January 26, 2026 • 30 mins
We often think creativity comes from sudden flashes of genius within us. But what if ideas actually exist in the world around us — waiting to be discovered and shaped by anyone paying attention?
Creativity expert Dr. George Newman, author of How Great Ideas Happen, explains how anyone can become a creativity "archaeologist," uncovering innovative ideas while avoiding common myths about creativity that keep us stuck.
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin, Hey, Happiness Lab listeners, Welcome back to our new
season on How to Get Unstuck in twenty twenty six.
Over the past few episodes, we've been exploring different ways
to get back on track in the new year, rethinking
how we spend our energy, learning how to deal with
unexpected changes, and getting clearer on our values and what
(00:38):
we really want in life. I hope these conversations have
already given you a few new tools for the year ahead.
But buckle up, because, out of all the episodes we've
had so far in this series, today's conversation has challenged
my assumptions about getting unstuck the most. Today we're diving
into the question of creativity, and more specifically, the stories
we tell ourselves about how creative ideas are supposed to happen.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
Think inside the box, use those constraints to your advantage.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
Today's guest will argue that nearly everything we have imagine
about generating creative ideas is wrong.
Speaker 3 (01:12):
My name's George Newman.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
I'm a professor of organizational behavior at the Rotman School
of Management. It's a University of Toronto. My book is
called How Great Ideas Happen? The Hidden Steps behind breakthrough success.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
George and I are about to unpack some of the
most common myths we have about creativity, and we'll learn
just how important rethinking these assumptions will be for getting
unstuck that happiness lab. We'll be right back after some
quick ads. Creativity expert George Newman and I go way back.
(01:56):
This is such a treat to be able to talk
to you, George, because you know, as you know, we've
known each other for.
Speaker 4 (02:00):
A long time.
Speaker 3 (02:01):
I know, so like it was two.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
Oh my gosh. Before he joined the University of Toronto,
George was a PhD student at Yale. But George has
been thinking about creativity long before his academic career began.
Speaker 3 (02:15):
Both my parents are musicians.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
My brother was a musician too, and I thought I
was going to be a visual artist. So I've kind
of had this lifelong interest in creativity that was like
a big topic of conversation around the dinner table, really
talking about like composers and different musicians. And then when
I became a psychologist and got interested in cognitive science,
(02:37):
it seems like a really natural progression to say, oh, well,
can I study this thing that I've been interested in forever?
Speaker 3 (02:43):
And try to make sense out of it.
Speaker 1 (02:45):
One way it made sense of things is to define things,
which may be an impossible task with creativity. But how
do you define creativity? What is it?
Speaker 2 (02:52):
The definition I like is the process of generating new
and useful ideas. I think everybody associates creativity with newness
and novelty, but the useful part is really interesting, because
you know, it's not just newness for its own.
Speaker 4 (03:08):
Say.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
The idea about creativity is finding these ideas that provide
value to people. And that value could be entertainment, or
it could connect with us emotionally, but it could also
be things like new scientific theories, or new inventions, or new.
Speaker 3 (03:25):
Kinds of technology.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
So it's a really broad definition that I think captures
what this more general process really is.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
I love that definition because this whole series is about
getting unstuck. And I think sometimes when we think about
creativity or getting unstuck when it comes to the creative process,
we think about some artist or an inventor, you know,
sitting there trying to get unstuck. But I think for
so many of us we can get stuck creatively for
very seemingly much more mundane things like what am I
going to cook for dinner tonight, or you know, what's
(03:53):
a new idea at work. All of us have these
moments of generating new ideas that we hope are effective.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
Totally, there's this kind of like association of creativity as
it's messy or it involves finger paint or you've got
to put on a smock. But absolutely creativity applies in
all of these different context right. It could be a
new way of folding your laundry, or a new way
of cooking your favorite recipe, or actually, the last example
in the book is this guy Dan Pashman who wanted
(04:19):
to come up with a better type of pasta, and
so that can be a form of creativity as well.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
So it seems like we have these miss when it
comes to creativity. One is that it's kind of this
big thing. You know, I have to make a painting,
or I have to do something really incredible and invent a
new technology or so on. But another myth you talk
about is how we often think of where creativity comes from.
What's our usual way of thinking about it, and why
is it problematic?
Speaker 2 (04:42):
Well, I think the common wisdom about creativity is that
it's something that comes from inside of us, and there's
this genius myth that there's this lone genius and you're
going to go off into the cabin and wait for
that light bulb moment where that brilliant idea kind of
just springs forth from within. And it's also kind of
how arriving at an idea might feel to us sometimes,
(05:06):
where it just hits you like a lightning bolt and
the shower. But what I argue in the book is
actually creativity is much more like a process of discovery
than doing careful work to kind of uncover something that
is going to be new and useful.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
So in the book, you go through all these pieces
of evidence against this isolated genius light bulb idea, and
one of the ones I found most interesting was this
idea of hot streaks. What are hot streaks and why
do they show that creativity doesn't work in a lot
of the ways we often think.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
It's a super fascinating research DaShan Wang at Northwestern and
his colleagues have found that across a lot of different fields.
So in science, filmmakers artists experience these moments in their
careers where they generate their kind of most impactful work
all at once. And they're short lived, but there seems
(05:54):
to be this flurry of activity. And what he finds
in his work is that those periods of hot streak
moment are actually preceded by a lot of exploration. So
these creators and lots of different disciplines are kind of
poking around, trying out lots of different things before boom,
you know, they hit on that one idea that they're
able to mine and refine further.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
Do you have any favorite examples of these hot streaks.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
One of my favorite is Jackson Pollock, you know, the
artist known for his drip paintings and splattering paint on canvas.
Those iconic Pollock works really came from a very short
period of time, only about three years, and that's really
produced a lot of the work that we recognize.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
I feel like every modern art museum I've go to
has like a bunch of these splatter paintings that it
was just like three years of his time where he
did these.
Speaker 3 (06:44):
It was just three years.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
And the notion there is that through exploration, Pollock kind
of hit on this much deeper principle that he.
Speaker 3 (06:52):
Was able to explore and then exploit.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
You've also talked about this idea of parallel discovery. Explain
this phenomenon why it also kind of goes against this
idea of these isolated genius moments.
Speaker 2 (07:04):
This is a super interesting phenomenon. And actually I was
like shocked when I found this paper from over one
hundred years ago that was talking about parallel discovery and
cataloging just hundreds of instances in which scientists and artists
and across a lot of different fields had hit upon
very similar ideas at the exact same time, and so
(07:26):
kind of challenging this genius myth that oh, I'm just
discovering things come from within, the fact that multiple people
can arrive at the same idea at the very same
time suggests they're actually finding their way to something that's
outside of them.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
I can't help but jump in and nerdily share one
of my favorite examples of parallel discovery. On March twelfth,
nineteen fifty one, the cartoonist Hank Ketchum debuted what would
become the famous syndicated comic strip Dennis the Menace, illustrating
the adventures of a young boy who was constantly getting
into trouble. But on that very same day, the British
(08:00):
cartoonist David Law debuted his own new comic in a
UK newspaper, and that comic was also about an adventurous
young boy, and it was also titled Dennis the Menace?
