My fear and avoidance of boredom comes from the multitude of apparently well meaning adults I was surrounded by, while growing up. I don’t think I’m alone in this? I imagine if you paused a little while and reflected on the advice dished out to you as a child, you’ll clearly remember at least this phrase being repeated over and over, at every opportunity boredom may have had to present itself….

An idle mind is the devil’s playground

It must have started early on, because if I’d heard it for the first time as a teenager, I would have rushed in to embrace boredom and stayed for a while. What teenager doesn’t want to dance with the devil a little, and if bored was all you had to be, then you know you were going to go there. By teenagerhood you were already brainwashed. Boredom was something that must be avoided at all costs.

This thinking survives today. A quick search of Google Images quickly confirms this view of ‘boredom’ via these and other similar memes …

Boredom is the Beginning of the Beginning

But what if it isn’t so? What if boredom isn’t the beginning of the end, but the beginning of the beginning? What if boredom is a gateway to incredible worlds inside of your imagination? What if boredom, as a gift for embracing nothingness for a while, gives up creativity?

My thanks to Kathleen Davis for placing this thought into my brain while reading her article in Fast Company exploring the impact of Smartphones in our lives. Somewhere in the middle of her writing, she makes a point about the link between boredom and creativity and the fact that Smartphones (to our detriment) have filled up all the empty space we used to have.

Perhaps the most detrimental effect is that we longer know how to be bored. Boredom is a gift to creative ideas; it’s time when your mind can wander and make new connections. But the easy distraction that smartphones offer kills the empty moments that make life what it is.

Journey to Find Boredom

And so I began a journey to find, embrace and explore boredom. It’s early on in the journey, but as I’ve thought about it, all that boredom is, at it’s simplest, is a space in time where you find yourself with nothing to do. No distractions, no activity, no hope of getting anything done. I smile at this because I know many spiritual people who pay good money to visit Monasteries built into mountains in countries like Bhutan, to spend weeks and months in silence, with no distractions, no activity, no hope of getting anything done. When nothingness is called ‘Meditation’, it’s a spiritual pursuit, but as soon as you call it ‘boredom’ it’s an invitation to the devil.

However, this is not a discussion on semantics, it’s an important conversation we must be having. We know that creativity is the application of knowledge. It’s taking thoughts and transforming them into a different state, a physical state if you like. Into something that takes up space in the physical world we inhabit. Be it as a business idea, or a painting, or a dance, or a new sport, or a fresh campaign.

In order to do this we must create a space for our minds to explore, discover, investigate, play, etc. Our minds need to take a multitude of different thoughts and ideas and put them together to see what might happen if you could successfully do so? And for our minds to begin that pursuit they must be emptied of the noise that fills them in our day to day existence of repetitive and structured behaviour.

Boredom is that kick start. Boredom is the act of emptying our minds. It’s why it’s so painful for us to be bored. Boredom scares us, not because it’s an invitation for the devil, boredom scares us because it’s the beginning of creation, and in creation everything is up for grabs. There’s a well known and quoted quote from Marianne Williamson that I’m certain she must have written having recently come out of a very empty space in her world…

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

The Alternatives to Creation are too Ghastly to Imagine

You didn’t think that great creativity was going to be easy did you? That you’d be walking down the road and a spark of genius that makes Einstein look positively pedestrian, would suddenly pop into your brain. Creation takes work. Hard work. Long hours. To take thoughts and transform them into something tangible and meaningful in the real world is not for the faint hearted. But we must do it. The alternatives are too ghastly to imagine. A world in which creation dies is a world in which we slip into a repetitive existence of 9-5 (or 8-4), Monday to Friday, doing the same tasks every day, over and over again. We wear the same ‘uniform’, conform to the wishes of untouchable and unknowable bosses and masters. We’ll sit in traffic for hours wondering why nobody spends any time finding a solution for our mundane and almost meaningless lives? We’ll train our children in institutions so that they too will one day live a life like we do, where everything seems the same, day in and day out. They too will live for weekends and 15 working days of leave each year, as together we go on leave with our colleagues and cram together onto beaches in similar places, or share dirt roads in the same Parks and climb mountains together, before returning to do it all over again.

