Hello! Thank you! I’m going to be talking today about things lost and things discovered. I’ll also be talking about demystifying the creative process.
To start, I have to begin with a little background story and a question. How many of you have suffered one great loss or another in your lives? OK, so it’s roomful.
We are told that we are not defined by the loss but we’re defined by how we respond to it. And that holds true for also things that happens to us that are good. It’s not the events that happened to us but it’s about how we respond to those events.
I’m recovering from what they call post-concussive condition. I had 9 concussions, which is a few too many, in my life. I think after the age of 10 you’re only supposed to have 3.
And people have to collect something, so why not collect concussions!
But, with concussions, when you recover from it they call it post-concussive disorder and many of the boys and girls that are coming back from overseas are suffering from something similar called post concussive disorder, which we’re just beginning to find out about.
Mine happened in 2008. I was hit by an 18-wheel truck that decided to park in the back seat of my car – a bad parking spot.
And when I came out of the accident, about a week later I lost a lot of things. One of the things that I lost was my ability to talk and my ability to remember who I was, which may have been a good thing.
I was told I’m much nicer now since the accident, I’m not sure how to take that from my best friends. Also, I lost a super power.
When I was a little child, I started drawing and I started studying art at the age of nine and was formally trained and could literally draw anything both in my head and in front of me.
And after the accident my hand would just go like this (shaking).
My doctor also told me that I would never get my higher words back, which was upsetting as a professor, and that it would take 10 years before I could teach and recover, knowing that I’ll start tomorrow teaching.
The university I taught at allowed me one course, my students were really lovely in letting me come in, but in order to do that I had to learn how to talk again.
And I wasn’t really sure what to do because they were going to wait 6 months before giving me a speech therapy, they’d like your brain to settle.
One night before going to bed I had a sudden little flash of an idea, a little Eureka moment, which I’ll talk about those in a second.
I thought of reading the New York Times newspaper, listening to the audio edition of it and recording myself and watching myself over and over to retrain myself to talk.
And I did that, to my girlfriend’s dismay, over and over and over and over… One word at a time, one sentence at a time, until I could talk.
And by the time I went to speech therapy they said “you’re doing quite well, what did you do?” and I told them and they said “well how did you figure that out?”
I said “I don’t know. I just came up with this idea”.
And I want to talk to you about that process of coming up with ideas.
Before the accident, people used to ask me if I was an artist and I thought being called an artist was pretentious and I used to say “no, I’m a painter”, as if that has any less pretension.
And I thought that because I was defining myself as a painter I wasn’t attaching my creative process in the same way, which
I thought was this thing that came from this mysterious place and I thought that by not being an artist and just being a painter was more like a blue-collar worker somehow and my creative process was more like that.
But I didn’t really understand it.
I began to study and investigate it a little bit, and oddly the things that came back to me in memory after the accident, were things from way before the accident.
In my studies of creative process, one of the things I came across from Plato was the dialogue, the Theaetetus, that talks about the seven stages of philosophical midwifery.
In early 1990s I met Murray Gell-Mann, a Nobel laureate physicist who is doing research in creativity at the institute and they discovered 7 processes in creativity, too.
I’m going to share those with you.
The 5th stage of the created process, which I’ll talk to them out of order, since brain injury I can’t really count so it’s OK.
The fifth stage is that Eureka moment, and that Eureka moment is very important.
How many of you have a little flash of an idea before you go to bed or when you wake in the morning or while you’re driving?
We have little flashes of ideas whether it’s a song how to fix something or how to overcome some problems at a job… These little flashes are very important. These are our Eureka moments.
When we have these, how many of you jump out of the bed in the middle of winter and write those down or pull your car over –
not do it while you’re driving, because you will run into me and then I’ll get my 10th concussion – and write these ideas down.
These ideas are very important and we often don’t realize how important they are to us and it’s not that we don’t believe in ourselves but we don’t believe in the validity of these little ideas, these little moments, this fifth stage.
But these are important and these are important to write down so you can get to the first stage.
The first stage in the creative process is just forming a question or an idea or a problem.
So if you don’t have one of those little Eureka moments then you can begin at the first stage and try and come up with an idea or a question or perhaps you’re at work and yo
at work and your boss has a question or a problem or there is a difficult situation you have to overcome at your work again;
or if you’re working in school, many of us have many problems at school, students have to go through every day being given challenges…
But you take these problems and you form a question around them you try to frame a question and then what you do is you engage in the process of research.
And research comes second natures to us. Think about when you give a child a rattle. The first thing they do in their research is stick it in their mouth.
Actually anything goes in a little baby’s mouth. That’s a process of researching and engaging the world.
We’re curious creatures, we do this by nature. And research can manifest itself in many different ways.
You can, as an artist, look at things, look at different visual things and sketch them; if you are a chef you taste and smell things…
But what you do is you go into the world and you experience the world and gather information from the world around that question you formed.
Now the 3rd stage is very interesting – I call it the “Basta Stage” the “Italian stage” where you say enough is enough.
You can research for a long time, you can be at 20,000 feet where you’re looking out over everything and seeing just the generalities of it, or you can be down in the weeds, lost in the particulars.
We can research to death on things, so you have to say enough is enough. As students, if some of you’re students, you don’t have the choice because you have these deadlines.
Then comes the 4th stage – and this is a very important stage – and I say that about every stage.
I have a friend who’s got this little daughter over in Germany says ‘Rafael what’s your favorite thing’ and I named three, because you can have only one favorite and I said I’m lucky I get more than one.
The next most important thing is the 4th stage. And this stage is a stage of gestation, where you hold that question.