Is that crazy or what? George's book is filled with
stories like these ones that show there's lots of great
ideas out there just waiting for you, me, or whatever
(08:20):
cartoonist happens to be paying attention to find them. So
it seems we really need to drop this idea of
the isolated genius. George has a metaphor he believes reflects
the science of creativity even better.
Speaker 2 (08:32):
I really like this metaphor of the creative explorer or
even archaeology, where we're exploring a landscape and searching for
an idea. So there's there's notion that ideas are in
some way external to us, and that we can draw
on inspiration and forms of insight and use that to
really propel our creative process. When you're feeling stuck, you know,
(08:55):
look out and see what kinds of things can I
draw from my environment.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
One of the things I was shocked by in your
book is it seems like so many of the people
I think of as like the great kind of light
bulb inventors. They were the ones who also think of
this creative process as exploration. There was this quote from
Thomas Edison that I really loved, which was my soul
called inventions already existed in the environment. I took them out.
I created nothing nobody does. There's no such thing as
an idea being brain born. Everything comes from outside, which
(09:22):
is funny, particularly for Thomas Edison, who I literally think
of as the light bulb, like the light bulb creator,
but also like the light bulb popping up in his head.
But even he was like, nah, I didn't do anything fancy.
I just found the stuff that was already out.
Speaker 3 (09:33):
There, totally totally.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
I mean I think it's kind of like the quintessential example, right,
because we do associate Edison with inventing the light bulb,
and light bulb is kind of our model for creativity.
Speaker 3 (09:46):
And yet Edison employed, you.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
Know, at one point two hundred different people in these
large teams. He called them these Mucker teams, and they
essentially were just exploring space.
Speaker 3 (09:57):
Trying out every different combination they could.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
And even the discovery of the light bulb is really
fascinating because different parts of it had been worked out
for almost over a century, and it was really Edison
at the end working out a very tiny detail which
he largely borrowed from somebody else.
Speaker 3 (10:15):
So there's notion that ideas just.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
Spring forth from nowhere, I think really mistakes a lot
of what's really happening.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
I kind of love George's new take on where good
ideas come from that we don't need to just wait
around for some light bulb moment to show up. Because
if finding good ideas is like excavating a landscape, that
means we can actually hack this process to generate new ideas.
But how do we do that? We'll have answers and
bust even more creativity myths When the Happiness Lab returns
(10:44):
from the break, Creativity expert George Newman argues that we
find our best ideas not by waiting for some muse
(11:04):
to strike, but by engaging in a process that's more
like an archaeological excavation, and that means that interesting new
ideas are to be found outside ourselves, whether that's from
the people we interact with, the places we explore, or
even the songs we listened to.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
So I had been thinking about this exploration discovery idea.
And then I was listening to the Pixies and they
have this song dig for Fire, and something just clicked
for me there where I was like, oh, yeah, like archaeology,
and so I started kind of taking notes about it.
And then the longer I thought about it, it really
(11:40):
started to actually connect and I started learning more about archaeology,
and these different parts of the process really started to
map on to what I was trying to say about creativity.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
And so you've argued that the same process that we
see in archaeology can be applied to creativity and that
can help us get unstuck. And one of the first
parts of these processes is what you've called surveying.
Speaker 3 (12:00):
What's that?
Speaker 2 (12:01):
So surveying is basically getting a sense of the landscape,
in this case, kind of the conceptual landscape, to figure
out where am I, where are other good ideas, what
is a good idea going to potentially look like. So
it's a way of orienting yourself in space, and it's
a big part of the process of archaeology. Right you
(12:23):
have to know where you're digging, otherwise you're just going
to dig up a bunch of empty ground.
Speaker 3 (12:28):
But It's also a really important.
Speaker 2 (12:29):
Part of creativity where you know, if we just start
generating ideas randomly, probably not going to be super productive.
It's about looking to where have good ideas been discovered
in the past, and can I help orient myself towards
those more promising sites.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
And when we start thinking of how we can go
about finding those promising sites, I think this is a
spot where another myth comes in. We assume that, like
I think really creatively, I need to be by myself.
We have this idea that I have to go off
to a cap in somewhere and lock myself up and
just have time by myself to think of all these
good ideas. But you've argued that that's wrong too. How
do we know that?
Speaker 2 (13:05):
Yeah, So a major source of creativity is exposure to
outside information. Even new pictures on the wall and new
kinds of furniture and exposure to new people can be
that trigger which accuse a new idea. So there's some
empirical evidence also a lot of the myths that we
have about those cabin in the woods, like Threau, you
(13:26):
know was probably the most famous one, but he wasn't
isolated at all.
Speaker 3 (13:29):
He was like half a mile from town.
Speaker 2 (13:32):
He threw these parties and was seeing people all the time.
So I think there's this kind of cultural myth that
we're going off in isolation when actuality creatives are really
drawing on their environment.
Speaker 1 (13:43):
Well, I want to pull that out because I've been
to the row House. It was basically a size of
my podcast studio with a little table and so on.
And my understanding was like he went there and just
hung out and like Walden sprung on him. But you're
saying he was at dinner parties and he was part
of civilization.
Speaker 3 (13:57):
Absolutely.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
Yeah. He would have over his author friends, family members,
He had an annual melon party. You know. Threau was
very much connected, and I think that was a big
part of his creativity and activity for everyone.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
I think it's so critical, right because a lot of
the work that we talk about on the Happiness Lab
involves the importance of social connection for being happier. And
we also knew that feeling better increases your performance, So
it makes total sense that like just being around other
people kind of puts you in the mindset to be
performing better and being more creative. But also seems like
other people are just a font of lots of different ideas.
(14:31):
Just like putting new posters on the wall might getting
you think differently, just hearing other people's random ideas might
help you too.
Speaker 2 (14:37):
I mean, even writing this book was a real opportunity
to kind of take my own medicine where you know,
inevitably I hit all of these creative blocks and then
I would kind of start sweating and try to block
out all of the noise and everything. And it wasn't
until I started just reading and exploring things online and
checking out new sources that were new to me that
(14:59):
I really started unlocking some of those new ideas and
new kinds of insights.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
Another thing we need to reject is this idea that
to come up with something creative it has to be
perfectly original. You've argued that we should just embrace the
idea of emulating a bit more. Why is emulating so
effective when it comes to new ideas.
Speaker 2 (15:16):
We often hear phrases like it's been done before, and
I think that can be a way to dissuade us
from going down in particular avenue. But it turns out
that a lot of great ideas throughout history were about
building on what has come before and just triaking it
a little bit. And I think about this as kind
of like finding your own five percent. I call it
(15:37):
the five percent novelty rule in the book. But if
we're able to borrow an existing idea and then put
your own spin or find a new application or a
new way of thinking about it, that can usually be
a really powerful source of creativity that lots of different
people have used throughout history.
Speaker 1 (15:54):
So that's stage one surveying. Next, stage stage two is
what you call gridding. How does gridding work and what's
the connection with what archaeologists are doing there?
