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FLEX YOUR MIND

My day job is coming up with fresh thinking and new ideas for brands. I love ideas. I love the first sniff of one, the gut feeling we’re onto something. The hunt for more evidence and the inevitable period of doubt and being ‘lost in the forest’. The joy of getting it down on paper. I love all of it.

Flex is about inventing new answers to old problems and picking at the threads of handed-down wisdom to see what unravels. It means having a low boredom threshold for the ‘same old, same old’. It makes us challenge the status quo and ask difficult questions, like: is this the way we should be living and working? Are the norms we’ve all bought into making us happy? This is opposite of dogma and rigidity. It is a sort of cognitive yoga; an exercise for the mind that stretches our horizons and challenges our biases. It requires bravery, leaps of faith and empathy. And, annoyingly, it’s not easy . . .

SKILL OF THE FUTURE

The World Economic Forum predicts that creativity is one of the top three skills workers will need in the future. The other two are complex problem-solving and critical-thinking. The more we flex our creativity muscles, they say, the more we future-proof our skills.

Some days at work, my partner Adam and I are creative ninjas. Other days, we talk about last night’s telly and what we’re going to have for lunch. Creativity isn’t effortless, there’s no app for it, but it’s vital if we are to find new and exciting ways to change the things that are restricting us. In this chapter, I’ll dig into the key ingredients for creativity, so that we can unlock it in ourselves. I will look at how our environments have conspired against us to make us inflexible and I’ll show how we can foster the right conditions for creativity to thrive.

Today, whether you’re a coffee barista or a CEO, everyone hungers to be creative. The New Yorker dubs it ‘Creativity Creep’ saying: ‘Few qualities are more sought after, few skills more envied. Everyone wants to be more creative – how else, we think, can we become fully realized people?’¹

Part of this is because we have more time to spend on being creative. As Walter Pitkin observed back in 1932, thanks to medical breakthroughs and time-saving devices like washing machines, ‘Men and women alike turn from the ancient task of making a living to the strange new task of living.’ And living these days is a creative endeavour. Social media has fetishized visually beautiful lives. Even if we’re making a packed lunch for our children, it’s got to be inventive, stylish, Instagrammable.

Instagram is full of creativity quotes from smart people. ‘Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating.’ ‘Creativity is intelligence having fun!’ ‘You can mimic a result. But not the creativity.’ These all sound nice and inspiring. You can imagine the fist pumps, the head nods.

But what does creative thinking actually mean?

EVOLUTION & DAD JOKES: WHAT IS CREATIVITY?

I want to start by looking at a classic case of creativity, a leap in thinking which for ever changed the conversation for humankind: the Theory of Evolution. The fascinating thing about this idea is that it occurred to two different people, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, independently. For two separate thinkers to reach the same place at the same time is a real rarity.

So what did they do in order to get to their big idea? In an essay published in 1959, American sci-fi writer Isaac Asimov looked at what their creative processes had in common to try to find the key to creativity.²

Firstly, they travelled. Darwin took a five-year, round-the-world trip aboard HMS Beagle in 1831. Wallace went to the Amazon and Rio Negro river basins in 1848, and then, in 1854, to the Malay Archipelago.

Secondly, both observed unfamiliar species of plants and animals and how they varied from place to place. Darwin famously went to the Galápagos Islands to study finches, tortoises and mockingbirds. During his travels in what is modern-day Indonesia, Wallace collected more than 100,000 insect, bird and animal specimens, which he donated to British museums.

Thirdly, both read Thomas Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population, which predicted that the human population would grow faster than its ability to feed itself. This proved to unlock the puzzle for both men. Reading about overpopulation in human beings sparked their ideas on evolution by natural selection. That’s how Wallace and Darwin made their creative leap: by connecting two seemingly unconnected concepts.

Cross-connection may be the key to creativity. The Oxford English Dictionary definition of creativity is ‘the use of imagination or original ideas to create something’, but this seems like quite a stretch. Is there really such a thing as pure originality, an idea that has never been thought of before? But smashing together two existing ideas which have never been connected – that is a breakthrough. That is what makes creative friction and sparks something fresh.

‘Smashing together two existing ideas which have never been connected – that is a breakthrough.

That is what makes creative friction and sparks something fresh.’

As the psychologist Steven Pinker has observed, that is how jokes work. In his book The Act of Creation, Arthur Koestler says we laugh when one idea, or frame of reference, sits next to a second, which doesn’t initially seem to make sense in the context of the first. So here’s a joke: Lady Astor supposedly said to Winston Churchill, ‘If you were my husband, I’d put poison in your tea.’ He replied, ‘If you were my wife, I’d drink it.’

