how this links back to the shower stuff when you're in the shower your subconscious mind tends to

be kind of quiet it's sort of like the you know the Smart but quiet friend that you have if you're in a busy conversation won't say very much but if everyone gets quiet for a minute they'll say the most brilliant thing that's what your subconscious mind is like whereas your conscious mind is like your pushy friend that always drives the conversation tells everyone to do all the time that's your conscious mind that's what you're doing all day I'm gonna go here gonna go here to do this gonna do that So when you're in the shower

it's one of the few opportunities that your subconscious mind gets a chance to speak there are other ways to get your subconscious mind to speak for some people it's doing things like improv games you do Improv Theater where you're working and you're making decisions fast enough that your conscious mind can't keep up and you're just doing stuff that's raw and open for some people it's intoxicants alcohol lowers your Inhibitions subconscious mind now is a easier chance to get it stuff surfaced that's the shower story so think about other opportunities for your subconscious mind of surface

meditation for some people it's just it's athletics when you go for a run your body's active kinesthetic wise it's going along your mind is free and boom now you have your idea so think about ways to allow your subconscious mind to get a chance to to participate hack number three and There's only three more hack number three this is particularly good when you're working with other people when you work with other people there's often politics in the room but who's gonna say what brainstorming is challenging most speakers of politics I'm afraid of what they're gonna

think if I say this idea my boss is here and I want a promotion so I don't want to say anything that's going to embarrass me because then they promoted all this politics about Other people and it takes a while before people are open enough to actually say what they're thinking so there's this trick called inversion it goes by other names but the inversion trick is basically this that when you have a specific problem you're trying to solve let's just say for example that you were working on coming up with a new design for a

mobile phone come with a fantastic user experience from old phone the task here to invert it would be let's design The worst possible user experience for mobile phone so we'll be some of the features and the worst possible experience for mobile phone worse possible really big has a cord weighs 50 pounds rotary has spikes coming out randomly calls people you don't like in the back and you in the back what do you got drop calls it drops every call extremely slow hub AC adapter you got one oh nice you got to go back and forth

Nice yeah how about gives you rabies why not right empties your bank account every third call so so so look I we'd never met before right I haven't I've ever met any of you before I don't think not many of you like why is that so easy and fun everyone's laughing in ten seconds why freedom why is it free there's what no long answers so the fact that the goal is to be bad is liberating in a way that the goal of making a great idea is now isn't it almost never and Once you have

this vibe in a room with a couple of other people where people are laughing and they get a shoe the sense of humor people are being daring and see how far they can go and building on each other that's exactly the vibe you want when you flip it around now go okay now let's hope it around and talk about the best design you've established the kind of dynamic you want by playing this little stupid game which is actually gonna be very entertaining for like five Minutes maybe and you've let you flip it around you've created

a vibe now that most facilitators and managers of brainstorming sessions try for hours to generate and never do because it's way too serious so invert when you invert the goal it gets silly and fun everyone feels liberated and open you get sense of humor in the room and now you get the right tone switch it back over sometimes actually if you keep a list of all the Really crazy bad ideas and you when you're done you switch over you can look at those things and go if we inverted this maybe maybe there's a good idea

there maybe instead of giving you rabies it gives you vaccines there's actually I'm pure laughing but there's actually I heard on the radio they were talking about building Geiger counters into cell phones so there's a way you could like there's other things you can add to cell phones to give it anyway I'm just saying It's not that ridiculous if you're actually brainstorm and ago take these messed up weird ideas that are really sick and twisted and then flip try to flip them over maybe something good comes out of that number four is partnering this is

kind of a cheesy one it's sort of obvious people forget this that many of the great legendary inventors and creators in every field despite how much credit they got for being a prodigy and solo artists solo Creator they had partners they at least had teachers every prodigy in the world had dozens of teachers that taught them a lot of what they knew so if you feel like you're not creative enough you want to boost your creativity find a partner to work with on a project if you can't find a partner find a rival you don't

need to know the rival just pick someone who you want to compete with I'm not off from I'm not saying like that's the end goal of creativity it's the show it Shows someone up and rub their face in it you know I made this painting it's better than yours that's not what I'm saying but you can't there are many many examples of creators who had rivalries that they used to fuel their work da Vinci and Michelangelo really hated each other it did not like each other part of the reason why Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel

