Inspired

Matt Richtel (2022). Inspired: Understanding creativity: A journey through art, science, and the soul. Mariner Books – HarperCollins Publishers: New York

7 “King Herod was the Steve Jobs of his time.”

7-8 Judea around the year zero … half a million people … Jerusalem. It was the ultimate company town, and the industry was religion

8 Population-level research … tells us that what gets created appears to come through a collective energy

10 Creativity is … the true first wonder of the world … Creativity lives inside each of us and, collectively, we create our world

11 In fertile brains, we make random connections among ideas

13 An intelligent person answers a question.

    A creative person comes up with the question in the first place, and then answers it

13 deeply religious people can struggle to be creative because they subvert their ideas to the wisdom of an all-knowing God

13 A creator’s toolbox grows through travel, new experience, emotion, and veering outside everyday comfort

13 creators aren’t so quick to dismiss information as irrelevant or unworthy just because it doesn’t conform to existing beliefs

14 Creativity and creators can make people deeply uncomfortable

16 Creativity is essential to our nature

18 riding in a car is among the most dangerous activities we will ever undertake

19 our greatest creations can have troubling side effects

19 Many pursuits in this world ask a person to choose between the selfish and societal advancement. Creativity, though, allows us to nurture our individual spark while also potentially changing the world

21 people get locked into identities, narrowed by fears that interfere with natural creative impulses

24 The act of creation is an end unto itself – one that provides more joy than do the resulting creations themselves

29 many definitions of creativity settle on an explication that includes a convergence of novelty and value. Value is important

30 creativity involves novelty and value or influence

30 creativity should not be seen … as good or evil

31 Creativity … involves the concept of authenticity … creativity can be associated with immense pleasure

31-32 Albert Einstein called creativity “intelligence having fun.” … “Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere … Imagination is more important than knowledge … You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created.”

32 Creativity is absolutely, vitally, insanely important. Novelty, value, surprise, authenticity, fun. But not necessarily good or evil

32 creativity … can be terrifying

35 “You have to be a dreamer but not forget to keep your feet on the ground.” … [Yehuda] Gat

36 Jack Goncalo … Do people really like creativity and creators? 

37 companies, research centers, leaders, and others “routinely reject creative ideas,” and teachers “dislike students who exhibit curiosity and creative thinking.”

40 “People want creativity and stability,” Goncalo said. 

    It can be difficult to have both

42 the very name “Israel” means “wrestles with God.”

47 Inspiration can be learned

47 doubt is essentially inherent to the creative journey

48-49 Researchers can pinpoint when the doubt sets in. Fourth grade … E. Paul Torrance … 1959 … 1964 … saw a sharp drop in creativity measures, especially in their fluency, or ability to generate lots of ideas. The drop happened in fourth grade … “Fourth Grade Slump.”

50 more conventional thinking takes root

50-51 Kyung Hee “Kay” Kim … Korea … United States … 2017 … tests with concrete answers caused children to lose curiosity and imagination, discouraging passion and risk-taking, and ultimately to succumb to “conforming to others’ control … If, early on, you start thinking about the right answer instead of thinking about possibilities, your brain loses flexibility.”

52 one of the most powerful studies ever published about the relationship between intellect and creativity shows that children who perform well on intelligence tests are not necessarily destined for creative achievement … 1921 … Lewis Terman … 1986 

53 One key reason for the rise of testing is the advent and spread of the personal computer

53 many big thinkers acknowledge now that the fast-changing nature of a complicated economy requires more flexible thinking

53 “What-if?” storytelling

54 give some permission to parents, children of all ages, and educators to allow more imagination, knowing it will not lead people off the rails altogether

55-56 late 1990s, John Dacey … The parents with creative children gave those children far fewer rules on a daily basis than did the families with children who did not exhibit creativity. In the families with creative children, Dacey told me, “There might be one rule, like: Be a mensch.”