Speaker 2 (16:01):
So gridding in archaeology is the stage of you know,
where they're stringing up twine over the site into manageable grids,
and there is I want to keep track of everywhere
I've searched, where did I find stuff? And importantly, where
didn't I find stuff? And so I make an argument
for a similar kind of process with creativity, of trying
the best you can to make your search process systematic.
Speaker 1 (16:24):
You've also argued that gridding requires having a guiding question
to know that you're on the right track. What's a
guiding question? Why is it so essential?
Speaker 2 (16:31):
I talk about the guiding question is kind of like
your compass in this process, and it essentially comes down
to what am I trying to do and why who
is this idea for? Who's going to find it impactful?
And it's not really about pandering to a specific audience
so much as understanding the value that somebody is going
(16:52):
to get from your idea, why they're going to find
it useful, and that can be such a powerful way
of helping to orient us more or away from less
promising directions.
Speaker 1 (17:01):
So there's another myth that we have during this gridding process,
which was one that I was kind of surprised by.
I think we're thinking about our guiding questions coming up
with new ideas. We often assume that we need to
think outside the box, right, But you've argued that thinking
outside the box is bad, which shocked me. Why isn't
this a good idea?
Speaker 2 (17:19):
What I say in the book is think inside the box.
Use those constraints to your advantage. I talk about the
way in which creativity really responds to not only what's
in our environment, but what about the environment is limiting
our idea, And when we can take those limitations and
use them to our advantage, it actually can be a
(17:40):
very powerful source of creativity. So I talk about the
artist Matisse and how late in life he had to
get a major surgery which basically left him bedridden. He
wasn't able to paint in the way that he had before,
but that led him to explore this totally new method
using paper cutouts. And that's a lot of what we
know Matisse for today is the style that developed specifically
(18:03):
because of those limitations that he was facing.
Speaker 1 (18:05):
This thinking inside the box is awesome because I think
it allows us to remember that not only can we
be creative when like something tricky has happened, right like
I'm bedridden, I can't do the same thing, but maybe
those constraints and those bad situations might make us more creative,
which seems like a different attitude than we normally take
towards the creative process.
Speaker 2 (18:23):
Yeah. I mean, I even go so far in the
book to say, let's run towards those constraints. Let's try
to find them and seek them out and narrow our
search field a little bit, or narrow the way that
we're exploring for ideas.
Speaker 1 (18:36):
Another practical strategy for using constraints is what you've called transplanting.
Speaker 2 (18:40):
What's that so transplanting is this idea of taking principles
or things that have worked in one domain and applying
them to another. And if you look across history, this
also winds up being a really powerful way in which
people generate new ideas. One of my favorite examples there
is a woman named Janet Stevens who was a hairdresser,
and she was at a museum and noticing Roman busts
(19:03):
and said, Oh, I wonder how they were able to construct.
Speaker 3 (19:06):
These like elaborate hairstyles.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
And so she began this process of trying to recreate
them herself and figured out that it's possible to do
by stitching the hair together, and this wound up being
actually a big discovery for classic scholars who had assumed
that must have been wigs or something like that.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
He also told this example of the invention of the
bullet train, which I found fascinating. Can you share that one?
Speaker 2 (19:29):
So when they first invented the bullet train, you had
this problem that it was traveling at such speeds that
when it would exit the tunnel, it would create this
like supersonic boom effect. And so engineered happened to be
an avid bird watcher knew about the kingfisher bird, which
doesn't want to scare away the fish, and so it
has this very long beak that kind of allows it
(19:50):
to seamlessly enter the water. So by copying the kingfisher's beak,
they were actually able to redesign the train so it
could exit the tunnel and not make this boom effect.
Speaker 1 (20:01):
So the front of the train actually looks like the
beak of a kingfisher.
Speaker 3 (20:04):
To me, almost identically. Yeah, that's so awesome.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
It also fits with these studies coming out showing that
if you look at like Nobel Prize winners, they often
are more likely to have these kind of outside hobbies
and things than folks who haven't won the Nobel Prize.
This idea that like being interested in multiple fields or
having kind of funny hobbies actually helps you be more
successful in your field, maybe more creative in your field.
It suggest that maybe if you're doing these other hobbies,
(20:28):
you just have more ideas to transplant from one domain
into another.
Speaker 2 (20:32):
Those are some really fascinating studies on early diversification and
how people who wind up being very successful in their
careers early on, instead of specializing very narrowly, kind of
took a very broad Swath, and it seems like what
these folks are doing is being able to draw on
a really diverse set of ideas and then re explain
(20:53):
them in terms of their own expertise.
Speaker 1 (20:55):
It was fun to hear you talk about that, George,
because we haven't mentioned this yet, but you and I
worked together a long time ago on experiments with monkeys,
and I know you've done work on celebrities and possessions,
and you've done work on pro social donation. Like if
I look at your CV, there's just papers on all
these different topics. You are so diverse as a young scholar,
and I feel like that might be why you're so
(21:16):
good at talking about creativity today.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
Or maybe I'm just trying to justify my own past.
Speaker 1 (21:23):
So far, George and I have covered steps one and
two of his creative process, surveying and gritting. But once
you've done that, it's finally time to dig up that
new idea and we'll discuss how to uncover something amazing
when the Happiness Lab returns in a moment. In his
(21:53):
new book, How Great Ideas Happen, Doctor George Newman upends
common misconceptions about the creative process. Instead of waiting for
divine inspiration. He encourages us to channel our inner Indiana
Jones and start playing archaeologist. And once all your idea
ground were is laid with the first steps of serving
and gritting, it's time for the part that everyone's been
(22:13):
waiting for, idea generation.
Speaker 2 (22:16):
So this next stage in the process is all about
getting everything you can out of the ground. And there's
a study that I love called the creative cliff illusion
that people kind of think that they're going to run
out of ideas, that when they start brainstorming, Oh, I
can only come up with ten or fifteen ideas in
this domain.
Speaker 3 (22:35):
But when we keep persisting, when.
Speaker 2 (22:36):
We keep going, we're able to generate many more ideas
and we expect. So the real key of digging is
more is more just trying to generate as much stuff
as possible, not worrying about how practical it is. At
that point, we're just going to be generating ideas. We're
just going to be kind of brainstorming. No idea as bad.
In fact, let's generate as many bad ideas as we
(22:57):
possibly can, and then let's go back later to see
what we've really found.
Speaker 1 (23:01):
This may be a delicate question, but I guessing is
one that a lot of folks are asking right now,
how helpful is AI when we're going through this idea generations.
Should we be using lots of different lms to help
us generate ideas? Is that a good thing or are
there some constraints there?
Speaker 2 (23:15):
I with the researchers showing is that it can definitely
be a good thing when it's used in the right way.
The way I like to fit it into this archaeology
metaphor is that AI is like a really powerful excavator.
