MEGA MONDAYS - David Foster Wallace, Pay Attention, Creativity & Company, Emotions
08/07/24 - Starting your week Creatively with the MEGA lens of motivation, exploration, generation, and amelioration. Creativity shapes everything, so let's dive in.
Happy Monday.
In creative work, there is always an opportunity cost. Time is finite, and that means so is creativity. Maya Angelou said "You can't use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have." She is right in the sense that creativity is compounding, and habit forming; but what she leaves out is that there are limited avenues to pursue, because there are limited days to do so.
So, more urgently now, to this week's business:
Motivation (What you worship)
Here is the inimitable David Foster Wallace on choosing what matters to you:
Exploration (Meta-Awareness)
I’ve been thinking about attention lately. I wrote a short piece - mainly to explore what I pay attention to. And if I can be more considered in the many moments that make a life:
Generation (Collaboration)
There are some wonderful words we use to describe the generative phase of creativity: brainstorm, ideation, mind-mapping.
Creativity often likes company, so I wondered if the generation phase can be a social affair. It seems like new ideas are easier to get to with a crowd. But then I thought about this, and realised the more elusive, world-changing, ideas don’t tend to arrive in the office meeting room.
Social creativity sessions may generate a larger quantity of ideas, but I have a hunch that the best kind of ideas comes from a great deal of thinking alone. That hard work type of thinking. New ideas are most remarkable when they go completely against the grain, and social pressures are likely to quench your instinct for these kinds of gems. Einstein coming up with general relativity in the patent office and the train station and so forth.
Collaboration may improve your drafts, or help in testing your ideas - but perhaps it is more of an amelioration phase aid.
Amelioration (Sustaining Creativity)
Creativity researcher at Yale Zorana Ivcevic Pringle writes a Substack called “Creativity Decision:. This week she released a good post about the emotional toll of creative work:
The article touches on a big hurdle in the amelioration phase:
The challenge of creative work is to successfully make it through these emotional challenges to transform the initial, often vague ideas, into something tangible and delightful.
Her research also shows some interesting things to keep in mind for creative aspirants:
We found that there are three kinds of expectations that are helpful in the creative process and they have much to do with emotions. First is the expectation of creativity as having ups and downs. This means assuming that there would be some frustrations and ongoing revisions to ideas and approaches to realizing them.
The second helpful belief is about the importance of completing one’s work. In other words, good enough, but not perfect is better than not completed at all, which can involve accepting a level of dissatisfaction with one’s work.
Finally, it is helpful to be aware that one’s work will be criticized and that there would be those who disagree or are otherwise displeased with it, as unpleasant (irritating, dispiriting) as that can be.
May your week be filled with creative engagement,
John