Every field of work has its own set of skills that are rare and valuable. But there’s one fundamental skill that is always rare and valuable and which you will need if you want to build a career you love: creative thinking. To the extent your work is routine, you will be replaceable. Regardless of how hard you work, you won’t add much value if you’re merely executing a solved problem. The value of your work comes from your ability to solve new problems. To possess rare and valuable skills means to be able to do work that’s not repetitive, but creative.

Creativity is your power to rearrange the elements of reality in new and valuable ways. It is usually viewed as the private property of artists, but any time you discover a new idea or create a new product or build a new company or solve a new problem or improve an old process you’re engaged in creative thinking. Whatever your field—whether you’re a writer or teacher or software programmer or math professor or FBI agent or entrepreneur—this kind of creative thinking is the hallmark of mastery and the key to success. It is not some mystical talent possessed by an elect few. It is an ability we all have the power to cultivate.

What creativity is

The best portrait of creative work I’m aware of comes from Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead. The novel features two architects as lead characters. Peter Keating graduates from college at the top of his class. Not because he is creative but because he is excellent at following the rules laid down by his teachers. His approach to architecture is not to create, but to copy. He wins accolades because he excels at imitating the kinds of buildings that traditional standards say are good.

But from the start, we see the limits of this approach. Keating is paralyzed whenever he comes to an architectural problem not covered by a teacher’s concrete rule. He has no way of judging what’s good or bad because he has no reference point for atypical building situations. The person he turns to for advice in such moments is an innovative young architect, Howard Roark.

Roark is not popular. In fact, he gets kicked out of college because he refuses to imitate the architectural styles of the past. His new approach to building stupefies most of the people around him precisely because it is creative rather than imitative. Early in the novel, Roark explains his philosophy of architecture:

“Here are my rules: what can be done with one substance must never be done with another. No two materials are alike. No two sites on earth are alike. No two buildings have the same purpose. The purpose, the site, the material determine the shape. Nothing can be reasonable or beautiful unless it’s made by one central idea, and the idea sets every detail. A building is alive, like a man. Its integrity is to follow its own truth, its one single theme, and to serve its own single purpose. A man doesn’t borrow pieces of his body. A building doesn’t borrow hunks of its soul. Its maker gives it the soul and every wall, window and stairway to express it.”

Here we get some crucial elements of how Roark creates. Every building has a theme or central idea the architect uses to select every detail about the building. This is partly why Roark is not paralyzed when he encounters a new problem with no inherited rule to guide him: he isn’t guided by inherited rules but the central idea that “sets every detail.” And the central idea—the standard of value—itself is neither inherited nor arbitrary. The architect chooses it in light of the materials available, the site where he intends to build, and the purpose the building is to serve. It’s this integration of every element of a building around its central idea that makes it beautiful.

For example, late in the book, Roark is tasked with building a low-income housing project, Cortlandt Homes. Rand describes the final design:

The drawings of Cortlandt Homes presented six buildings, fifteen stories high, each made in the shape of an irregular star with arms extending from a central shaft. The shafts contained elevators, stairways, heating systems and all the utilities. The apartments radiated from the center in the form of extended triangles. The space between the arms allowed light and air from three sides. The ceilings were pre-cast; the inner walls were of plastic tile that required no painting or plastering; all pipes and wires were laid out in metal ducts at the edge of the floors to be opened and replaced, when necessary, without costly demolition; the kitchens and bathrooms were prefabricated as complete units; the inner partitions were of light metal that could be folded into the walls to provide one large room or pulled out to divide it; there were few halls or lobbies to clean, a minimum of cost and labor required for the maintenance of the place. The entire plan was a composition in triangles. The buildings, of poured concrete, were a complex modeling of simple structural features; there was no ornament; none was needed; the shapes had the beauty of sculpture.

Philosopher Gregory Salmieri summarizes Roark’s approach this way:

[Roark] must first understand the relevant architectural problem by identifying the proposed building’s function and location and the nature of the available materials, then he must conceive some central idea as a specific solution to this problem, and then select every detail of the building in accordance with this central idea, thereby integrating the building into a harmonious whole.

This, in pattern, is the process creative work follows—not just in architecture, but in every field.

