Hugh Garry

Less Cowbell

The Futureheads have a new album out this week. It's called 'Rant'. What's remarkable about it is it's an a capella album. A brave move for a rock group that have a strong fan base and four studio albums under its belt.

At this stage of their career bands can live or die by their next move. They've come through the 'difficult second album' phase, been touring for a decade and need to do something that is different but is more of the same. Usually the answer to that dilemma is 'more cowbell'. Or in other words, lets do more of the same but bigger. More guitars. More drums. More noise. And lets do it louder.

As mentioned in my previous post '4 lessons in creativity from The Artist' taking stuff away is always an option:

Creativity is about subtraction. What you remove is as import as what you add. If you're making a blockbuster like Transformers and you add more robots, you simply have a film with more robots. If you're making a film like The Artist and you take away the voices you have something 'remarkable'.

What's really interesting is that when you combine elements in a creative way (such as rock bands and a capella) to create something new interesting posibilities that arise as a result. For example you could argue that it took the arrival of broadband and Flash to make Youtube a reality. In this case touring the album becomes a completely new experience for the band and the audience. Not only is the cost of the tour reduced because they have less gear (on ticket price) but the venue's they can now play a different kind of venue. 

It's great to see the creative side of 'the industry' taking bold steps in risk averse times. 

4 lessons in creativity from 'The Artist'

 

I went to dinner on Sunday with a friend who told me that people in Liverpool were walking out of the cinema when they discovered that The Artist was a silent film. I shouldn't be surprised though. I'm sure there were couples choking into their popcorn in multiplexes all over the country when the realised that a silent movie actually means no speaking and no colour. Not even 3D!!! What was Hollywood thinking?

I was delighted to see it scoop a handful of Oscars last month. It's a brilliant and engaging film packed with lessons in how to be creative in whatever it is you do. Here are 4 to be getting on with:

1. What is not constrained is not creative. If you are faced with a blank sheet of paper to fill try add some restrictions of your own. 

2. Creativity is about subtraction. What you remove is as import as what you add. If you're making a blockbuster like Transformers and you add more robots, you simply have a film with more robots. If you're making a film like The Artist and you take away the voices you have something 'remarkable'.   

3. Talent imitates, genius steals. Borrowing from what has gone before is no bad thing. Singing the Rain was a brilliant movie.

4. Rethink deadness. Just because technology moves forward doesn't mean old ideas are bad ideas. 

 

Lean Startup: From the boardroom to the Whitehouse (SXSW12)

Why daydreaming is important to creativity

I've enjoyed some of the articles that appeared over the New Year about the value of silence. Switching off the laptop and stepping away from the iphone is this year's geek equivalent to going to the gym in January. Disconnecting is as hip in 2012 as connecting was in 2011. Everyone is switching off for the weekend as people try to kick the digital habit. There is even a new meal time game called 'Don't be a Dick During Meals with Friends' which requires everyone to put their phone in the middle of the table during a meal. The first one to pick it up to check their email or tweet has to pay for everyone's meal. 

I've recently been resisting the urge to reach for the iPhone as a way of finding time to daydream. Daydreaming is important. Soon after we leave the education system we find ourselves in jobs that require us to unlearn the behaviours drilled into us from our first days in the classroom. Daydreaming is probably one of the most of forbidden rules of the classroom, focus us everything, which is a nightmare for a young mind. As Alison Gopnik points out in 'The Philosophical Baby' it's not that children can't focus they're just not very good at not noticing. 

Creativity is about connecting things and thinking the unthinkable so it should be no surprise that daydreaming forms an important part of anyone’s creative process. Daydreaming takes your mind out of the realities of the moment and into the abstract via a series of mental connections. Scientist Jonathan Schooler from UCSB has done a lot of work in the area of the value of daydreaming and discovered that people who allow their mind to wonder score highly in tests for creativity. 

I love this quote from Virginia Woolf in her novel 'To The Lighthouse' which I stumbled upon via John Lehrer:

Certainly she was losing consciousness of the outer things. And as she lost consciousness of outer things, her mind kept throwing things up from its depths, scenes and names, sayings, memories and ideas, life a fountain spurting over that glaring, hideously difficult white space.

The fountain spurting out over the difficult what space is such a wonderful metaphor for the virtues of mind wandering in creativity. Allowing your daydreams to shuffle all those memories you have neatly stored away, remixing moments without your control and then spurting them out as a stream of visions you feel you had not active part in creating. What a perfect way to fill that blank page.

As screens steal our attention more and more the need to schedule daydreaming into our day is something we should all think about if we want to be creative in what we do. Close the laptop, put the phone away, use that spare 15 minutes you suddenly found in your day to let your mind wonder rather than giving it away to a device.

Terry Gilliam on 'where ideas come from'

The answer is 'little elves'. Sorry, but what would you expect from the man who brought Time Bandits, Brazil and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen to our screens. But yes, he's kinda right. The elves do play their part. Recently I posted a video of John Cleese talking about the creative pause. Now his Python buddy Terry Gilliam talks about putting faith in his pixies, or rather his subconscious, to find the connections that create his stories:

I used to say I knew where the ideas came from. Because I'd go to bed, and I'd leave my shoes by the bed. And I'd wake up and there'd be these little elves that would come in and put ideas in my shoes, and I'd just use them. 