    Translation from Yiddish: Be kind

58 Mark Runco … “parents and teachers … the best thing they can do for creativity is tolerate,”

58 The number one enemy of creativity is perfectionism … the opposite of perfectionism is permission

59 Dean Simonton … sees the same patterns with major creators: Quantity of ideas outpaces quality … “If you want to be creative you can’t guarantee a solution in advance,” … creators persevere without knowing whether their pursuit will succeed

64 [Rhiannon Giddens] and her sister credit the boredom with forcing them to develop vibrant powers of imagination

67 Yo-Yo Ma … “He told me he’d been playing cello since he was itty-bitty, and he told me about reaching a certain age in his twenties and thirties and realizing he had to choose to be a cellist … That’s what he did – he’d been playing just because that’s what he did. Since then he’d been much happier with his life.”

74 gratitude … humility

77 expertise or even basic craftsmanship is not at all the same as creativity

84-85 Emma Seppala … getting beyond misplaced fear and becoming creative – are closely related

87 perceiving more threat than is merited … People can get even more overwrought through worry, intensifying this sympathetic response well out of proportion with the actual threat … What if it was possible to not trigger the lion response when there is no lion … breathing and other mindfulness techniques

89 “You must lose your inhibitions,” said Kay Kim … the connection between sexuality and creativity … a correlation between Nobel Prize winners and greater acceptance of, and experimentation with, sexual freedom

90 Carlos Santana … meditation. “It made me higher than any weed in the world … It gives you clarity into who you are.”

90-91 2016 … International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction … “The studies were unable to show that substance use directly contributed to the growth of creativity or facilitated creative artistic processes.”

91 great ideas are generated when “you’re awake but super relaxed, when the mind is wandering.” This is a state when alpha waves are generated in the brain … It’s the place where we don’t fear external judgment. We are not on guard

93-94 General Walter Piatt … To be creative, “You have to be open-minded.”

94 rare mix of confidence and humility and trust themselves without being arrogant … “to win this war without killing one more person.”

96-97 mindfulness … “It lets you pay attention and discern what is real and what is present without judgment.”

97 creators emerge over time … the way to hear your voice is to quiet the white noise around you

100 The nonjudgmental, meditative state can give rise to mind wandering.

    That’s good for creativity

102 daydreaming

105 What’s of note about making love is that it was by far the least likely time for a study subject’s mind to wander

106 a person having a pleasant daydream isn’t necessarily a happier person … “a human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost.”

106 2014 … The study aimed to see how comfortable people are being alone with their thoughts. The answer: not comfortable. In fact, people are so uncomfortable that they’d rather give themselves an electric shock than sit quietly for fifteen minutes in a room … There is a less painful way in which many people avoid letting their minds wander. We entertain ourselves

108 Sometimes, though, fear is creator’s best friend

109 Dr. Edward Jenner … smallpox … The world’s first vaccine … Dr. Jenner was hypercurious

127-128 Andreas Wagner … bacteria … mutation gives the cell incredible new survival powers, such as the ability to overpower an antibiotic … two different types of mutations that lead to such a result … One … efflux pump … Mutations to the pump can cause the pump “to become hyperactive … As an antibiotic enters, the pump pumps it right back out,” … Another … enzymes … Typically, the job of these enzymes is to cut, or “cleave”, other molecules … However, random mutations can occur in the genes that encode these enzymes that cause them to cleave penicillin … Creativity can be shown at the most basic molecular level and that what happens there is a roadmap for creativity at large

130 Dean Simonton … “the creative process is essentially Darwinian.”

131 Beethoven … A basic attribute of creators is not the initial quality of their ideas but the sheer quantity of mutation

131 [Richard] Dawkins, in his book The Greatest Show on Earth … “Artistic creativity … is involved with sexual selection.”