It's a way of clearing a lot of ground in
a very short amount of time. But you have to
know what you're looking for, and you have to know
where you're going to direct it, because if you just
(23:36):
plow an excavator, you know you're going to find a
lot of ground where there's absolutely nothing. AI is a
really powerful tool for kind of generating more ideas, but
you know, if we're not careful, those ideas can be
really similar, and so you know, on aggregate it can
make everybody's ideas the same. So we really need that
guidance early on to make sure that I'm directing it
(23:56):
to new and promising directions.
Speaker 1 (23:59):
Okay, so we've excavated all the good ideas. Now we
move on to the final phase, stage four, which is
what you call sifting. What's sifting?
Speaker 2 (24:06):
So sifting now is you know, we've taken up bunch
of stuff out of the ground. More is more, and
we're going to go back and see do we find
anything of note? Is there anything here that's actually going
to be useful to us? And so if in the
digging stage it's all about optimism, go go go, the
sifting stage is really the opposite. We want to be
as hard headed and critical as possible to say is
(24:28):
this really something that we can carry forward?
Speaker 1 (24:31):
And when we're doing that critical process, we have to
make sure that we don't fall prey to a bunch
of biases. One bias that I know I fall prey
to a lot that I need to let go. Is
what you've called the creative endowment effect. What's that? And
how can we let go of that bias?
Speaker 2 (24:45):
So the creative endowment effect is actually some research that
we did in our lab, which is our attachment to
our own ideas that because I'm the person who came
up with it, it's really good, and we found that if
you just take those same ideas and pass them along
to somebody else. They're actually much more accurate at finding
the better ideas in those sets.
Speaker 1 (25:06):
That's so important because this comes up in like group
settings all time, Like we'll have it's big brainstorm meeting
and everyone's dropping ideas and we're on idea like number
one hundred and forty two. I'm like, I like to
go back to idea number one that I had, Like
I really liked that one.
Speaker 2 (25:18):
Oh absolutely, I mean I think it comes out of
this again, it's kind of like an extension of this
genius or light bulb way of thinking that Oh.
Speaker 3 (25:26):
Well I thought of it. You know, how could it
not be great?
Speaker 2 (25:30):
So as much as as we can trying to create
that psychological distance and space between you know, ourselves and
our ideas, we can see them more objectively.
Speaker 1 (25:39):
Another bias we need to overcome is our tendency to
always want to add more. We're very good at adding stuff,
but we kind of suck at subtracting stuff. Why is
subtracting so essential during this part of the creative process.
Speaker 2 (25:52):
Well, it's a really fascinating work showing that subtraction itself
can be a really powerful way of generating new ideas,
and it's not something that normally.
Speaker 3 (26:00):
Occurs to us.
Speaker 2 (26:01):
Right, we think about what we can add, not what
we can take away.
Speaker 1 (26:04):
I think there's a very famous Lego study on this, Right.
Speaker 2 (26:07):
Yeah, so gave Adams at the Universe, Virgina and her colleagues,
you know, they gave people some kind of creative object
and then said can you make it better in lots
of different context and people always added stuff, they never
took things away. And even when it came down to
like fixing a paragraph of text that had a lot
of redundant senses, instead of removing the redundant senses, they
(26:30):
just added more.
Speaker 1 (26:32):
So how can we get ourselves to notice that subtraction
is essential?
Speaker 2 (26:36):
I like this metaphor of floating a raft versus building
a tower. You know, given our attachment to our own ideas,
there's this tendency to say, here's everything I've done. Let
me stack up this giant tower of stuff so you
can see it, and that reflects all of the effort
that I put in. But when we're evaluating our ideas,
I think it's much more powerful to think about, like
(26:56):
floating a raft, what's going to make my idea or
set of ideas water tight and finding all of the holes,
and a lot of that time's getting to that place
is about subtraction.
Speaker 1 (27:06):
There's another thing that can derail us during the selection process,
which I found kind of surprising actually, which is that
we can sometimes get messed up when somebody else praises
one of our ideas. How does that work and how
does it mess us up?
Speaker 2 (27:18):
There's a lot of situations in which praise can kind
of be a creativity killer, and some very interesting work
showing that when somebody says, hey, you've got a genius ideal,
we're going to be really reluctant to prove them wrong.
And because of that, we're going to actually engage in
less exploration, less swinging for the fences, which is exactly
what the work on creativity suggests we should be doing.
Speaker 1 (27:40):
And probably less subtraction. If somebody tells you, oh my gosh,
that idea is great, even if it doesn't fit on
your raft to makes your ideas flow effectively, you're going
to want to keep it there because someone just said, oh,
this is great.
Speaker 2 (27:50):
Absolutely, and I think this is a big issue even
as people get more senior in their roles, right it's
hard to not attribute your success to all of the
great ideas that you've had in the past, and so
you become that much more attached to all of them,
in every part of them.
Speaker 1 (28:05):
So we need to be careful about praise. But we
also want to get feedback from other people. So how
can we get that balance most effectively?
Speaker 2 (28:13):
Well, I talk about a lot of different strategies for
getting feedback. One that I really like is thinking about
feedback is how do we get on a learning curve?
How do we think about making incremental tweaks to our
idea rather than throwing the whole thing out, because I think,
especially when we get critical feedback, there's a tendency to say, oh,
scrap it, I'm going to move on.
Speaker 3 (28:33):
But you know that's ignoring all of the process that
we've paid along the way.
Speaker 1 (28:38):
A final thing we need to pay attention to, which
I love a lot, because we talk about this a
lot on the Happiness Lab, is that the creative process,
and especially the subtracting part of the creative process, really
requires a lot of emotion regulation. Why is emotion regulation
so critical for creativity and where can do we badly
lead us astray?
Speaker 3 (28:55):
Well?
Speaker 2 (28:56):
I think one place that leads us astrays, you know
we were talking about, like the attachment to our own ideas.
The other place that leads us astray is that the
research suggests that it's in fact those ideas that we
maybe feel a little bit uncomfortable or anxious about that
wind up being the most promising. Sometimes when an idea
is really novel and kind of abstract, when we first
(29:17):
think of it, we say, oh, like, maybe it's not
that promising, and we use that feeling to inform whether
or not we explore it further. But research suggests, hey,
we should actually jump on those opportunities and those can
be some of our best ideas.
Speaker 1 (29:30):
So if you've been feeling bored or creatively uninspired, now
is the time to get unstuck. You don't have to
be an artist or an innovator to put George's advice
into practice. You could use these strategies to pursue a
new career path, remodel your kitchen, or even rethink your
exercise routine. Just remember to look outside yourself and be
open to the possibilities and sources of inspiration in your environment.
(29:54):
Something totally unexpected may just fuel a life changing idea.
And if you want even more tips about how to
get more creative, be sure to check out George's new book,
How Great Ideas Happen, which is out this week. Up
next week on the Happiness Lab, we'll wrap up our
series on getting Unstuck in twenty twenty six, and this
time we're going big, like meaning of Life big, or
(30:18):
at least meaning in life big.
Speaker 4 (30:20):
You're just thinking about the paradigm of life raw, getting
more out of life, not cram more into it. Oh,
I need another hobby, I need a bigger thing, I
need more. No, you don't need more. You need to
get more out of what's already there.