I refuse to intellectualize, or try to understand how it happens. It happens, and I just try to ride with it. And the frightening thing is when it doesn't happen, it's actually terrifying because you realize, "I've dried up. It's finally happened: the well is empty." But, then if you get through those periods, then something starts happening again. A lot of what happens, it's like doing a painting without actually doing a sketch in advance. You just start and you got this, you add another thing, boom, boom, boom. 

Just for one example, The Wholly Family, is the scene in the hospital. There was always going to be a hospital scene and the boy would see himself as a baby. But then, I was in this place that repairs dolls, the hospital of dolls, and there was this little plastic egg with a Pulcinella in it, so OK, now we have eggs and that's how babies come. And it just changed it. It was beautiful. I think it's about having an idea and never letting it become rigid. It's just the beginning, and then you just see what you can pull into it. At the end, there you are.

I like that he has this image of elves doing the work for him. Ghosts make another good metaphor for idea generation. Like ghosts the ideas are always there, half formed, floating all around, everywhere you go, waiting to become a reality. Only you can see them because the ghosts are faint realisations of the experiences you've collected. As Gilliam says, 'they are not rigid, they're just the beginning, and then you just see what you can pull into it'. 

Like the elves in the night, the ghosts find you. Probably when you least expect them to visit. Gilliam's came in hospital for dolls. Newton's came when he was in the orchard. Archimedes came whilst he was taking a bath. The ideas come. Eventually. Having faith in ghosts, elves or simply a part of your brain that you don't control requires the kind of leap of faith that only people who believe in elves in the first place are likely to take. Another great reason to cling onto what's left of your childlike mind. 

Seneca, bees and combinatorial creativity

I like this quote from Seneca who uses the bee's process for making honey as a metaphor for creativity. Collecting, combining, fermenting. It's all there:

We should follow, men say, the example of the bees, who flit about and cull the flowers that are suitable for producing honey, and then arrange and assort in their cells all that they have brought in; these bees, as our Vergil says, "pack close the flowing honey, and swell their cells with nectar sweet".... Certain others maintain that the materials which the bees have culled from the most delicate of blooming and flowering plants is transformed into this peculiar substance by a process of preserving and careful storing away, aided by what might be called fermentation, whereby separate elements are united into one substance.

We also, I say, ought to copy these bees, and sift whatever we have gathered from a varied course of reading, for such things are better preserved if they are kept separate; then, by applying the supervising care with which our nature has endowed us, in other words, our natural gifts, we should so blend those several flavours into one delicious compound that, even though it betrays its origin, yet it nevertheless is clearly a different thing from that whence it came.

 

John Cleese on his creative process

Some nuggests of brilliance from John on the power of the unconscious mind and the value of the creative pause.

One of the problems creative people often have is scheduling and process. Randomness and serendipity are such an important part of their lives that there is a reluctance for creating 'moments for creativity to happen'. But as Clesse points out here creating time and space are useful for allowing the brain to wonder, to get into the right mode for thinking. It's what he calls his 'Tortoise Enclosure'. It's an oasis in the middle of your life built with boundaries of space and boundaries of time. Simple as that. 

 

The Creative Pause

I like this quote from Brian Eno taken from Steven Johnson's 'The Innovators Cookbook':

"I think there are periods that, when you’re in them, seem desperately unfruitful, and you think, “Why am I doing this? I’m completely useless, and I’ve lost it all.” Then an idea finally strikes you, and you suddenly realise that you’ve been working on it for quite a long time but you weren’t aware of it. You’ve assembled all of the mental and physical tools you need to handle it in what seemed like a fallow period".

It reminded me of some writing I did during my own recent creative pause about switching off and letting our unconscious memory do the work.

Switching off to get results:

The ‘creative pause’ is a deliberate self-imposed interruption of your consciousness flow of thoughts as you attempt to solve a problem or come up with creative solutions. In other words, it’s taking a break, walking away from what you are doing, then daydreaming a little bit. It may sound counter productive when you are facing deadlines but it’s a proven way of producing insights when it appears that your brain has given up on you. By walking away from the problem you are giving the non-conscious resources in your brain permission to make the connections that your conscious resources are struggling to make.  

I’m yet to meet a person who hasn’t hit a creative wall at some point in their working lives. This creative crash usually comes as a result of over thinking the problem. You’ve gathered all your resources, you’ve started making connections, but you are failing to come up with the final answer. After countless hours working the problem over in your head the ‘a-ha’ moment you desperately seek seems further away than when you started. Battling through is not the answer yet it is how most people attack the problem. You can’t ‘walk off’ a blister so why try. Taking a pause, whether it is for 30 minutes, 30 seconds or even 30 days, will help quiet the noise in your brain allowing the answers to rise up.

