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Is Creativity a Habit?: 8 Habits of Highly Creative People

Is Creativity a Habit?: 8 Habits of Highly Creative People

Last updated on: October 8, 2015 at 7:17 am by Tim Suttle

Is Creativity a Habit?: 8 Habits of Highly Creative People 2015-10-08T07:17:47-06:00 Tim Suttle

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There’s an interesting article up at Fast Company by a writer named Stephanie Vozza. She typically writes in the productivity slash organizer vein, so Vozza brings that sensibility to bear on the concept of creativity. The article caught my eye because I’m prepping a sermon series dealing with art and beauty. I’ve been reading Hans Urs von Balthasar’s theological aesthetics for three straight days now. Either I’m losing my mind or Balthasar is just a tough read. Half of the time I have to translate the English translation of Balthasar into English I can understand. So, this article was the theological Snickers bar I was jonesin’ for this morning.

Is creativity a habit? I threw in my lot with Julia Cameron somewhere around 1996 when I worked through her great resource for artists, The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. Cameron recommended the practice of what she called “day pages.” Other folks who have written extensively about the craft of writing have said similar things (Steven King, Anne Lamott, Anne Dillard to name a few): same time, same place, every day, sit down and write for nobody else but you. The craft of writing, or any artistic endeavor, is a muscle that must be exercised or it will atrophy.

That habitual practices are necessary to foster proficiency in any craft, creative or otherwise, is self-evident, but what about inspiration? What about the genuis and imagination required to produce a work of art that is truly beautiful? Is that kind of creativity a habit? Vozza argues that it is: “Aha moments aren’t magic, they come to people who have cultivated daily habits of approaching life differently.”

Here are the habits she highlights. You can read her full article here: “8 Habits of People who Always Have Great Ideas.”

They look for inspiration in unexpected places.
They make slow decisions.
They find internal motivation.
They start from scratch.
They are willing to take risks.
They are always trying new things.
They find connections between experiences.
They are open to magic.

Don’t let the wording of the last one scare you off. It’s actually just a way of saying that the essence of anything that might be called good news always involves the movement from word to flesh. She’s talking about a sacramental view of the world–enchantment.

I have found the combination of #2 and #6 to be of utmost importance in terms of my ability to produce something that is (hopefully somewhat) original. Ideas that are not wholly derivative take a lot of time to develop. One must go through many iterations, sketches, drafts, studies, models, and so on in order to something original. Clever happens quickly, but genius takes time. I have found that my best ideas come as I’m ruminating on one idea over the course of days or weeks. I’m scribbling down thoughts and honing in on what I really think about a certain subject. Then, somewhere along the way I bump into a seemingly unrelated idea or symbol and the two crash together like the old Resee’s commercials (you got your chocolate in my peanut butter). Creativity is about seeing connections. This really only happens when we take our time with ideas.

I would only quibble with #4 as it is, strictly speaking, totally impossible to “work from scratch.” Until the 1700s “creativity” was not a word that was used with regard to human ability. Creative types were called artisans. The term “creative” was reserved for naming the ex nihilo abilities possessed only by the divine.

Claiming that human beings can “start from scratch” is the aesthetic equivalent to the great philosophical foible of 19th Century Philosophical Liberalism, or modernity–however you want to term it. To read more about this, here’s an old post: Post Liberal Theology for Dummies.

Part of the human condition is that we are imbedded in a specific cultural milieu that we cannot escape. All artists stand on the shoulders of previous artists. All language, symbol, form, and expression is received by us. We do not generate those things, because they live in the culture. We can work with them, rearrange them, and find new and imaginative means of expressing them, but any creativity that could be called true and good must necessarily be humble in terms of the claims it makes for itself. Humans can’t do creation ex nihilo. We can only work with what was already here when we woke up in the world. Humans are much more like quilters than weavers.

This is a really interesting article & well worth your time.

Hans Urs Von Balthasar

Stephanie Vozza

theological aesthetics

writing

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