Speaker 1 (30:33):
That's all Next time on the Happiness Lab with me
Doctor Laurie Santos
Pushkin, Hey, Happiness Lab listeners, Welcome back to our new
season on How to Get Unstuck in twenty twenty six.
Over the past few episodes, we've been exploring different ways
to get back on track in the new year, rethinking
how we spend our energy, learning how to deal with
unexpected changes, and getting clearer on our values and what
(00:38):
we really want in life. I hope these conversations have
already given you a few new tools for the year ahead.
But buckle up, because, out of all the episodes we've
had so far in this series, today's conversation has challenged
my assumptions about getting unstuck the most. Today we're diving
into the question of creativity, and more specifically, the stories
we tell ourselves about how creative ideas are supposed to happen.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
Think inside the box, use those constraints to your advantage.
Speaker 1 (01:06):
Today's guest will argue that nearly everything we have imagine
about generating creative ideas is wrong.
Speaker 3 (01:12):
My name's George Newman.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
I'm a professor of organizational behavior at the Rotman School
of Management. It's a University of Toronto. My book is
called How Great Ideas Happen? The Hidden Steps behind breakthrough success.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
George and I are about to unpack some of the
most common myths we have about creativity, and we'll learn
just how important rethinking these assumptions will be for getting
unstuck that happiness lab. We'll be right back after some
quick ads. Creativity expert George Newman and I go way back.
(01:56):
This is such a treat to be able to talk
to you, George, because you know, as you know, we've
known each other for.
Speaker 4 (02:00):
A long time.
Speaker 3 (02:01):
I know, so like it was two.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
Oh my gosh. Before he joined the University of Toronto,
George was a PhD student at Yale. But George has
been thinking about creativity long before his academic career began.
Speaker 3 (02:15):
Both my parents are musicians.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
My brother was a musician too, and I thought I
was going to be a visual artist. So I've kind
of had this lifelong interest in creativity that was like
a big topic of conversation around the dinner table, really
talking about like composers and different musicians. And then when
I became a psychologist and got interested in cognitive science,
(02:37):
it seems like a really natural progression to say, oh, well,
can I study this thing that I've been interested in forever?
Speaker 3 (02:43):
And try to make sense out of it.
Speaker 1 (02:45):
One way it made sense of things is to define things,
which may be an impossible task with creativity. But how
do you define creativity? What is it?
Speaker 2 (02:52):
The definition I like is the process of generating new
and useful ideas. I think everybody associates creativity with newness
and novelty, but the useful part is really interesting, because
you know, it's not just newness for its own.
Speaker 4 (03:08):
Say.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
The idea about creativity is finding these ideas that provide
value to people. And that value could be entertainment, or
it could connect with us emotionally, but it could also
be things like new scientific theories, or new inventions, or new.
Speaker 3 (03:25):
Kinds of technology.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
So it's a really broad definition that I think captures
what this more general process really is.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
I love that definition because this whole series is about
getting unstuck. And I think sometimes when we think about
creativity or getting unstuck when it comes to the creative process,
we think about some artist or an inventor, you know,
sitting there trying to get unstuck. But I think for
so many of us we can get stuck creatively for
very seemingly much more mundane things like what am I
going to cook for dinner tonight, or you know, what's
(03:53):
a new idea at work. All of us have these
moments of generating new ideas that we hope are effective.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
Totally, there's this kind of like association of creativity as
it's messy or it involves finger paint or you've got
to put on a smock. But absolutely creativity applies in
all of these different context right. It could be a
new way of folding your laundry, or a new way
of cooking your favorite recipe, or actually, the last example
in the book is this guy Dan Pashman who wanted
(04:19):
to come up with a better type of pasta, and
so that can be a form of creativity as well.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
So it seems like we have these miss when it
comes to creativity. One is that it's kind of this
big thing. You know, I have to make a painting,
or I have to do something really incredible and invent a
new technology or so on. But another myth you talk
about is how we often think of where creativity comes from.
What's our usual way of thinking about it, and why
is it problematic?
Speaker 2 (04:42):
Well, I think the common wisdom about creativity is that
it's something that comes from inside of us, and there's
this genius myth that there's this lone genius and you're
going to go off into the cabin and wait for
that light bulb moment where that brilliant idea kind of
just springs forth from within. And it's also kind of
how arriving at an idea might feel to us sometimes,
(05:06):
where it just hits you like a lightning bolt and
the shower. But what I argue in the book is
actually creativity is much more like a process of discovery
than doing careful work to kind of uncover something that
is going to be new and useful.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
So in the book, you go through all these pieces
of evidence against this isolated genius light bulb idea, and
one of the ones I found most interesting was this
idea of hot streaks. What are hot streaks and why
do they show that creativity doesn't work in a lot
of the ways we often think.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
It's a super fascinating research DaShan Wang at Northwestern and
his colleagues have found that across a lot of different fields.
So in science, filmmakers artists experience these moments in their
careers where they generate their kind of most impactful work
all at once. And they're short lived, but there seems
(05:54):
to be this flurry of activity. And what he finds
in his work is that those periods of hot streak
moment are actually preceded by a lot of exploration. So
these creators and lots of different disciplines are kind of
poking around, trying out lots of different things before boom,
you know, they hit on that one idea that they're
able to mine and refine further.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
Do you have any favorite examples of these hot streaks.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
One of my favorite is Jackson Pollock, you know, the
artist known for his drip paintings and splattering paint on canvas.
Those iconic Pollock works really came from a very short
period of time, only about three years, and that's really
produced a lot of the work that we recognize.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
I feel like every modern art museum I've go to
has like a bunch of these splatter paintings that it
was just like three years of his time where he
did these.
Speaker 3 (06:44):
It was just three years.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
And the notion there is that through exploration, Pollock kind
of hit on this much deeper principle that he.
Speaker 3 (06:52):
Was able to explore and then exploit.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
You've also talked about this idea of parallel discovery. Explain
this phenomenon why it also kind of goes against this
idea of these isolated genius moments.
Speaker 2 (07:04):
This is a super interesting phenomenon. And actually I was
like shocked when I found this paper from over one
hundred years ago that was talking about parallel discovery and
cataloging just hundreds of instances in which scientists and artists
and across a lot of different fields had hit upon
very similar ideas at the exact same time, and so
(07:26):
kind of challenging this genius myth that oh, I'm just
discovering things come from within, the fact that multiple people
can arrive at the same idea at the very same
time suggests they're actually finding their way to something that's
outside of them.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
I can't help but jump in and nerdily share one
of my favorite examples of parallel discovery. On March twelfth,
nineteen fifty one, the cartoonist Hank Ketchum debuted what would
become the famous syndicated comic strip Dennis the Menace, illustrating
the adventures of a young boy who was constantly getting
into trouble. But on that very same day, the British
(08:00):
cartoonist David Law debuted his own new comic in a
UK newspaper, and that comic was also about an adventurous
young boy, and it was also titled Dennis the Menace?