131-133 Robert Bilder … “At the edge of chaos, the states are maximally novel while still connected to states in the ordered regime, and thus are most likely to manifest the combination of novelty and utility that is the hallmark of creativity,” … 2014

133 Convergent and divergent thinking are key concepts in the world of creativity … Convergent thinking revolves around ideas that conform … Divergent thinking, by contrast, is considered “nonlinear.” … On the flip side, divergent and convergent “thinking” may not actually involve thinking at all, not the way you may be considering it

134 “Neutral” is a term for mutations that appear, on the surface, not to have a big impact on the survival of the organism … only about 40 percent of genes have a direct impact on the viability of a species

135-136 Dr. Alexander Fleming … “I did not invent penicillin. Nature did that. I only discovered it by accident.”

137 divergent thinking doesn’t necessarily mean the breaking of a natural law but, rather, seeing things for what they are, could be, or have developed into

137 A projection, from a study funded by the British government, estimates that by 2050, more people on Earth will die from drug-resistant microbes than will die that year from cancer

138 the creative urge is biological in origin. It is in us

139 2001 … GRAMMY … “Beautiful Day.” … Bono … U2 … “In the music business, we’re pop stars and think we’re the center of the universe and think our fans are like moons going around us, and that everything revolves around us … That’s all BS.” … The popularity of music … “is based on hardware.”

141 Evolution, survival, and a “mindless” form of creativity from lower life forms offer a few concrete lessons for creators and would-be creators. One lesson is to not underestimate the role of the environment

141 [Roger] McNamee … “I cannot overstate the role of dumb luck.”

142 how well a creation is received into the world is the relationship between the creation and the environment. A creator can control only part of the relationship… but not the time and place in which the creative twist occurs

144 creators tend to exhibit extraordinary curiosity, humility, an openness to discussion and ideas, romps of conversation, and interests in their own lives that go in different directions

145  “One of the hardest things is: What is the question? Creating the right question is often a large part of the problem,” [Geoffrey] West

145 As life-forms get larger, they use energy more efficiently and at a rate that is consistent across organisms … when you double the size of an organism, it needs 75 percent less energy per cell

146 one of the most fundamental laws of innovation:

    PERFECTIONISM IS PUBLIC ENEMY #1 OF CREATIVITY

146-147 cities … The key figure is 15 percent.

    If a city doubles in size … it requires only 85 percent increase in … infrastructure …

    There is a crucial corollary. When you double the size of a city, the amount of what that city produces goes up by a factor of 115 percent. Pollution, crime, economic output … Each person in a city that has doubled is 15 percent more productive than a person living in a city half the size …

    And it turns out this goes for ideas too …

    “It’s no accident that all great ideas and all innovations take place in an urban environment … It’s a rare occurrence that you have the Newton phenomenon.” … 1665 

153 Justin … Sandercoe … “one of the most influential teachers in guitar history.”

154 Sandercoe thought creativity was a platinum album, when instead it was becoming a beloved, deeply satisfied, and highly creative stay-at-home guitar teacher

155 research from Santa Fe Institute proves that the density of population directly correlates with new ideas … Then along came the internet … The value of physical proximity has become far less significant in the way we collaborate

155-156 COVID-19 … Creativity decentralized with it

156 Geoffrey West … “At some stage, we won’t be able to adapt fast enough to the changes driven by this extraordinary process driven by social network,”

157-158 I see reason for hope. Two reasons, actually … The first reason … Creativity is a function of social networking, sure, but it is hugely a product of individual power built upon the lucid, quieted mind … the second reason for hope. It has to do with leadership … “The great innovation we need is a leader,”

159-160 The story of creativity and religion starts in the Middle Ages … “The Roman Catholic Church is the only thing holding things together,” said Scott Cormode … Martin Luther, Martin Luther King, Jr., Moses, Jesus, Confucius, Mohammed … He’s developed a model for understanding creative leadership that links the Reformation to the personal computer and Silicon Valley

160 It is also beyond dispute that major religions define the human experience, and their texts are among the most influential creations. Their leaders are titans of creativity, and so the issue for me is what they teach us about how to think about innovation, not faith … the perspective of a theologian on creativity

161 Judaism … Hinduism … Confucianism … Buddhism … the Roman Catholic Church … “All-powerful” is how multiple historical texts describe the church in and around 1500 … Holy and also corrupt