who's not a painter he hated painting was because da Vinci was held up to be the best artist in Italy And he was a painter so Michael and she was like yeah he's a painter I'll show you how to paint Sistine Chapel I'm not saying it's the healthiest attitude to have in life we're not talking about healthier we're talking about creativity okay different morning lecture series right number five is failure there's this weird dynamic between for many creative people between the dreams and ideas that we always have like we're things we Strive for things we

wish for things you want to create in the world and this extreme sensitivity to rejection it's a this very polarized and dangerous I don't know how to diagram it dangerous set of things because the bigger the idea is the more rejection you likely need to face to get that idea to go anywhere so part of the practice of being a creative person and developing ideas he's just saying you know what today I'm gonna do something fail I'm Just gonna fail I'm gonna find a challenge or a problem that is so hard that I fail and

if I haven't I can't wear the last time I have failed at something even if it's just a sketch or a diagram or whatever the low fidelity early thing is in your field the last time you did one of those it just didn't work at all if you can't remember that then you're being a chicken you're not pushing yourself the whole idea of the creative process is about failure it's About recognizing I'm gonna sketch and I'm gonna learn I would do another sketch do another sketch to do the sketch into the process the sketches are

going to get better towards solving this problem in this idea so find a way to fail and if you're looking for partners find partners who also understand this notion of failure until you actually ship the thing until you put the painting up on the wall until you put the movie in the theater or the book in The store you're not done yet so it's not really a failure you're failing all along the way when you're creating because everything you do is never complete until you reach the final page we reach the final version of the

thing so find ways to fail this is long history of this confused perception of great artists that they never fail they did everything perfectly but if you read the journals and the the actual evidence the Digga the evidence of how they Worked they fail all the time some of them are better at dealing with it with it than others and some of them have better language about it than others does one quote I want to read you from the famous architect Christopher Alexander who's heard of Christopher alley Wow he's old now I guess which makes

me old okay I'll read the quote anyway Architects are good visualizers but most of the time we're wrong even when you're Doing good you're making nine mistakes for every success the more at each stage you can experience to contemplate the reality the more it will give you feedback and you'll be able to intelligently develop it create a process Christopher Alexander was a little bit of like not a blowhard but a wordy kind of guy Hemingway said this first draft of everything is [ __ ] full-stop have anyway like four words first draft is always going

to suck That's part of the deal in making stuff everyone's first draft sucks a lot of artists don't want to admit this Michelangelo didn't want him at this he burned all of his sketches didn't want the world to know about his sketches he wanted the world to perceive this just them one day he went into the studio and just carved a thing just from his mind [ __ ] not how it worked he's sketched in practice and studied and he'd sit and look at the sculpture Before he would start or when he was stuck and

he'd sit and stare at it and study it you could argue on those days he was failing gosta argue in those days he was learning because he was failing he didn't know enough about how to take the next step so he was paused but he did not stop like the guy saw in the design studio he was still making diagrams he was still thinking what else can I do what else can I do long history of famous things that when they were First made everyone thought was stupid and [ __ ] the Eiffel Tower they

wanted to tear it down before was completed completely unpopular construction now it's the most famous thing in Paris one of those famous objects in the world van Gogh everyone told them all our critics all the artists he knew used too much paint you're using too much paint that's they told van Gogh too much paint it's nice and everything but it's kind of fuzzy I Mean that's the feedback you got first stuff you're gonna there's no way around that all the great things in the world that we look now is like relics that are perfect when

they were created were rejected people did not see them yet last hack for you is switching modes so I've mentioned a beautiful ways to think about thinking that kinesthetic maybe moving around maybe it's your environment ideas can be represented in many different ways you Can represent an idea through words you can represent an idea through pictures through sketches through drawings to diagrams through wireframes you can adjust you can you can express any through sound some ideas are easy to express in different mediums so if you're stuck in one medium pick a different one there's lots

of really interesting examples of this and how we teach children things so this is the famous diagram that everyone's been Taught about you know how electrons work right this is not actually what electrons look like this is not this is not a actual photo but this way to represent an idea has a lot of power it's more powerful and conveys a lot more information than what the actual thing looks like that's one way to switch modes I've read a lot about stories of invention and how they did it double helix that's what this is the