Why is this funny? Well, clearly no one wants to be murdered. But when we gear-shift to suicide as a welcome escape from poor old Lady Astor, it becomes funny.

This slamming together of two unexpected frames, where the latter is surprising and causes you to reconsider the former, is called a paraprosdokian (from the Greek ‘against expectation’). Paraprosdokians are what the rest of us might call ‘dad jokes’. Like Stephen Colbert’s: ‘If I am reading this graph correctly – I’d be very surprised.’ And Groucho Marx’s: ‘I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn’t it.’

Koestler’s The Act of Creation looks beyond comedy to art and science. Creativity in these disciplines, he thought, is also about exploring the relationship between two unrelated ideas. He calls this ‘bisociation’. For him, creativity is the bisociation of two self-contained but incompatible frames of reference. In short, a dad joke.

IT’S HARDER THAN EVER TO BE CREATIVE TODAY

But it is not as simple as that. We’ve become really bad at bisociation. Creativity may be higher on the cultural agenda, and it might be a key skill for the future, but the truth is, it is now harder to be creative.

Why is this? Today, we simply don’t have the bandwidth to be creative. Our technology both overwhelms and distracts us. Every 24 hours people are bombarded with the equivalent of 34 gigabytes of information – that amount would overload a laptop within a week.³ We can’t calmly absorb all this information and metabolize it into beautiful creative thought.

Digital overload is making us act like Dug, the talking dog in Pixar’s movie Up. Every few moments, he interrupts himself mid-speech, ears pricked, nose quivering and shouts, ‘SQUIRREL!’ Dug is all of us, except our squirrels are tweet storms; siren calls from abandoned, half-filled online shopping carts; the jerk of the leash when we are tagged in a photo.

So we’re too distracted to be creative. But even if we manage to focus, our own creativity – our ability to bisociate – is under threat from algorithms. When Amazon nudges us to buy a similar book to the one we’ve just clicked on, when Netflix cues up yet another film ‘with a strong female lead’, when social media echo chambers only feed us news that is palatable to us, we’re being pigeon-holed. We’re being funnelled down a narrow path. Instead of the quirky, interesting people we imagine ourselves to be, we’re becoming self-fulfilling prophecies, living in a bland monoculture. All of this amounts to a navel-gazing outlook (or in-look) which keeps us thinking in the ways we have always thought. We are stuck in a monotonous spin-cycle of our own experience, which is a profoundly uncreative place to be.

THE STATE OF PERMA-DISTRACTION

Gloria Mark studies digital distraction at the University of California. She has found that it takes about 23 minutes to return to the original task after an interruption. So that quick minute spent on Twitter or Facebook isn’t just 60 seconds. It’s 24 minutes down the drain.⁴

‘Everyone thinks they are right all the time about everything,’ innovation strategist Faris Yakob told me. ‘We can’t see anyone else’s point of view with clarity. We assume they are idiots and racists. It’s got to the point where I can’t emotionally understand a position that is different from mine. I tend to like reading books about history and politics, but I’m forcing myself to read more fiction. Reading fiction helps you develop empathy and understand better where people you disagree with are coming from.’

We also bristle at any opinion that differs from our own. Ian Martin, writer on political comedy The Thick of It, called Twitter a ‘shrieking tunnel of fuck’. In the midst of this polarized battleground it is harder than ever to find common ground, to flex our positions and move forward. Without respect for another’s perspectives or empathy for their experiences, we can’t make connections, bisociate and progress our thinking. Remember, the dictionary definition tells us creativity is: ‘the use of imagination or original ideas to create something’. Ouch. Cultural zombies can’t be creative, can they? Shrieking trolls won’t open their imagination, will they? How can we escape our ‘tunnel of fuck’ and find the fuel for empathy and inventiveness?

STEREOTYPING + CREATIVITY

Evidence suggests that lack of empathy for others is indeed a block to creativity. A 2012 study by Tel Aviv University found that people who ‘believe that racial groups have fixed underlying essences’ did not do as well in creative tests as those who saw racial categories as ‘arbitrary and malleable’. So those who pigeonhole racial groups have ‘a habitual closed-mindedness that . . . hampers creativity’, the study authors wrote.⁵

BECOMING T-SHAPED

The creative industries are always on the hunt for what they call ‘T-shaped’ people. The vertical bit of the T – the I – is depth of experience in a specific subject. The horizontal bit of the T is a broader range of experience across subjects, which encompasses the capacity to peek over the top of parapets, to collaborate, to find links between different disciplines. Essentially, the horizontal bit of the T is the knack of Koestler’s bisociation. So this magical T-shaped human combines the vertical skill of rigour and the horizontal skill of empathy.