Is that crazy or what? George's book is filled with
stories like these ones that show there's lots of great
ideas out there just waiting for you, me, or whatever
(08:20):
cartoonist happens to be paying attention to find them. So
it seems we really need to drop this idea of
the isolated genius. George has a metaphor he believes reflects
the science of creativity even better.
Speaker 2 (08:32):
I really like this metaphor of the creative explorer or
even archaeology, where we're exploring a landscape and searching for
an idea. So there's there's notion that ideas are in
some way external to us, and that we can draw
on inspiration and forms of insight and use that to
really propel our creative process. When you're feeling stuck, you know,
(08:55):
look out and see what kinds of things can I
draw from my environment.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
One of the things I was shocked by in your
book is it seems like so many of the people
I think of as like the great kind of light
bulb inventors. They were the ones who also think of
this creative process as exploration. There was this quote from
Thomas Edison that I really loved, which was my soul
called inventions already existed in the environment. I took them out.
I created nothing nobody does. There's no such thing as
an idea being brain born. Everything comes from outside, which
(09:22):
is funny, particularly for Thomas Edison, who I literally think
of as the light bulb, like the light bulb creator,
but also like the light bulb popping up in his head.
But even he was like, nah, I didn't do anything fancy.
I just found the stuff that was already out.
Speaker 3 (09:33):
There, totally totally.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
I mean I think it's kind of like the quintessential example, right,
because we do associate Edison with inventing the light bulb,
and light bulb is kind of our model for creativity.
Speaker 3 (09:46):
And yet Edison employed, you.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
Know, at one point two hundred different people in these
large teams. He called them these Mucker teams, and they
essentially were just exploring space.
Speaker 3 (09:57):
Trying out every different combination they could.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
And even the discovery of the light bulb is really
fascinating because different parts of it had been worked out
for almost over a century, and it was really Edison
at the end working out a very tiny detail which
he largely borrowed from somebody else.
Speaker 3 (10:15):
So there's notion that ideas just.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
Spring forth from nowhere, I think really mistakes a lot
of what's really happening.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
I kind of love George's new take on where good
ideas come from that we don't need to just wait
around for some light bulb moment to show up. Because
if finding good ideas is like excavating a landscape, that
means we can actually hack this process to generate new ideas.
But how do we do that? We'll have answers and
bust even more creativity myths When the Happiness Lab returns
(10:44):
from the break, Creativity expert George Newman argues that we
find our best ideas not by waiting for some muse
(11:04):
to strike, but by engaging in a process that's more
like an archaeological excavation, and that means that interesting new
ideas are to be found outside ourselves, whether that's from
the people we interact with, the places we explore, or
even the songs we listened to.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
So I had been thinking about this exploration discovery idea.
And then I was listening to the Pixies and they
have this song dig for Fire, and something just clicked
for me there where I was like, oh, yeah, like archaeology,
and so I started kind of taking notes about it.
And then the longer I thought about it, it really
(11:40):
started to actually connect and I started learning more about archaeology,
and these different parts of the process really started to
map on to what I was trying to say about creativity.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
And so you've argued that the same process that we
see in archaeology can be applied to creativity and that
can help us get unstuck. And one of the first
parts of these processes is what you've called surveying.
Speaker 3 (12:00):
What's that?
Speaker 2 (12:01):
So surveying is basically getting a sense of the landscape,
in this case, kind of the conceptual landscape, to figure
out where am I, where are other good ideas, what
is a good idea going to potentially look like. So
it's a way of orienting yourself in space, and it's
a big part of the process of archaeology. Right you
(12:23):
have to know where you're digging, otherwise you're just going
to dig up a bunch of empty ground.
Speaker 3 (12:28):
But It's also a really important.
Speaker 2 (12:29):
Part of creativity where you know, if we just start
generating ideas randomly, probably not going to be super productive.
It's about looking to where have good ideas been discovered
in the past, and can I help orient myself towards
those more promising sites.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
And when we start thinking of how we can go
about finding those promising sites, I think this is a
spot where another myth comes in. We assume that, like
I think really creatively, I need to be by myself.
We have this idea that I have to go off
to a cap in somewhere and lock myself up and
just have time by myself to think of all these
good ideas. But you've argued that that's wrong too. How
do we know that?
Speaker 2 (13:05):
Yeah, So a major source of creativity is exposure to
outside information. Even new pictures on the wall and new
kinds of furniture and exposure to new people can be
that trigger which accuse a new idea. So there's some
empirical evidence also a lot of the myths that we
have about those cabin in the woods, like Threau, you
(13:26):
know was probably the most famous one, but he wasn't
isolated at all.
Speaker 3 (13:29):
He was like half a mile from town.
Speaker 2 (13:32):
He threw these parties and was seeing people all the time.
So I think there's this kind of cultural myth that
we're going off in isolation when actuality creatives are really
drawing on their environment.
Speaker 1 (13:43):
Well, I want to pull that out because I've been
to the row House. It was basically a size of
my podcast studio with a little table and so on.
And my understanding was like he went there and just
hung out and like Walden sprung on him. But you're
saying he was at dinner parties and he was part
of civilization.
Speaker 3 (13:57):
Absolutely.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
Yeah. He would have over his author friends, family members,
He had an annual melon party. You know. Threau was
very much connected, and I think that was a big
part of his creativity and activity for everyone.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
I think it's so critical, right because a lot of
the work that we talk about on the Happiness Lab
involves the importance of social connection for being happier. And
we also knew that feeling better increases your performance, So
it makes total sense that like just being around other
people kind of puts you in the mindset to be
performing better and being more creative. But also seems like
other people are just a font of lots of different ideas.
(14:31):
Just like putting new posters on the wall might getting
you think differently, just hearing other people's random ideas might
help you too.
Speaker 2 (14:37):
I mean, even writing this book was a real opportunity
to kind of take my own medicine where you know,
inevitably I hit all of these creative blocks and then
I would kind of start sweating and try to block
out all of the noise and everything. And it wasn't
until I started just reading and exploring things online and
checking out new sources that were new to me that
(14:59):
I really started unlocking some of those new ideas and
new kinds of insights.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
Another thing we need to reject is this idea that
to come up with something creative it has to be
perfectly original. You've argued that we should just embrace the
idea of emulating a bit more. Why is emulating so
effective when it comes to new ideas.
Speaker 2 (15:16):
We often hear phrases like it's been done before, and
I think that can be a way to dissuade us
from going down in particular avenue. But it turns out
that a lot of great ideas throughout history were about
building on what has come before and just triaking it
a little bit. And I think about this as kind
of like finding your own five percent. I call it
(15:37):
the five percent novelty rule in the book. But if
we're able to borrow an existing idea and then put
your own spin or find a new application or a
new way of thinking about it, that can usually be
a really powerful source of creativity that lots of different
people have used throughout history.
Speaker 1 (15:54):
So that's stage one surveying. Next, stage stage two is
what you call gridding. How does gridding work and what's
the connection with what archaeologists are doing there?