The creative pause is one of the more tricky elements of the creative process for people to come to terms with because the results it produces are difficult to account for. But think about it for a moment. How many times have you heard people say ‘The idea came from nowhere’ or ‘I was in the shower’ or ‘I was doing the dishes and it struck me’ or ‘I was in the car on the way to work’. For Archimedes his famous eureka moment happened whilst taking a bath. Newton was hanging out in an orchard when the penny dropped in the form of an apple. These epiphanies happening away from the actual process of problem solving owe a lot to the size of our subconscious brain power compared to that of our conscious brain power.

The science bit: how the creative pause works:
When we solve problems we not only use different sides of our brain, we are also using different bits of memory: our ‘working memory’ and our ‘unconscious memory’. Because we are more familiar with our working memory we tend to give it more credit for problem solving than our ‘unconscious memory’. Let me explain how they differ.

Our ‘working memory’ is used to solve simple mathematical problems like simple addition, multiplication and conversions: calculating the cost in dollars of a £5 meal (if the dollar is $1.60 to the pound) is something our ‘working memory’ can cope with without having to resort to using fingers, a paper and pen or calculator. Change the cost of that meal to £5.37 and all of a sudden the ‘working memory’ is beginning to struggle. In fact, for most people it has probably fallen over.

Your ‘unconscious memory’ has an incredible ability to call upon stored information to help us complete challenges way beyond the capabilities of the ‘working memory’.


For one moment I want you to imagine that you are Lionel Messi, the slightly short but rather brilliant Barcelona and Argentina center forward. You're about to take a free-kick, which is 30 meters away from the goal. The ball is placed 11 meters to the left of the center of the goal. In front of you stands a wall of players situated to mandatory 10 meters from the ball.

The average height of the 5 players in the wall is 6 feet tall. Because of their positioning your view of the goal is totally obstructed. You want to kick the ball in to the top right corner of the goal, as far away from the goalkeeper as possible.

To compensate for his positioning slightly left of center the keeper has positioned his wall to cover the right side of the goal. To have and hope of hitting your target you must make the ball curve around the wall and come back in before the ball travels a distance further than the goal.

As well as curving the ball you must also apply enough power to make the ball rise and then dip just at the right point so that when it hits its desire target it enters between the posts no more than 2 inches from the top post and 2 inches from the right post.

To achieve all of this you must hit the ball with a specific part of your foot, with your foot at a certain angle and with an exact amount of pressure. Easy. Right? Wrong.

It’s the kind of goal Messi scores on a regular basis using his unconscious memory to make the exact calculations for him. Just walking requires your basal ganglia to make a multitude of calculations every second to coordinate all the muscle groups required to create the actions required.

Throughout our entire working day we continually put faith in our ‘unconscious memory’ to make the kind of incredible calculations our ‘working memory’ could never solve. Yet somehow when we have a big problem we insist on piling the pressure on a part of our brain already buckling at the knees. Kicking a donkey harder will not win you the Grand National, mounting a thoroughbred might.

Storytelling tips from Ira Glass

There are few better storytellers in the world of radio than This American Life's colossal host Ira Glass. If you're not familiar with This American Life then I suggest you subscribe to the podcast and feed on its wonderful archive of amazing stories. 

So as a huge fan of the man, and the show, I was delighted to stumble across this great interview in which he discusses his craft in great detail. some great advice in there for anyone in the business of telling stories regardless of the medium or platform the story is made for.

Part 1:

"OK. So you have the building block which is the actual sequence of actions, the anecdote part of it. This thing happened and then this thing and then this thing. That's one building block. And the other big building block, your other tool, is that you have a moment of reflection. And by that I mean at some point somebody's got to say here's why the hell you're listening to this story. Like here's the point of this story. Here's the bigger something that we're driving at. Here's why I'm wasting your time with all this".

Part 2:

"You have to be really a killer about getting rid of the boring parts and going right to the parts that get into your heart. You just have to be ruthless if anything is going to be good. Things that are really good are good because people are being really, really tough".

Part 3:

"And the thing I would just like say to you with all my heart is that most everybody I know who does interesting creative work, they went through a phase of years where they had really good taste and they could tell what they were making wasn't as good as they wanted it to be. They knew it fell short, you know, and some of us can admit that to ourselves and some of us are a little less able to admit that to ourselves".

Part 4:

"And so we've all seen really bad videos done by people who talk like people on TV. Just like when I was first on the radio I just tried to talk like somebody on the radio. And of course everything is going to be more compelling, it's just like one of the laws of broadcasting, everything will be more compelling the more you just talk like a human being and just talk like yourself".

A Manifesto for Life

I've been thinking a lot about Manifestos recently. I was talking to one of my team today about the importance of setting yourself personal rules for life every year. This year mine is 'Stretch Yourself'. Last year it was 'Do what you're good at to make the world a better place'. The year before it was 'Become an expert'.

Then I came across this which was taken from Tolstoy's 'Rules of Life' courtesy of Gretchin Rubin. I think it's wonderful.

"Have a goal for your whole life, a goal for one section of your life, a goal for a shorter period and a goal for the year; a goal for every month, a goal for every week, a goal for every day, a goal for every hour and for every minute, and sacrifice the lesser goal to the greater."

I need to start compiling my own manifesto soon.