162 fifteenth and sixteenth centuries … creativity can be infectious, and it had become so during the Renaissance … a monk named Martin Luther

164 Martin Luther reformed the Christian religion by giving it a new story

165 Jesus offered a powerful plot twist based on the Old Testament … new product: It is available to everyone, not just the Chosen People … religion and theology tell us about the essential nature of creativity: It is often extremely effective when it connects the past to the present and helps guide the future

168 Islam

170 the remarkable intersection of creativity and conformity

171 1892, an African American man, Homer Plessy … Supreme Court … Fourteenth Amendment … made glaring the system of racism that would echo until the present

173 A new study suggests that deeply religious people are less likely to be creative than people who aren’t devoted to a monotheistic God

175 If someone has a particularly hard-and-fast worldview, it limits the ability to consider information that falls outside that worldview

175-176 historically, some of the most creative individuals … were devout believers

178 we very frequently kill potentially good ideas because we fear they will take more resources than they are worth to pursue

183 [2020] mobile phone … African American … discrimination … the rise of the pandemic helped create conditions that led to social change

197 “How many things can you think of to do with a brick?” … Joy Paul Guilford … 1967. The test was aimed at measuring a person’s ability to develop divergent thoughts … Or a paper clip, a pen, a shoe? … identify four qualities … associated with creativity … fluency … originality … flexibility … detail

198 [Roger] Beaty … brain scanner … timed alternative use test … the scanners measure blood flow in the brain … “Those who did better … had stronger connections between regions of three subnetworks of the brain.” … default network, the executive control network, and the salience network

199 Arne Dietrich … authored the book How Creativity Happens in the Brain … the complexity of creativity currently exceeds our ability to map it in the brain

200 There is extraordinary potential for the field of neuroscience when it comes to understanding creativity, but the science is very embryonic and therefore might mislead

201 2003 … “transient hypofrontality theory” … A temporary slowing down of the most advanced parts of the brain would lead to the generation of more creative ideas … creativity is “fully and embedded and distributed” in the brain

203 heightened activity when creating in a part of the brain known for downtime and not active analysis

204 The creators needed less brain power … the Smart Comparison Group had to work harder

210 [Judd] Apatow … “It’s all about having people who have a good heart – to be surrounded by people with kind hearts who are offering up the good and the bad in their life experience.”

210 The sum of the stories and science of the brain is that they broadly reinforce the idea that ideas and innovations percolate from parts of the brain associated with more relaxed states, and then get assessed by the more intellectual or analytical parts

211 creativity and vision.

    What people create comes from what they see. Literally

212 2019 in a journal called Neuroimage … creative people actually see more material in the world around them, picking up and dwelling on information that others who are less creative miss … It helps explain the value of travel and new experience, of conversations with people who think differently

215 the research noted, “that creative and highly curious individuals see the world differently in a quite literal sense.”

    It is hard to overstate the importance of this finding in the pursuit of understanding creativity

215 rigid thinking is anathema to creativity

216 The more people see, the more they can create

216 By definition, it can be hard to be novel or surprising, two core aspects of creativity, if a would-be creator is narrowed by seeing few things or by failing to see things as they are

216-217 Garry Trudeau … “being on the outside looking in can make you a better noticer than those admitted to the party, a better observer of the games people play to preserve their status, and, of course, more empathetic toward those who have none … I never doubted my self-worth for a moment … I had every expectation of life working out.” … an invaluable balance

220 [Jennifer] Eberhardt … “false fears” can greatly interfere with creative processes

221 Bias exists for good reason. It helps to save mental resources … bias creates false fear that inhibits creativity … the creation of great works … often comes from seeing things as they are

225 the more closed-minded we are to ideas … the less able we are as individuals to be creative. And the less we can create as a society

225 good news for those who aspire to creativity … being just plain smart is overrated

226 a 2003 paper in the Journal of Research in Personality … dispelled the myth of intelligence as the chief personality trait among creators