When I wrote my first novel, I Am Justice, I started out with a purpose. I wanted to write a thriller that showed how a normal person might realistically evolve into a Jack Reacher-type hero. I needed a central idea that would allow me to achieve that purpose. I knew my lead character had to start out as far from a vigilante hero as possible, so I made her a college student. That raised a question: if a typical college student became entangled with a crime, she wouldn’t try to solve it—she would go to the police. So I had to have a strong reason why she couldn’t go to the police—why she would have to take responsibility for solving the crime. Well, I thought, what if she was partly responsible for the crime? That led to me to my central ideal: a college student kills a classmate but is terrified when the next morning police discover three dead students in what appears to be a gruesome hate crime. To keep her secrets buried, she has to find out the truth about what happened that night. That central idea, then, acted as a standard of value to guide me in selecting everything about the novel: the characters, the plot, every line of dialogue, every word choice.

Architecture and writing fiction are obviously creative tasks. But this same process of creative thinking applies even to seemingly non-creative fields. Take the case of Darwin. On the surface, his work wasn’t about creativity but discovery. But look deeper. He started with a rich and messy set of facts about living organisms, including the growing conviction by scientists that species hadn’t shown up one day in their final form, but had evolved into their current form over millions of years. What scientists couldn’t do was explain evolution. They could not answer the question: by what mechanism do species evolve? Darwin’s great insight came from reading the work, not of a biologist, but an economist.

Thomas Malthus had argued that agricultural yields grow arithmetically while human populations grow exponentially. This, thought Malthus, necessitated a struggle for survival by human beings, with large portions of the population dying from starvation. Re-reading Malthus’s essay, Darwin made a creative leap. He saw how a similar struggle for survival among animals would mean that those most fit to thrive in their environment would tend to survive and reproduce. Small survival advantages would propagate over time leading to large changes over large stretches of time.

Darwin spent the next two decades taking this revolutionary insight and using it to make sense of a wide set of questions a theory of evolution needed to answer. He had to make sure it fit and could explain the fossil record, the geographical distribution of different species, the degree of natural variation among offspring, the extreme perfection of vital organs, etc., etc.—and that no competing theory could account for all of these facts.

Moving from science to business, consider the case of Steve Jobs and the mental process that produced Apple’s numerous breakthrough innovations. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, his first breakthrough innovation was the iPod MP3 player. But Jobs quickly became aware that the iPod would be irrelevant as soon as a phone maker figured out how to put a quality MP3 player onto a phone. One device beats two. So he conceived of a new idea—a product that combined a phone, a music player, and an internet browser. He and his team then went about figuring out how to build that device, which required solving countless new problems, and making countless new creative decisions. Jobs famously oversaw every detail of the project, making sure that it would give the use the best experience possible.

Though creativity cannot be boiled down to a recipe or a necessary order of steps, we can identify several key elements of the creative process:

Problem: Creative thinking involves problem solving. Roark aims to design a building given the building’s purpose, location, and materials; Darwin aims to explain why species evolve; Jobs aims to forestall a competitive threat to the iPod.
Solution: Creative thinking involves a central idea that solves the creative problem and acts as a standard of value. Darwin conceives of natural selection as the mechanism of evolution; Jobs conceives of a device that combines the function of a phone, a music player, and an internet browser.
Integration: Creative thinking involves selecting every detail in accordance with that central idea (or, in the case of a scientific discovery, checking to see if all of the relevant facts do integrate with the solution).

This is the creative process. But how do you identify problems, formulate solutions, and integrate everything around that solution?

How to think creatively

Creative thinking, like all thinking, consists of asking questions and answering them. And when you ask questions and answer them, what you are really doing is searching and judging. You set out to answer a question, or solve a problem, or achieve some purpose. Then you go about your task by querying your subconscious and your environment for raw materials—and judging the results. True or false? Right or wrong? Good or bad? Am I headed toward my goal or away from it? This process of searching and judging continues until you achieve your goal: a theory, a novel, a painting, an app, a new product, a crucial business decision.

The difference between an amateur and a master is not, at the deepest level, a difference in process—but in the quality of the process. The master conducts more fruitful searches and makes more efficient and refined judgments. And, importantly, this ability is not innate. It is an achievement cultivated through practice.

Searching

Edgar Allan Poe once explained the process he used to craft his famous poem, “The Raven.” In his telling, “no one point in its composition is referable either to accident or intuition—that the work proceeded step by step, to its completion, with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem.”

For example, take the poem’s most famous line: “Quoth the Raven ‘Nevermore.’” Poe knew he wanted a refrain that would “produce continuously novel effects, by the variation of the application of the refrain—the refrain itself remaining for the most part, unvaried.” But what should the refrain be? It must be short, he decided—ideally a single word. But which word?