If being bored is the beginning then bored I will be. I will embrace it, learn to love it and live there

By the way, all is not lost. On that same Google Images page I referred to above, with memes of warning, I discovered glimpses of what I have written above. People, who out of their boredom have discovered the beginning of the beginning

Photo by Julian Myles on Unsplash

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Chief executives believe that — more than rigor, management discipline, integrity or even vision — successfully navigating an increasing complex world will require creativity

From an article in FastCompany back in 2010, here’s the picture of most important qualities from the 2010 IBM study….

By 2012 ‘creativity’ had slipped down to 3rd place on the IBM CEO Global Study

The 2015 IBM Global CEO Study seems to have shifted what it’s looking for from CEO’s. But looking at the quotes that are used in one of the papers to come out of it, from a variety of CEO’s, it seems obvious that creativity must be pretty high up the list of priorities, because I’m not sure how else they’ll get through successfully without a very big dose of it?

SHOULD YOU PAY A PREMIUM FOR CREATIVITY?

As I pointed out in my post last week, creativity has been on the decline since at least 1984 in some countries. That means that people entering the workplace from around the end of the 90’s are less creative than their older counterparts. With no sign of a reversal in the ‘creative quotient’ it seems to me that there should be a premium paid for anyone with above average creativity in the workplace?

The world is a complex and unpredictable place to do business in, and rightly, CEO’s globally know that creativity is a critical skill and attribute to have inside of their organisations. There is an enormous need to pay attention to increasing the levels of creativity, from our children in school all the way through to the most senior levels of organisations, companies and government.

The post Is Creativity The Most Important Leadership Skill? appeared first on Calidascope.

From 1990 to 2008 there has been a steady decline in creativity in the US, according to research conducted by Kyung Hee Kim at the College of William & Mary. While I couldn’t find any similar South African data, a Newsweek article from 2010 suggests that it may be an America only phenomena:

Around the world, though, other countries are making creativity development a national priority

I’m not sure I buy that view? As Kim points out in a paper in the Creativity Research Journal in 2011,

Countries such as China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan have modeled their educational systems after the American education system because of America’s previous success in encouraging creativity in children

It seems to me that one could quite easily conclude that creativity growth prospects, around the world, aren’t looking very healthy at all. And for those of you who prefer pictures…

It’s wasn’t the pictures that scared me as much as the conclusions that Kim draws from her research (included analyzing almost 300,000 Torrance scores of children and adults)…

Thus, it can be concluded younger children’s ability to produce statistically infrequent, unique, and unusual ideas has significantly decreased after 1990. 

and….

The significant decrease of Strengths scores since 1990 indicates that over the last 20 years, children have become less emotionally expressive, less energetic, less talkative and verbally expressive, less humorous, less imaginative, less unconventional, less lively and passionate, less perceptive, less apt to connect seemingly irrelevant things, less synthesizing, and less likely to see things from a different angle. It could be speculated children are learning to interact in more impersonal ways, as they are more dependent on current technologies to communicate, perhaps because these technologies lack person to person, verbal and other interpersonal communicative signals. Technologies can enhance creativity and are useful tools for the creative process; however, some aspects of technologies may hinder the development of a child’s creative personality. The decrease in Elaboration scores which persists since 1984 indicates that over the last 30 years, 1) people of all ages, kindergartners through adults, have been steadily losing their ability to elaborate upon ideas and detailed and reflective thinking; 2) people are less motivated to be creative; and 3) creativity is less encouraged by home, school, and society overall.

and….

The results indicate younger children are becoming less capable of the critical thinking processes of synthesis and organization and less capable of capturing the essence of problems.

and….

The results indicate younger children are tending to grow up more narrow-minded, less intellectually curious, and less open to new experiences.

I don’t know about you, but it’s at this point I’m hoping like hell that this is just an American problem. My gut, sadly, tells me otherwise. While I don’t have any data, my own anecdotal observations quite easily match some of these conclusions in the world I inhabit. I’d be more than happy to be proved incorrect.

Does It Matter?

Of course it matters. At a macroeconomic level it counts.The health of an economy relies heavily on the creativity and innovation of scientists, engineers, business people, farmers, miners, and any person who contributes towards it, to employ more people, build more things that other countries want to buy, produce more food from the same piece of land, improve our national health, secure our borders, etc, etc. And we have to do it better than before. We can’t just do what we did last year, and the year before. We’ve got to find new and improved ways to do everything, all the time. Cheaper, better, faster and more of it.