But it’s really hard to be T-shaped these days. The vertical is being fuelled, meaning we are being made more I-shaped by the algorithms that feed us more and more of what we already know. But the horizontal – empathy – needs our active attention. Cross-pollination requires us to break out of our echo chambers, broaden our horizons and open our hearts and minds to the new.

‘Notice things, be curious, talk to people, figure out new ways of doing things.’

Travel is one way to do this. Remember both Darwin and Wallace were committed explorers. Faris Yakob and his wife Rosie are nomadic creatives who travel around the world working for their consultancy Genius Steals. Travel is very important to them. Faris told me: ‘Habituation makes you blind. It turns your brain off.’ Rosie says travel turns it back on again. ‘There’s a discomfort to being in new places,’ she explains. ‘It means you need to notice and be curious. The more you travel and the stranger the situations you are in, the more likely you are to expand your surface area and serendipitous things might happen.’

It’s not enough to simply go on holiday. Two weeks on a sun lounger in Majorca won’t cut the creative mustard. You have to do what Rosie talked about: notice things, be curious, talk to people, figure out new ways of doing things.

Not all of us can afford the luxury of travelling in order to boost creativity, of course. But many of us can at the very least get out of the workplace and go for a walk. Research from Creative Equals, an organization that champions diversity in the creative industries, shows that just 9 per cent of people have their best ideas in the office. Fans of the walking meeting include Arianna Huffington, Mark Zuckerberg and Barack Obama.

The first reason to go for a walk is that we need to move more. We’re living in sedentary times, sitting on average, for 9.3 hours per day, longer than we are sleeping.⁶ The second reason is to boost our creativity. Researchers at Stanford University asked people to think up new uses for common objects while sitting at a desk or walking. Over three-quarters came up with more ideas while walking than sitting.⁷

At Starling, Adam and I walk to client meetings rather than taking the Tube. It means we leave in good time and don’t rush. We use the journey to discuss the meeting ahead, or just chat. Some of our best ideas and conversations happen on walks – a time which otherwise would be a deadzone of getting from A to B.

Walking is second nature. It doesn’t require concentration. It allows the mind to wander. The state of the wandering mind has been shown to be fertile for creative ideas and flashes of insight. When we don’t try hard to have an idea – sod’s law – it comes to us.

HOW TO BE T-SHAPED

1. Travel. And if you can’t travel, be open to new influences wherever they might be – notice things, be curious, ask why. Take a new route to work or school. This will force you to see things slightly differently and confront you with new inputs.

2. Go for a walk on your own, and let ideas sneak up on you. Or with someone else and talk them through.

3. Take a photo each day. This will nudge you to observe, to look harder at everyday things you may otherwise ignore and find new perspectives.

4. Break your echo chamber. I have scrutinized who I follow on Twitter and my aim now is to follow diverse, challenging voices and avoid the loud, obvious ones.

5. Be empathetic. Try to think flexibly and openly about ideas that feel odd and jarring to you.

6. Clash these ideas together, make connections, join dots. Tell dad jokes.

7. Read books. Fiction, non-fiction, anything. Just keep reading.

8. And read things you wouldn’t automatically choose. Take inspiration from Stack. Stack is a subscription service that delivers a different specialist magazine each month, on anything from art to tennis.

9. Be OK with having creative droughts. Don’t panic. When this happens, see points 2 and 7.

10. Take the pressure off yourself, be in the moment, don’t force it. That’s when the magi will happen.

PINNY GRYLLS’ FLEX STORY

Pinny Grylls is a documentary filmmaker and children’s author

‘My worst ideas come from sitting on the internet and researching things. You are at a computer, your eyeballs are staring at the screen, there’s a digital wall between you and a real story, which has already been mediated several times. I want to get to a new story, a new perspective, not one already told by someone else.

You need to get off your arse and actually physically meet people. Ordinary day-to-day conversations and events can be doors into new ideas and films. An example of this: I was buying a second-hand car and had to pick it up from Stoke-on-Trent. It was going to be a boring task – collecting the car, signing documents and whatnot. But I was sitting in this guy’s living room, and he told me he works as a hypnotist, specializing in doing past-life regression with traumatized people who work in the fire service. These people had ordinary lives, they were not novelists or professional creatives. Yet, under his care, they pop into another realm and become someone else. They tell stories of being a nineteenth-century farmer committing a murder, or a priest in Tibet. I was inspired to make a film about it and it became a Channel 4 documentary.