diagram of the guys who've trying to Figure out the guys in women who are trying to figure out DNA and how it worked they were doing all the experiments they weren't working quite right they needed a model a model to express their vision for how they thought it worked and this was the model that helped them actually break through and figure out how it worked these are not artists these were not sketches or designers there was a visual representation they tried a few other Ones but this is the one that allowed them do the right

experiments that proved or that demonstrated how DNA actually functioned so representation if you're stuck find a different way to represent the problem sometimes just going to another person who even may know nothing about the problem and trying to explain it to them will force you to represent the problem differently your own mind trigger I got it now this happens to me all the time I go to someone asking for advice I hate asking for advice and like got this problem and I start whiteboarding it halfway through before they know what the hell I'm talking about

like I got it because the process of explaining it changes how I think about the problem so try it out you have to apologize then because people feel like you that they wait you wasted their time but actually the hell perfectly just not in the way that they expect it to help me that's my Last one this is the pretty picture of a double he looks the kind of thing so my last thing for you is creativity the kind of work that's the foundation if you stop mr. metha lobs romanticizing and mythologizing about ideas all

the things that you want out of your creative life and your work are much easier to obtain these are my references and I'm happy to take questions now all right no questions thanks cut in the back Communicate that in a like you're looking for a job I need to move around well I'm talking or I work best at night and your hours are 9:00 to 5:00 how do you what are the recommendations for trying to stop you establish yourself and work with other people who don't have those similar okay so the question was what do

you do if you know how you like to work you like to work you know I don't know like to work at night and it's a 95 job what do you do I think You're probably a mismatch just if you're in a place that's that restrictive about how you work the best environment possible environments are about results you're hired to achieve a result and the more creative the environment the more likely it's gonna be oriented that way I think I don't think I would bring it up in a job interview I think I bring it

up when I had a job offer we have a job offer they've expressed based on what we know About you we think you're a good fit for the job and they don't say I think I'm a good fit for the job too but the way I work best is X let's negotiate how we can accommodate X does not need to come up until then bringing up until then is just making your bargaining power or your your appeal as a candidate lower so a lot of stuff you don't say during a job interview right I think

that that would be one of them I wouldn't even bring it up I would pay Attention of the other people in the work environment and what they're like and how flexible does work environment seem I have a book for you for asking a question do you want the the orangey one or the white one what rg1 okay you have to come up here and get it though cuz I'm not coming over there other questions in the green do is you repeat the question right do I ever worry about running out of Ideas no I I

do ever worry about running out of good ideas maybe but the thing is though that's part of why the journal is useful that you never know where an idea is gonna fit you really never know but if we write down until it's captured somewhere you never that happens to me so I'm primarily a writer it's probably my primary creative medium is writing all write stuff down all the time I talk to y'all write stuff down listening to the radio I write stuff down and it'll Happen every so often all the time we're talking like Oh

like I'm writing this essay now and there was that thing it was about a month ago and I now this thing that didn't know what to do with now I have a place for it it's now possible is it likely no but is it possible yes I think if you're paying attention and you're you're you're capturing when it's in your brain you will never run out of ideas but a good idea is a different Thing yes I am a compulsive journaler I am not very protective of them I don't really like that for me it's

the process if I lose one of these journals I didn't remember what was it in anyway but the fact that I am writing stuff down that means I am always paying attention to what's going through my brain I don't I don't throw them away but if I lost one I'm like okay what that means I have to just keep going not know and maybe I should have a better System but I think I would ruin it if I had a system yes yes yes how do you go about doing that okay so how do you

bring creativity to the workplace first thing don't call creativity don't call creativity you don't need that you don't need to like labels we like labels like to be the champion with the flag creative for bringing crew we're bringing design into the whirly the flag you have flags when you're fighting a war and you don't want To fight a war when you're outnumbered you know if you're outnumbered you don't do that you want it you want to you know right you want to account you want camouflage on you want to you want to pay this doesn't

mean to me is like subversive or subversive maybe but you want to be Machiavellian or evil about it but in order to make change happen anywhere it's about power who has enough power to make the kind of change happen that you want have what kind of changes Happened at all ever if you're in an environment that nothing has ever changed the likelihood of you coming in with some philosophy or attitude as an outsider there's a lot of power making that happen is very low if you look in the company you can see evidence a year