226 Gregory Feist … Intelligence is fairly associated with problem solving and the speed of doing it, abstract reasoning, and, broadly, the capacity to process information. It is a component of creativity, to a point

227 People with an IQ that is above average are not likelier than people with an average IQ to achieve creatively.

    In fact, above an IQ of 115-120, “the relationship becomes essentially zero,” … “threshold theory,” … 2013 paper … the threshold for creativity of 120 … has prevailed

227 some research shows that a better predictor than test-measured intelligence of whether someone will achieve creatively is whether outsiders perceive or report a person to be intelligent

229 2013 … [Gregory] Feist … “scientists who have wide imagination, who are curious, and open to new experiences tend to be more creative than their conventional and down-to-earth colleagues.” … personality trait … “openness/intellect.”

230 openness … requires the consideration of ideas and a willingness to explore those ideas, experiences, and feelings

231 “innovation/imagination.”

232 2013 … neuroticism … The influence of this personality type on creativity is less than that of openness, but is still statistically significant

233 the creator is confident enough to be willing to be uncertain – but then confident enough to settle on an answer authentic to a particular creative approach

236 “The truly civilized man is marked by empathy,” Malcom Kerr

243-244 ignoring the role of the immune system and attacking the cancer … using chemotherapy and radiation … blunt force attacks with all kinds of collateral damage … [James] Allison … stimulate the immune system to attack the cancer … a molecule called CTLA-4 … Tasuku Honjo, won them equal shares of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Medicine … “established an entirely new principle for cancer therapy.”

245 much of the suffering, including many deaths, came from an overreaction of the immune system to COVID-19

246 How old is a creator?

247 Dean Simonton … Einstein, Picasso, Freud, Edison, Bach … At what age were these great creators most productive?

248 it is possible to stay creative throughout one’s life span

250 How old is a creator … Any age will do

254 “It’s hard to generalize about people once you get to know them and like them,” [Jacob] Schroeder

257 Alex [Alejandro Rizo] … “You can have so much in common with someone you sometimes think poorly about.”

262 George de Mestral … Velcro … late 1940s … burrs

268 Dr. Charles Dinarello … in the 1970s discovered the molecule that causes fever

273 The secret ingredient to creativity is: you

273 Creativity is essential to us because it allows us to survive

274 Being creative makes people happier … The research shows that when people create, it allows them to experience relief

276 creativity let people express themselves out of the box – to the point that it was a physical relief

276 Why create? This is not about saving the world. It might be in no small part about saving yourself … creativity and happiness are close relations

276 James Kaufman … 2018 … premise: “Everyday creative people are less stressed, happier, more successful and more satisfied with their jobs.”

278 you’re your day job

280 Do not quit your day job … Being creative for a living is very, very hard. It requires immense luck

281 Creativity is not an either/or lifestyle

284 polymath … person of wide-ranging knowledge or learning

287 Many people believe they are worthy of trying to create, and as worthy as anyone else. But they are not more worthy, which is just as important to the creativity equation as feeling worthy

292 90 percent of the information ever created in the world happened from 2016 to 2018

295 Creativity is inevitable, because it is in us …

    Creativity has unintended consequences … in ways that are good or bad

296-297 mRNA vaccines … Covid-19 vaccines … Katalin Kariko … and a collaborator named Drew Weissman

302 a trait that surfaced repeatedly in conversations with great creators: unyielding curiosity

302-303 [Yo-Yo] Ma … I could hear the essence of creation.

    First, there was his innate curiosity and openness. Creators don’t seem to preach as much as to listen, interact with the world, gather, synthesize. They give themselves permission to ask the “smart-dumb questions.” They don’t rush to judgment by choosing to mimic what they’ve learned. They test, probe, ask with some fearlessness about where the answer may lead … The secret ingredient in creativity is you.

    At the same time, the nature of the creations that rise in each of us can very much depend on the circumstances around

304 Creations, even the most brilliant, have unintended consequences … no great creation goes unpunished

306 Be inspired. It is natural