Speaker 2 (16:01):
So gridding in archaeology is the stage of you know,
where they're stringing up twine over the site into manageable grids,
and there is I want to keep track of everywhere
I've searched, where did I find stuff? And importantly, where
didn't I find stuff? And so I make an argument
for a similar kind of process with creativity, of trying
the best you can to make your search process systematic.
Speaker 1 (16:24):
You've also argued that gridding requires having a guiding question
to know that you're on the right track. What's a
guiding question? Why is it so essential?
Speaker 2 (16:31):
I talk about the guiding question is kind of like
your compass in this process, and it essentially comes down
to what am I trying to do and why who
is this idea for? Who's going to find it impactful?
And it's not really about pandering to a specific audience
so much as understanding the value that somebody is going
(16:52):
to get from your idea, why they're going to find
it useful, and that can be such a powerful way
of helping to orient us more or away from less
promising directions.
Speaker 1 (17:01):
So there's another myth that we have during this gridding process,
which was one that I was kind of surprised by.
I think we're thinking about our guiding questions coming up
with new ideas. We often assume that we need to
think outside the box, right, But you've argued that thinking
outside the box is bad, which shocked me. Why isn't
this a good idea?
Speaker 2 (17:19):
What I say in the book is think inside the box.
Use those constraints to your advantage. I talk about the
way in which creativity really responds to not only what's
in our environment, but what about the environment is limiting
our idea, And when we can take those limitations and
use them to our advantage, it actually can be a
(17:40):
very powerful source of creativity. So I talk about the
artist Matisse and how late in life he had to
get a major surgery which basically left him bedridden. He
wasn't able to paint in the way that he had before,
but that led him to explore this totally new method
using paper cutouts. And that's a lot of what we
know Matisse for today is the style that developed specifically
(18:03):
because of those limitations that he was facing.
Speaker 1 (18:05):
This thinking inside the box is awesome because I think
it allows us to remember that not only can we
be creative when like something tricky has happened, right like
I'm bedridden, I can't do the same thing, but maybe
those constraints and those bad situations might make us more creative,
which seems like a different attitude than we normally take
towards the creative process.
Speaker 2 (18:23):
Yeah. I mean, I even go so far in the
book to say, let's run towards those constraints. Let's try
to find them and seek them out and narrow our
search field a little bit, or narrow the way that
we're exploring for ideas.
Speaker 1 (18:36):
Another practical strategy for using constraints is what you've called transplanting.
Speaker 2 (18:40):
What's that so transplanting is this idea of taking principles
or things that have worked in one domain and applying
them to another. And if you look across history, this
also winds up being a really powerful way in which
people generate new ideas. One of my favorite examples there
is a woman named Janet Stevens who was a hairdresser,
and she was at a museum and noticing Roman busts
(19:03):
and said, Oh, I wonder how they were able to construct.
Speaker 3 (19:06):
These like elaborate hairstyles.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
And so she began this process of trying to recreate
them herself and figured out that it's possible to do
by stitching the hair together, and this wound up being
actually a big discovery for classic scholars who had assumed
that must have been wigs or something like that.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
He also told this example of the invention of the
bullet train, which I found fascinating. Can you share that one?
Speaker 2 (19:29):
So when they first invented the bullet train, you had
this problem that it was traveling at such speeds that
when it would exit the tunnel, it would create this
like supersonic boom effect. And so engineered happened to be
an avid bird watcher knew about the kingfisher bird, which
doesn't want to scare away the fish, and so it
has this very long beak that kind of allows it
(19:50):
to seamlessly enter the water. So by copying the kingfisher's beak,
they were actually able to redesign the train so it
could exit the tunnel and not make this boom effect.
Speaker 1 (20:01):
So the front of the train actually looks like the
beak of a kingfisher.
Speaker 3 (20:04):
To me, almost identically. Yeah, that's so awesome.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
It also fits with these studies coming out showing that
if you look at like Nobel Prize winners, they often
are more likely to have these kind of outside hobbies
and things than folks who haven't won the Nobel Prize.
This idea that like being interested in multiple fields or
having kind of funny hobbies actually helps you be more
successful in your field, maybe more creative in your field.
It suggest that maybe if you're doing these other hobbies,
(20:28):
you just have more ideas to transplant from one domain
into another.
Speaker 2 (20:32):
Those are some really fascinating studies on early diversification and
how people who wind up being very successful in their
careers early on, instead of specializing very narrowly, kind of
took a very broad Swath, and it seems like what
these folks are doing is being able to draw on
a really diverse set of ideas and then re explain
(20:53):
them in terms of their own expertise.
Speaker 1 (20:55):
It was fun to hear you talk about that, George,
because we haven't mentioned this yet, but you and I
worked together a long time ago on experiments with monkeys,
and I know you've done work on celebrities and possessions,
and you've done work on pro social donation. Like if
I look at your CV, there's just papers on all
these different topics. You are so diverse as a young scholar,
and I feel like that might be why you're so
(21:16):
good at talking about creativity today.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
Or maybe I'm just trying to justify my own past.
Speaker 1 (21:23):
So far, George and I have covered steps one and
two of his creative process, surveying and gritting. But once
you've done that, it's finally time to dig up that
new idea and we'll discuss how to uncover something amazing
when the Happiness Lab returns in a moment. In his
(21:53):
new book, How Great Ideas Happen, Doctor George Newman upends
common misconceptions about the creative process. Instead of waiting for
divine inspiration. He encourages us to channel our inner Indiana
Jones and start playing archaeologist. And once all your idea
ground were is laid with the first steps of serving
and gritting, it's time for the part that everyone's been
(22:13):
waiting for, idea generation.
Speaker 2 (22:16):
So this next stage in the process is all about
getting everything you can out of the ground. And there's
a study that I love called the creative cliff illusion
that people kind of think that they're going to run
out of ideas, that when they start brainstorming, Oh, I
can only come up with ten or fifteen ideas in
this domain.
Speaker 3 (22:35):
But when we keep persisting, when.
Speaker 2 (22:36):
We keep going, we're able to generate many more ideas
and we expect. So the real key of digging is
more is more just trying to generate as much stuff
as possible, not worrying about how practical it is. At
that point, we're just going to be generating ideas. We're
just going to be kind of brainstorming. No idea as bad.
In fact, let's generate as many bad ideas as we
(22:57):
possibly can, and then let's go back later to see
what we've really found.
Speaker 1 (23:01):
This may be a delicate question, but I guessing is
one that a lot of folks are asking right now,
how helpful is AI when we're going through this idea generations.
Should we be using lots of different lms to help
us generate ideas? Is that a good thing or are
there some constraints there?
Speaker 2 (23:15):
I with the researchers showing is that it can definitely
be a good thing when it's used in the right way.
The way I like to fit it into this archaeology
metaphor is that AI is like a really powerful excavator.
It's a way of clearing a lot of ground in
a very short amount of time. But you have to
know what you're looking for, and you have to know
where you're going to direct it, because if you just
(23:36):
plow an excavator, you know you're going to find a
lot of ground where there's absolutely nothing. AI is a
really powerful tool for kind of generating more ideas, but
you know, if we're not careful, those ideas can be
really similar, and so you know, on aggregate it can
make everybody's ideas the same. So we really need that
guidance early on to make sure that I'm directing it
(23:56):
to new and promising directions.