ago six months ago this boss and that group changed something okay there's some hope change is possible in the culture I'd go and pay attention how did that person make change happen how did They do it they're just one day show up and work and do it no they probably found out who are their allies in this kind of change who will support them if they've showed the flag like who's gonna be behind them so I pay attention to other kinds of change in your work environment if there's no change at all and status quo

it's like a bank from the 50s and it's all the same forever then it's just it's really really really unlikely no matter how smart or creative You are because the culture just can't the culture just doesn't know how to deal with that but if you see it but but if you see it but if you see examples of change study those examples how do they do it in the culture maybe I had a financial argument they're going to save money if they do X its financial it's about money it's a creative idea but I wouldn't

use that word to save the company money here's how we're gonna do it that's your get your Cow flush and then you follow that and say whatever creative stuff you want but it's about solving a problem that your boss has said is the most important thing that's your ticket yes you're very well dressed so you should get to speak so the question was what do I do I need to reset my mind I again I encourage you don't these are like other people's ways of solving problems that it's like wearing other people's clothes like it's

not really gonna work out it looks great On them and you put it on it's not gonna work I have many exercises definitely one if I go for a run or I go play basketball my body so focus in something in my mind goes through a meditative place like the shower and I find it when I'm stuck on a problem exercise is usually valuable for me usually valuable but other times it's I need to go watch a movie or I need to go get go out with friends and get drunk there's a lot of stuff

in life that Anything that I find is um fully engaging tends to take me out of whatever context I was in and when I come back to the thing I was working on I see it very differently there's no the hack actually we think of the hack to learn for my wife who's a painter and her hack is this if one way to deal with it like you're stuck in a problem problem is to work on two things at the same time you start a project a you're working at a you get Stuck it's like

okay I don't work in a anymore it's too hard I'll work on B you work on B B's B's seems easy because a was hard we're gonna be easy easy he's a hard hard hard I'm stuck on B I really don't want to work and B anymore all of a sudden age hazel-e look really attractive to go back to a hey we're Cannella bit further but now I'm stuck again oh oh okay hey go back to me you're working on both you have an outlet from one project that's another Project it's a pretty slick little

trick the risk is you become a workaholic and you have seven projects you don't talk to anyone anymore but but working multiple projects for some people can be a way to deal with being stuck because it allows you to be stuck and say okay I'm stuck but I still have a way to be productive and not beat myself up for feeling like I'm stuck so that's a trick that might work yeah okay so how to do with creativity on a deadline there's no There's no there's no magic answer I think discipline is really the right

answer that if you know if you have two weeks to you have a deadline two weeks from now and you know you this phase it's the research experimental phase then divide your I'm big on thirds so let's say it's three weeks okay three weeks so I know I need a chunk of time to just explore an experiment that's my first week I have a hard date after that week I'm dumb an experiment and my Second week is gonna be prototyping baby balls have my goals of three different prototypes so I'm still exploring but in this

very structured way and the last week's to pick one direction out of the prototypes and just build it yeah break it down and discipline there's no way around the discipline part but being discipline to go I know I need that time if I don't get that time and then if your schedule is just three days you do the same thing day one is experiment day Two is three prototypes day three is actually build it so it's scales but discipline is the answer yeah so the question was what do you do for too many days how

do you prioritize so a lot of my career I was the team manager guy like a project manager guy and the rule of what project managers do this is really the core of any what any good project manager does is make stack rank lists people show up do this do this there's 30 things my job 1 2 3 4 5 so Here your list of 20 ideas even if you don't like I've done this in my journal I'll say ok what am I gonna write about next and I'll go through it I'll see that I'll

10 and then put them aside and look at them and I go I have no idea with that one is that what I don't know that one sounds promising that one's sort of promising and I could take them and put them in some rough order based on my own intuition of their value that's a place to start from it's also a Kind of discipline thing yes all those ideas are good but unless I find a way to rank them it could even be a random ranking so I know what to start with first then I

will never get out of the exploration experimental phase and the idea generation part is usually not the hardest part so the sooner I can move into actually building something or solving a problem the more informed well then be about maybe I decide this is actually the wrong idea I'm gonna go Back to my list and now have a better way to prioritize it put them in order it could even be random but have an order and then start working on the one that you put first done yes cool that is so amazing how do you

know when to stop right there is no answer there's no it's sort of like how do you know when to get married or how do you know when to break up with someone like how do you know what to break up with someone the reason why there's no good Answer is because there's no way to predict the outcomes of creative challenges there's no way to know for certain that if you work on it for another year it's gonna come to fruition there's no way to know that so the more projects you work on this is