I try not to impose a story on the world. The way I work is a collaboration between me and the person who wants their story to be told, who wants it to be witnessed. That’s why you need to meet people, to get the magic, the intimacy. You don’t get it from a screen. You have to be with them physically.

My tip is to give yourself permission not to work. Go on a road trip to buy that second-hand car. It may be a more interesting day than you thought. Don’t force yourself to sit at a screen and come up with ideas. Do the washing up. Read a story to your kid. Do ordinary things, and your brain will go somewhere else. Take pressure off those moments and let ‘being’ in your life be enough. When you take pressure off, that’s when you find things.

I was diagnosed with a two-centimetre wide benign brain tumour which was right between my eyes. I had radiation therapy and they had to scan it every six months. We took time off work and school and went on a family campervan road trip around Europe. We thought, ‘We don’t know what the future is, so we want do this now.’ Recently, I had a scan to see whether the radiation had worked. If it hadn’t, I needed a dangerous operation to remove it. It had shrunk by 25 per cent, I was given the all-clear and it was like being given my life back.

Until that point, I didn’t realize I had been in stasis, not being able to plan anything. But ironically, this had allowed me to be more in the moment and to live! We cram so much into our days; we pressure ourselves. We’re a culture that is geared up for quantifiable achievement and status. It’s hard to get out of that way of thinking. We need to be patient, to give ourselves permission to dream and not fill every moment of downtime. We need to ‘be’ and believe it doesn’t matter if nothing creative comes out of it. It’s enough being alive. That is the ultimate creative act.

LIBERTY & RESTRAINT

It’s tempting to see creativity as relying on complete freedom and expansiveness. Many have found that the opposite is true. Creativity can thrive when there are restrictions and barriers in place. It is these roadblocks which can force breakthroughs. David Ogilvy, the advertising guru known as the original Mad Man, once said, ‘Give me the freedom of a tight brief’. What did he mean by this?

Limits give you clarity, focus and purpose. They also give you a feeling of safety, and safety gives you the confidence to explore.

BEAUTIFUL CONSTRAINTS

Adam Morgan and Mark Barden’s book, A Beautiful Constraint: How to Transform Your Limitations into Advantages, refers to a study of children’s playground habits. In a playground in a wide open field where they could run anywhere, children tended to stay in the middle. When faced with complete freedom, it feels more reassuring to be near the other kids, to keep the status quo. However, if you build a fence around the field, children will explore right to the edge and use the whole space. Ironically, in a contained, safe space, you can roam free.

So think about fences for your creativity. Put in some ‘beautiful constraints’ and you might push yourself beyond the status quo. When Olivia Laing wrote her novel Crudo, her ‘fences’ were that she would write every day and she wasn’t allowed to go back and edit. She finished it in seven weeks. She said: ‘Because there was no intention or plan, I wasn’t self-conscious and I wasn’t worried about trying to get perfect sentences, it was just smashing them down as fast as I could.’

If you are a procrastinator, your ‘fence’ could be a strict time limit on the task ahead. If you are the sort of person who makes long lists about what you need to get done, reduce them to one bullet point. This is your creative objective for the day.

Constraints also make you work harder to be creative and push you to excel. Jerry Seinfeld bans himself from jokes containing sex or swearing – it’s just too easy to get a laugh. These limits raised his game and upped his comic creativity. He says: ‘A person who can defend themselves with a gun is just not very interesting. But a person who defends themselves through aikido or tai chi? Very interesting.’⁸ He treats his stand-up sessions as scientific experiments, analysing the type and length of laugh he gets for each joke and using that analysis to shave off a word, honing his routine until it is pitch perfect. For him, the creativity lies in what’s left out.

If you have creative paralysis, write a list of everything this is NOT. So if, say, you are planning a hen party for a friend, write down everything she would hate first of all. These are your guardrails – and you can create freely within them.

‘Think about fences for your creativity . . . and you might push yourself beyond the status quo.’

Rules can give you freedom from interruption. We’ve seen how insidious digital distraction can be today, sapping much more real time than the actual diversion took. The writer Zadie Smith has a zero tolerance policy towards social media and doesn’t connect to the internet during her writing time, leaving any fact checking until she has finished writing for the day. ‘If I could control myself online, if I wasn’t going to go down a Beyoncé Google hole for four and a half hours, this wouldn’t be a problem. But that is exactly what I’ll do,’ she says.