On a microeconomic level you can take that thinking and run it through almost every single part of an economy. Provinces want all that, cities want it too, and so do businesses, and sports teams, and farmers and miners, and families and you. Even Mother Nature is hoping we’ll find better ways to treat our planet and everything that lives on it.

At a personal level it matters. Creativity breathes life into an otherwise mundane and boring existence. I don’t know if you’ve ever considered a life in which you had no access to creativity inside of yourself? A life without the skill set of creativity leaves you doing what when you get home from a day in the office where you followed instructions all day? It leaves you doing what on the weekend when you wake up on Saturday morning yearning to do something different? Well actually there’ll be no yearning. Creativity is that yearning to do something different, something unusual, something adventurous.

Here Come The Machines

I’ve always held onto the view that the one thing machines / robots will never do better than humans is ‘creativity’. When it comes to repetitive functional tasks they’re already replacing us and showing they do those jobs far better. But creativity, I don’t think so. That’s our domain. It’s what makes us human. The ability to not only desire to find another way, but to also take disconnected bits and pieces, and thoughts and ideas and put them together in a way that changes the world. I often say to my peer group of parents, don’t let your children study anything a machine might be able to replace, because a machine will replace it. Encourage your children to pick something, anything, that has an element of creativity at it’s centre and they’ll never have to complete with a machine or a robot. Not ever.

But if we’re going to let our creativity levels slide into the toilet, it’s not going to be a case of machines catching up to our creativity level, we’re just gonna hand it over to them on a plate, as we slide on by, towards a world of grey (no shades, just grey).

The Magic That Is Creativity

We’ve become so fixated on getting smarter in our heads, that we’ve missed the magic that is creativity. Do any Google search on ‘Einstein quotes’ (I’ll make it easy for you) and you’ll see him speaking of imagination and creativity over and over again. Academic genius without creativity and imagination is nothing. It’s a machine. It’s a robot. Robots have that kind of smarts. They know lots of things in one dimension. They can apply those things in that one dimension faster than any human. Creativity and imagination unlock the potential of knowledge, because if you can’t apply knowledge it’s not worth having.

It was at 16, while Einstein was imagining what it would be like to ride next to a beam of light that the first thoughts of what was to become the Theory of Relativity was born. He was imagining long before he had the brainpower to solve the question he was asking.

I can’t say if this slide in creativity is happening here in South Africa or not? I can say, that if it is we need to do more than just pay attention. We need to stop the slide, turn it around and send it on it’s way into space where our children, all of them, have imagination power to think about things like riding next to light beams, and then we can be assured that all this academic information we’re feeding them will be put to great use, and maybe even change the world.

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For years now I’ve been reading and researching anything that describes ‘creative’ for signposts to shine some light on why I might have walked the path I have, separately from those I have called family, friend and acquaintance?

Enter Nancy C. Andreasen (I love people who display an initial as a middle name – why do they do that?). She’s not any more significant than some other thinkers I have come across, but she is one of the smarter ones, who’s doing some very cool research on creativity by studying people’s brains. According to Wikipedia:

Nancy Coover Andreasen is an American neuroscientist and neuropsychiatrist. She currently holds the Andrew H. Woods Chair of Psychiatry at the University of Iowa Roy J. and Lucille A. Carver College of Medicine

I found her in an article in The Atlantic, titled, Secrets of the Creative Brain – Where genius comes from, whether it is dependent on high IQ—and why it is so often accompanied by mental illness.

There’s a lot to get through in this article (I’d define it as a long read), and it left me only a little further down the road, but there’s enough in it to have anyone interested in this space, a little more engaged than normal. It left me with the overwhelming view that to include oneself in the category of ‘creative’ reinforces just how much of an outsider you might really be.

For example…..

I have spent much of my career focusing on the neuroscience of mental illness, but in recent decades I’ve also focused on what we might call the science of genius, trying to discern what combination of elements tends to produce particularly creative brains. What, in short, is the essence of creativity? Over the course of my life, I’ve kept coming back to two more-specific questions: What differences in nature and nurture can explain why some people suffer from mental illness and some do not? And why are so many of the world’s most creative minds among the most afflicted? My latest study, for which I’ve been scanning the brains of some of today’s most illustrious scientists, mathematicians, artists, and writers, has come closer to answering this second question than any other research to date.