why creativity is a kind of work the more you work on projects and abandoned and come back to some the better you're informing your own intuition about how to make those kinds of decisions which Is the same thing and say about when to break up with someone or when to move to a different city or when to quit a job like there's no way to know you could stay in a job and next month the boss you hated quits could happen you don't know it could be that you quit and then it's like there's no

way to predict the future and that kind of question but wonder how long you persist for there's no there's no easy answer for that I'd say experience though abandon the Project odds are you can come back to the project whenever you like especially it's a personal project or you're a writer or and you're not committed to a contract or something come back whenever you want so quit and see what happens like tweak back to her or text back sir quit now that's what he said yeah in the back this is a good question the question

was why why do I recommend not using the word creativity i it's just the way you make change happen is based On culture so if the verb that gets the most power or gets the most attention is creativity they definitely use it but in most environments the business doesn't pay people and creativity they don't collect creativity from their customers it's usually about profit that's the why the people started the company that's why the people get paid and get bonuses because they're generating revenue for the company the primary index of most Corporations is going to be

capital that's just what a corporation is every culture is different so there's different flavors of there's different things that are emphasized depending on who's leading it but all that I meant was if you're if you're going to be an advocate for change be like a Navy SEAL like but when you land like look at the landscape like where the assets where are the resources who am i allies like you want to pay attention that before You go charging in if you really think the best charge you have cuz you've seen other people in your company

do it is the creativity charge absolutely use that but that's not usually the case usually people come in with the creativity charge or the design charge or and there's tons and tons of them because that's what they personally think is the most important thing and they're passionate about it and they don't Understand where the rest the company isn't as passionate about that thing and so they come in without much power and making an adversarial thing very quickly and if you don't have the advantage power wise you don't want an adversarial situation I'll charge you twice

then no no I don't I think everyone so everyone has both both half to the brain the right brain and left brain thing I think is very stupid I'm not that you're stupid but I think I think that I think It's a very misguided understanding of how why people make decisions and how our brains work you need both parts if you have just right brain you're left playing you don't function everyone everyone uses both parts of their brain yes right okay so the question was have I ever used video to capture ideas and I made

a funny face which makes your point in a way because her point was there's more expression that goes on other than Just the words I've never done that I have try doing that the transcribing thing it just doesn't work for me although I do a lot of public speaking so this is a form that I like and I'm comfortable with but it's a very different form this is the performance this is the output of work and practice and study when I'm writing my journal it's just random half-baked items like I heard I heard Dave say

some cool thing I'm writing it down look at it later I'm Not I'm not as soon as I'm speaking it's just I don't know why I tried it it didn't work for me but if I felt like I wasn't creating up stuff with my journals I needed a better way to I would try something different I don't have that problem I write lots of crappy stuff down all the time but if I didn't have that problem I try something else so it's I made that face that never heard of that before I think about was

An actor maybe I would do that because my form is about it's more visual I don't know I don't think about that more it's a good question I know the movie another would Christopher Walken you guys know the movie all right cool okay it's a cool idea mr. Zog you have a question you've got margins we many of us have been inspired to do these things but we're starting to God's margins we're our deadlines I'm trying to get my Billables a bunch up and [ __ ] there's small people you know though right oh that's

last question gotta go well the I guess the simple answer is I quit my job to try to do this for a living so I didn't know this would work I do I do for a living I write books I speak the last two years and it's been different I'm a man I manage a team for wordpress.com so I've gone back into the fold but for the eight years before that this is what I did I wrote books I gave Lectures I did a little bit of consulting here and there but the short answer was