Experiment with using airplane mode on your phone, and setting strict times of the day (at the beginning and the end) in which to deal with emails. Use apps like Freedom and Self Control which allow you to block your own access to websites, apps or the entire internet to stop wasting time online. Use time before bed to read, rather than being on your phone – stretch your empathy muscles.

Creativity also requires chutzpah. Chutzpah is a Yiddish word that refers to self-confidence or bravery. Clashing disciplines, making the connections, bisociation: none of this can be done by someone suffering from self-doubt. You needed swagger to say the Earth was round when everyone thought it was flat. You need guts to walk away from accepted wisdom. ‘The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas,’ said John Maynard Keynes, ‘as in escaping from old ones.’

CHANNEL YOUR CHUTZPAH

Escaping the ‘old ones’ can be hard because they’ve been handed down to us as gospel. Our parents might have even embedded these ideas in our bedtime stories. And moving away from them makes a statement that you do not need their (or society’s) approval any more.

We can all do this, but what gets in the way is the belief that creativity only lies in the hands of very few select people. The notion that true creatives are artists, misfits at the edges of society or geniuses who are ‘ahead of their time’ is a barrier to creativity. It lets you say: ‘Creativity lives in others, but not in me.’ It stops you being brave and robs you of your chutzpah.

One of the most generous and powerful speeches on this comes from the Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby. In her game-changing performance ‘Nanette’, she takes a swipe at the ‘great men of art’ school of thought, which characterizes people like Van Gogh and Picasso as lone, eccentric geniuses.

Gadsby says: ‘People believe that Van Gogh was just this misunderstood genius, born ahead of his time. What a load of shit. Nobody is born ahead of their time! It’s impossible . . . Artists don’t invent zeitgeists, they respond to them . . . [Van Gogh] was not ahead of his time. He was a post-Impressionist painter painting at the peak of post-Impressionism.’

We’re all products of our time. We all swim in the cultural soup. Our creativity comes from how we respond to it. Bravery, daring, escaping the old ideas – we can have them all. We just need the chutzpah to do so.

‘We all swim in the cultural soup. Our creativity comes from how we respond to it.’

HOW TO CHANNEL YOUR CHUTZPAH

1. Notice the moments when you have been brave in the past. When you owned up to a mistake. Or you called out an injustice. Why did you do it? How did you feel? If you recognize and cherish those moments, you can summon them again when you are in need of chutzpah.

2. Don’t feel self-conscious and let it inhibit your ideas. No one is thinking about you. That sounds a bit sad, but it’s actually liberating. No one is thinking of you! They are too busy thinking about themselves. Remember Coco Chanel’s words: ‘I don’t care what you think about me. I don’t think about you at all.’

3. Work out who diminishes your bravery. Who is your Achilles heel? Who do you always feel sheepish or inhibited around? These people are drains. Instead, try to hang around people who boost your mojo.

4. Done is better than perfect. Obsessing about perfection is navel-gazing and paralyzing. Get it done, get it out, get on with life.

5. If all else fails channel Dolly Parton. She said: ‘Find out who you are. And do it on purpose.’

Then dare, shed the old assumptions – and create.

SUMMARY

Modern life is conspiring to make us into cultural zombies. Creativity is scarcer and more urgent than ever. In order to flex we need to interrogate what we really want, and what we need to change to get it – and to do this we must have the space to think creatively. Creativity is a muscle that needs exercising – think of it as cognitive yoga – in order to dodge the algorithmic monoculture that wants to swallow us up.

So when an idea hits you, let it run. Comedian Dave Chappelle says that for him, creativity involves letting go. ‘If I have an idea, it’s the driver. The idea says, “Get in the car,” and I’m like, “Where am I going?” The idea says, “I don’t know. Don’t worry about it. I’m driving.” Sometimes I’m shotgun, sometimes I’m in the fucking trunk. The idea takes you where it wants to go.’ ⁹

Let your ideas take you where they want to go. Swim in the cultural soup, read books, react to what’s out there. Listen to people, meet them face to face, empathize with them, look them in the eye and connect with them. Don’t try and be ahead of your time; be of your time and say something different about it.

But, most importantly, trust in yourself, be brave and nourish your own chutzpah. Creativity doesn’t live in the hands of lone geniuses. It lives in us all.

‘Working nine to five, what a way to make a living. Barely getting by, it’s all taking and no giving.

They just use your mind, and they never give you credit. It’s enough to drive you crazy if you let it.’

DOLLY PARTON