Now in this stage there’re three activities that can occur, that are part of the creative process. When you hold the question you enter into a state of detachment.
When I was 16, I studied Zen Buddhism. I grew up in southern California, I was a little weird, had a sensory deprivation tank in my garage that I went into every night instead of sleeping – very different lifestyle than main.
But from 16 to 25 I went to a Zen center and studied Zen Buddhism.
And one of the things you do in Rinzai’s that you get kōan-study where the Rōshi gives you an impossible question,
one that we know from almost every movie and TV show is “what is the sound of one hand clapping?” or “how do you manifest your Buddha nature at this sound?”.
There are questions that can’t be answered. In logic we call these wicked questions, not a main thing, which are questions that are very informal,
they can’t be answered very directly one way or another but they have multiple answers.
The idea is to hold on to this questions and keep them in the back of your mind and do a divergent behavior, something different, go sweep, go mop… anything else.
It’s important to do that; or think of other things. Another thing is to, while you’re holding that question, approach the question through metaphor.
If you’re working on a mathematical equation ask yourself what that equation would look like if it were a tree. How would it be if it were a herd of geese?
Things that are so crazy and might seem so far away from the question that they’ll take you to a new place.
Now artists do this all the time, because we operate with this kind of fearlessness of imagination and there’s these two worlds that have to come together.
We all live in the world of operations… the day-to-day world where we have to do all our organizational life,
putting toothbrush and toothpaste together, going to work, punching the time clock – which I don’t think they have any more – driving to and fro…
And all these operations draw us away from our true nature, which is our inventive nature.
They say necessity is the mother of invention but I really think that invention is second nature to us, it’s very primal aspect of our being.
And our inventive nature comes through our imagination. And our world of imagination is very important.
So you have this world of operations over here, the day-to-day world; then you have this world of daydreaming and imagination.
And you don’t want to do this too much because people slap you and say “hey wake up and stop daydreaming”.
But it’s important to do that because you have to go away from this world of operations and through divergent behavior or through metaphor, imagine and think of things differently.
Visualize the problem; imagine what that calculation might look like; imagine what that thing – the answer you have – might seem like if it were something else and mash these two worlds together.
We call in science the world of empiricism and in artist intuition and we have to weave the fabric of both together.
In doing so you can get to again(!) the most important stage – the 5th stage – the Eureka moment… the big Eureka, where you get the idea again but now you have the answer to it.
And then comes the 6th stage, where a lot of people fail.
And that’s the process of making. When challenged with having a good idea and bringing it into being or birth, actually making it is very difficult for us. Because we’re afraid of failure.
We are afraid that it won’t look good. We’re afraid that people won’t like it or us.
And you have to operate without fear. You have to accept that you might fail and in fact failure might actually be good.
I tell my students I’d rather have eloquent failure than boring success. This failure is really important or the success that you have.
But if you don’t know how to make the thing, let’s say you’ve imagined a new process for renewable energy but you’re like me, you’re just a dumb painter.
Well, then you get people around you that can help you make that thing or if you can’t find them you write it down, you describe it in details.
So eventually you can either patent the idea, which is always a good thing, or you can find the people who can help you bring that idea into being.
But it’s important to remember that we have to bring these ideas out.
We have to share these ideas, because if we don’t, then the world doesn’t move forward; we don’t innovate and we don’t create.
And the last and most important stage – I keep saying that – is the stage of testing and criticism, or when we share things.
When we bring them into the world. In the world of science it’s testing, in art it’s criticism and in the real world it’s just sharing and asking what people think.
And not being afraid whether people like it or they don’t like it or whether you’ve made something that’s wonderful or in the Theaetetus what they call a “wind egg”,
which is philosophical platonic word for a fart, the cold wind egg, sound better in Greek. But this idea of bringing things into the world is really important and very critical.
So, I sort of want to kind of go back over these to make sure we understand everything. There’ 7 stages in this creative process and these stages do not come in any particular order.
But you have to learn to recognize these stages. The more that you recognize them, the more that you’ll be able to enter in and out of them fluidly.
So, it’s not like you start in one and now I’m going to two and now I’m going to three… but allow yourself to maybe journal and keep track of when you’re in the state of research; when you are in the state of gestation.
I have my students write down the feeling states that happen while they’re around it. How do you emotionally feel when you get a great idea or when you pop into an idea or when you’ve research so much, your brain is just exhausted?
Keep track of those feelings. The other thing is that when you’re in these states, and especially the 5th state – these little Eureka moments – capture these ideas! Don’t think that they’re worthless.
I’ve had some really crazy ideas. I was in Chicago 15 years ago at – oh, which university was it – at Chicago Institute of Technology and this German doctor, professor
Abbs called me upstairs because they were going to hire their first artist, and he goes “why would we hire an artist?
What can you invent or imagine?” I said, “I don’t know, what about cell phone data projector?”
and this was way before we had the technology and he said “absolutely impossible, it’s a dumb idea! Can’t get that small, the battery power blah, blah, blah…”.
When the first white paper was released by this, and by the way I wrote the idea down and sent it to Nokia, Samsung, I’m not taking credit for it, but I sent that idea out into the world.
And about when the first white paper came out I sent it to Dr. Abbs and I said “Crazy idea, huh?”
These ideas are really important that we have and we don’t know how valid they are or how invalid.
But what is important is to know to keep them, to make them and to share them.
So I ask you before I leave, the most important thing that you take away from this talk is to value your ideas and be fearless in your ability to bring them in the world and make them and share them with one another.
Thank you very much!