I quit I decided that I didn't want to work for anybody else I wanted to try seeing if I could write books for a living I didn't know what could work I really had no no faith that would but I've been thinking about all the times this dream at I got sick of the well someday well someday we'll get sick of that I'm like [ __ ] it It's gonna be this day and I might hate it but then I'll come back to the job and career that I had and I'll appreciate it because at

the moment all I'm thinking about is why I'm not doing X I don't want to live a life where I'm spending all of my energy talking about what I'm not thinking what I'm not doing so the short answer is I quit the other answers though which are not specific to me there's a huge history of crew famous Creative people that we know who did their stuff on the side I'm not saying that it's easy I'm not saying that's a good healthy lifestyle again health and creative I'm not sure they go together but there are famous

authors who wrote in prison they're famous authors who wrote in exile like like you know there's some go to commit a felony that's the play right oh hey I'll visit you you know I'll bring it care packages but what you're saying is totally true There's nothing you do time is limited finite time everything use your time for is a trade-off fundamentally for everyone so if you have a family you care about you're like the security of your job you like to go home and then hang out with your friends the time for making a real

project to book a movie a play a thing has to come from somewhere it has to if you want to be good at that thing that means practice practice takes time there's no I mean think of all the Friends friends you have or in bands it's a similar thing they find a way to fit that in that's their Saturday for me we don't watch TV like a TVs and huge exist like you're wanting back in the history like Renaissance and the Enlightenment and why some people were so productive there was no four hours maintenance time

of entertainment per day we have this default assumption that you're guaranteed by law of the universe four Hours of entertainment per day that's not that's not a law you're probably on average I don't know any of you but on average there four hours a day sitting and watching something take an hour out of that everyday hour a day over a year that's a book hour hour over through our day over three years that might be a movie that's hour a day I think anyone can find an hour a day if you're really a dreamer and

sheíll passionate about it that hour is a trade for some other Pleasurable thing you do by choice not an easy decision I'm not saying you know you should not easy to do but the choice is available to you because you're alive you have you have a career probably I'm assuming all your gonna go somewhere I hope to have a career you have choices these choices are available to you throughout the history of the world these choices did not exist for most people on this planet today those choices don't exist for most people you Have those

choices available to you and when you create something this is the crazy thing for me I feel like I'm an old cranky man when I say this but you make a two-minute video you put it online the whole planet can see it you know how insane that is - a film director of like 1955 any of the great legends in any field a writer painter musician even 50 years ago how hard it was for them to get their work out there to be seen by anybody and you can do it Right now on your iPhone

make a video with your friend in the hallway if it's funny enough a thousand people 5,000 people can watch it tonight like that's just mind-blowing to me that opportunity is just sitting there it's not about the ideas anymore that gap between your idea and it actually having an effect in the way that you want it's smaller than ever in history and it's worth thinking about that when you're coming up with excuses For why it's too hard easier than ever easier than ever so go make something I did make it bad that's fun put on YouTube

no one will see it then okay it's fine but you made it and now you learn something you learn what maybe the next thing you want to do is the next you want to do or you might decide that this fantasy you have it's just a dream you don't actually like the reality of being a productive creative person in These more artistic ways you don't actually like the lifestyle a lot of the people we know who were famous didn't like lifestyle either a lot of miserable famous creator people lots of it so anyway sorry as

we fantastic question I hope my answer wasn't too much of a rant one more question one more question yes sir well I'm sorry back up again your work with a group of people okay well okay so there's two different so yeah the question was what do you do You're working on a project team this one person who's always the stinker who kills every idea instantly what do you do about that and there's two kinds of answers the the subversive answer well do the nice three answer first the nitrates are first is you pull them aside

and have a conversation with them hey we're trying to brainstorm here some ideas might take more than three seconds of evaluation to know whether it's good or bad some ideas might so if you decide Within three seconds you are killing good ideas along with the bad ones so next meeting can you try to give a little more space to people just have a conversation this guy might be more powerful you might be senior manager but you're you can have a conversation with anyone you like and you offered us a suggestion that that's that's the upfront

direct way someone should have a conversation with him about or her about that behavior and if You're not the right person to do it maybe your bosses talk to your boss go hey boss we have this meeting with this guy he works for you as well giving you feedback he's hard to be creative with what should I do can you talk to him should I talk to him involve the people who are trying to make you successful in helping the problem that's the nice friendly and upfront politically correct way the subversive way is find a

way to have the Meeting without him don't call it a meeting this is again like the banner thing don't call it a meeting just somehow you and two or three other people end up a coffee every morning in some other place somehow it just happened I don't know I'm there you're here hey maybe we should talk about that idea thing okay let's do that great and then you show up to the meeting and the three of you already agree on one of the ideas now the power dynamic is very Different the what that conversation is

like is very different worth to try anyway if you have other questions for me my in from yeah my stuff's up there I love questions that's how I learned I really stuff I got wrong send me mail ask me a question happy to answer that way and thank you for coming