Speaker 1 (23:59):
Okay, so we've excavated all the good ideas. Now we
move on to the final phase, stage four, which is
what you call sifting. What's sifting?
Speaker 2 (24:06):
So sifting now is you know, we've taken up bunch
of stuff out of the ground. More is more, and
we're going to go back and see do we find
anything of note? Is there anything here that's actually going
to be useful to us? And so if in the
digging stage it's all about optimism, go go go, the
sifting stage is really the opposite. We want to be
as hard headed and critical as possible to say is
(24:28):
this really something that we can carry forward?
Speaker 1 (24:31):
And when we're doing that critical process, we have to
make sure that we don't fall prey to a bunch
of biases. One bias that I know I fall prey
to a lot that I need to let go. Is
what you've called the creative endowment effect. What's that? And
how can we let go of that bias?
Speaker 2 (24:45):
So the creative endowment effect is actually some research that
we did in our lab, which is our attachment to
our own ideas that because I'm the person who came
up with it, it's really good, and we found that if
you just take those same ideas and pass them along
to somebody else. They're actually much more accurate at finding
the better ideas in those sets.
Speaker 1 (25:06):
That's so important because this comes up in like group
settings all time, Like we'll have it's big brainstorm meeting
and everyone's dropping ideas and we're on idea like number
one hundred and forty two. I'm like, I like to
go back to idea number one that I had, Like
I really liked that one.
Speaker 2 (25:18):
Oh absolutely, I mean I think it comes out of
this again, it's kind of like an extension of this
genius or light bulb way of thinking that Oh.
Speaker 3 (25:26):
Well I thought of it. You know, how could it
not be great?
Speaker 2 (25:30):
So as much as as we can trying to create
that psychological distance and space between you know, ourselves and
our ideas, we can see them more objectively.
Speaker 1 (25:39):
Another bias we need to overcome is our tendency to
always want to add more. We're very good at adding stuff,
but we kind of suck at subtracting stuff. Why is
subtracting so essential during this part of the creative process.
Speaker 2 (25:52):
Well, it's a really fascinating work showing that subtraction itself
can be a really powerful way of generating new ideas,
and it's not something that normally.
Speaker 3 (26:00):
Occurs to us.
Speaker 2 (26:01):
Right, we think about what we can add, not what
we can take away.
Speaker 1 (26:04):
I think there's a very famous Lego study on this, Right.
Speaker 2 (26:07):
Yeah, so gave Adams at the Universe, Virgina and her colleagues,
you know, they gave people some kind of creative object
and then said can you make it better in lots
of different context and people always added stuff, they never
took things away. And even when it came down to
like fixing a paragraph of text that had a lot
of redundant senses, instead of removing the redundant senses, they
(26:30):
just added more.
Speaker 1 (26:32):
So how can we get ourselves to notice that subtraction
is essential?
Speaker 2 (26:36):
I like this metaphor of floating a raft versus building
a tower. You know, given our attachment to our own ideas,
there's this tendency to say, here's everything I've done. Let
me stack up this giant tower of stuff so you
can see it, and that reflects all of the effort
that I put in. But when we're evaluating our ideas,
I think it's much more powerful to think about, like
(26:56):
floating a raft, what's going to make my idea or
set of ideas water tight and finding all of the holes,
and a lot of that time's getting to that place
is about subtraction.
Speaker 1 (27:06):
There's another thing that can derail us during the selection process,
which I found kind of surprising actually, which is that
we can sometimes get messed up when somebody else praises
one of our ideas. How does that work and how
does it mess us up?
Speaker 2 (27:18):
There's a lot of situations in which praise can kind
of be a creativity killer, and some very interesting work
showing that when somebody says, hey, you've got a genius ideal,
we're going to be really reluctant to prove them wrong.
And because of that, we're going to actually engage in
less exploration, less swinging for the fences, which is exactly
what the work on creativity suggests we should be doing.
Speaker 1 (27:40):
And probably less subtraction. If somebody tells you, oh my gosh,
that idea is great, even if it doesn't fit on
your raft to makes your ideas flow effectively, you're going
to want to keep it there because someone just said, oh,
this is great.
Speaker 2 (27:50):
Absolutely, and I think this is a big issue even
as people get more senior in their roles, right it's
hard to not attribute your success to all of the
great ideas that you've had in the past, and so
you become that much more attached to all of them,
in every part of them.
Speaker 1 (28:05):
So we need to be careful about praise. But we
also want to get feedback from other people. So how
can we get that balance most effectively?
Speaker 2 (28:13):
Well, I talk about a lot of different strategies for
getting feedback. One that I really like is thinking about
feedback is how do we get on a learning curve?
How do we think about making incremental tweaks to our
idea rather than throwing the whole thing out, because I think,
especially when we get critical feedback, there's a tendency to say, oh,
scrap it, I'm going to move on.
Speaker 3 (28:33):
But you know that's ignoring all of the process that
we've paid along the way.
Speaker 1 (28:38):
A final thing we need to pay attention to, which
I love a lot, because we talk about this a
lot on the Happiness Lab, is that the creative process,
and especially the subtracting part of the creative process, really
requires a lot of emotion regulation. Why is emotion regulation
so critical for creativity and where can do we badly
lead us astray?
Speaker 3 (28:55):
Well?
Speaker 2 (28:56):
I think one place that leads us astrays, you know
we were talking about, like the attachment to our own ideas.
The other place that leads us astray is that the
research suggests that it's in fact those ideas that we
maybe feel a little bit uncomfortable or anxious about that
wind up being the most promising. Sometimes when an idea
is really novel and kind of abstract, when we first
(29:17):
think of it, we say, oh, like, maybe it's not
that promising, and we use that feeling to inform whether
or not we explore it further. But research suggests, hey,
we should actually jump on those opportunities and those can
be some of our best ideas.
Speaker 1 (29:30):
So if you've been feeling bored or creatively uninspired, now
is the time to get unstuck. You don't have to
be an artist or an innovator to put George's advice
into practice. You could use these strategies to pursue a
new career path, remodel your kitchen, or even rethink your
exercise routine. Just remember to look outside yourself and be
open to the possibilities and sources of inspiration in your environment.
(29:54):
Something totally unexpected may just fuel a life changing idea.
And if you want even more tips about how to
get more creative, be sure to check out George's new book,
How Great Ideas Happen, which is out this week. Up
next week on the Happiness Lab, we'll wrap up our
series on getting Unstuck in twenty twenty six, and this
time we're going big, like meaning of Life big, or
(30:18):
at least meaning in life big.
Speaker 4 (30:20):
You're just thinking about the paradigm of life raw, getting
more out of life, not cram more into it. Oh,
I need another hobby, I need a bigger thing, I
need more. No, you don't need more. You need to
get more out of what's already there.
Speaker 1 (30:33):
That's all Next time on the Happiness Lab with me
Doctor Laurie Santos
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