This bit of information becomes an interesting matter for contemplation of self / family reflection. It’s also loaded with thoughts of finding an online test that measures ‘mental illness’. While creativity and mental illness are linked in many research papers, there’s still nothing conclusive. However, from as early as 1891, a physician named Cesare Lombroso put forward a …..

gossipy and expansive account of traits associated with genius—left-handedness, celibacy, stammering, precocity, and, of course, neurosis and psychosis—and he linked them to many creative individuals, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Sir Isaac Newton, Arthur Schopenhauer, Jonathan Swift, Charles Darwin, Lord Byron, Charles Baudelaire, and Robert Schumann. Lombroso speculated on various causes of lunacy and genius, ranging from heredity to urbanization to climate to the phases of the moon. He proposed a close association between genius and degeneracy and argued that both are hereditary.

Not sure I’m happy with his inclusion of left-handedness in that, but it was 1891, I’m prepared to give him some space 🙂

Mental illness isn’t the only predictor. There have also been theories about IQ and creativity. While this has always been a difficult one for me to consider personally because I’m certainly not overly developed on the IQ spectrum. It turns out I’ve not really had to worry because it isn’t much of a predictor to begin with.

Intelligence doesn’t have much effect on creativity: most creative people are pretty smart, but they don’t have to be that smart, at least as measured by conventional intelligence tests. An IQ of 120, indicating that someone is very smart but not exceptionally so, is generally considered sufficient for creative genius.

So, I while I might be part of the category ‘creative’, I certainly do not belong to the sub-category ‘creative genius’.

Andreason, driven by some small thinking man in the University she was housed in, was determined to solve the answer to where creativity came from and hypothesized the following….

subjects would have an increased rate of schizophrenia in family members but that they themselves would be relatively well. I also hypothesized that creativity might run in families, based on prevailing views that the tendencies toward psychosis and toward having creative and original ideas were closely linked.

Some of why schizophrenia is included in the study of where creativity comes from, has to do with well known creatives who’s family history is littered with the illness

• James Joyce had a daughter who suffered from schizophrenia, and he himself had traits that placed him on the schizophrenia spectrum
• Bertrand Russell had multiple family members who suffered from schizophrenia
• Einstein had a son with schizophrenia, and he himself displayed some of the social and interpersonal ineptitudes that can characterize the illness
• And others…

From this part in the article it felt as if it got messy (perhaps it was just too long for me) in terms of an easy narrative from to follow. So for those who don’t end up reading the full article (and you should), let me list the headline characteristics, thoughts and theories that captured my attention:

In one of her studies, a full 80 percent of the researched group had had some kind of mood disturbance at some time in their lives, compared with just 30 percent of the control group

When the psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison looked at 47 famous writers and artists in Great Britain, she found that more than 38 percent had been treated for a mood disorder; the highest rates occurred among playwrights, and the second-highest among poets. When Joseph Schildkraut, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School, studied a group of 15 abstract-expressionist painters in the mid-20th century, he found that half of them had some form of mental illness, mostly depression or bipolar disorder; nearly half of these artists failed to live past age 60.

Creative people are better at recognizing relationships, making associations and connections, and seeing things in an original way—seeing things that others cannot see.

Many creative people are polymaths, people with broad interests in many fields—a common trait among my study subjects.

One thing I’ve learned is that creative people work much harder than the average person—and usually that’s because they love their work

I’ve also found some evidence supporting my early hypothesis that exceptionally creative people are more likely than control subjects to have one or more first-degree relatives with schizophrenia

As in the first study, I’ve also found that creativity tends to run in families, and to take diverse forms. In this arena, nurture clearly plays a strong role. Half the subjects come from very high-achieving backgrounds, with at least one parent who has a doctoral degree. The majority grew up in an environment where learning and education were highly valued.

Many creative people are autodidacts. They like to teach themselves, rather than be spoon-fed information or knowledge in standard educational settings

The biggest thought I am left with having read this article, is that to be included in the category ‘creative’, or perhaps it’s that sub-category ‘creative genius’, isn’t just something you’re good at? It’s not just a gift you’re born with, or develop. To be included in the category ‘creative’ means that you truly are a loner, by virtue of your DNA. You’re physically and mentally made up very differently to the other categories we drop human beings into. It’s certainly not an easy category to belong to, and perhaps the rest of us should be a little kinder to those who do.

Some people see things others cannot, and they are right, and we call them creative geniuses. Some people see things others cannot, and they are wrong, and we call them mentally ill. And some people, like John Nash, are both.

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