The question now arose as to the character of the word. Having made up my mind to a refrain, the division of the poem into stanzas was of course a corollary, the refrain forming the close to each stanza. That such a close, to have force, must be sonorous and susceptible of protracted emphasis, admitted no doubt, and these considerations inevitably led me to the long o as the most sonorous vowel in connection with r as the most producible consonant.
The sound of the refrain being thus determined, it became necessary to select a word embodying this sound, and at the same time in the fullest possible keeping with that melancholy which I had pre-determined as the tone of the poem. In such a search it would have been absolutely impossible to overlook the word “Nevermore.” In fact it was the very first which presented itself.

What Poe describes is a process of explicit reasoning. He consciously worked out, step-by-step, the needs of his poem and the best way to satisfy those needs.

A similar approach was taken by Thomas Edison to the discovery of a usable light bulb. Edison didn’t invent the light bulb. Instead, he made it useful and economic by finding an affordable, long-lasting filament. Edison’s approach was to brute force his way to a solution by testing out thousands of different materials until he got the idea of trying carbonized materials like cotton, which worked far better than other materials. He carbonized everything from hickory to boxwood to the fibers of tropical plants sent to him by biologists until he found the one that worked best: carbonized bamboo.

What’s striking about these examples is how uncreative they seem. We typically associate creativity, not with step-by-step reasoning or running a series of trials, but with creative leaps. A creator approaches some problem and has a moment of insight that takes him beyond where explicit reasoning would lead.

In his book Blink, Malcolm Gladwell opens with a story about a Greek statue that was authenticated by scientists. Yet when a number of art historians looked at it, they instantly judged it to be a fraud. The experts couldn’t immediately articulate why they were so sure, but further testing showed that they were right. They didn’t reason their way to the correct answer—they leaped to it.

There’s no question that creative leaps typically do play a crucial role in creativity. Archimedes sits in the bathtub and screams “Eureka!” as he realizes that he can measure the volume of irregular objects using water displacement. Darwin reads Malthus’s essay on human population growth and discovers the principle of natural selection. Mozart scribbles out the overture to Don Giovanni the morning of its opening performance. Newton grasps the law of gravity watching an apple fall from a tree.

Creative thinkers make creative leaps. But the reason I started with explicit reasoning is because creative leaps should be understood, not as moments of mystical insight, but as lightning-like counterparts to explicit reasoning. They are best thought of as implicit reasoning. Looking backwards, a creator can, in principle, reconstruct a reasoning process that would have led to these insights and discoveries. Gladwell’s art experts, for example, were ultimately able to reconstruct what facts they had grasped intuitively that had convinced them the Greek statues were fraudulent. Even artists, who seem to make creative leaps that defy explicit reasoning, can often reconstruct why they made the creative choices they did—even if they didn’t explicitly reason their way to those choices during the act of creation. What you want to cultivate is the master’s ability to skip over many of the steps in order to find solutions.

You already have the ability to take creative leaps in some areas of life. If you’ve ever watched a movie to TV show and predicted the ending, it probably wasn’t because you sat down and reasoned out what would happen. Instead, your mind leaped to an answer based on pattern recognition. Looking back, you could probably reconstruct the implicit reasoning that led you to the answer, but you didn’t engage in that reasoning consciously. Your subconscious simply fed you the answer.

This is precisely what masters are able to do in their profession. It’s not that they sit down and effortlessly solve a difficult problem or create a flawless masterpiece. But over time they are able to put themselves in a position where they eventually do gain a creative insight (or a whole series of them) that leads to a creative achievement.

Masters typically start by immersing themselves in a problem or task. They don’t sit around waiting for inspiration to strike. They create a fertile garden for creation. In Jonah Lehrer’s book Imagine: How Creativity Works, he starts with the story of how a design firm came up with the idea for the Swiffer—essentially, an improved mop. The team was originally tasked by Procter and Gamble with an open-ended assignment: come up with a new floor cleaner. The team started by watching film of people cleaning their homes. “This is about the most boring footage you can imagine,” one of them said. “It’s movies of mopping, for God’s sake. And we had to watch hundreds of hours of it.” Boring, yes. But that process of immersion ultimately led them to the insight that existing mops were unnecessarily messy and burdensome.

Or take the case of Darwin. His creative leap after reading Malthus came only after spending five years on the HMS Beagle traveling the world: Paul Johnson notes that “no other scientist had traveled anything like so long as Darwin making studies on the spot or had observed so wide a variety of phenomena on land and ocean.” During the voyage, the first germs of his theory took shape as he watched finches on the Galapagos islands and noted in his diary, “Seeing this gradation and diversity of structure in one small, intimately related group of birds, one might really fancy that from an original paucity of birds in this archipelago, one species had been taken and modified for different ends.” It would be another three years before this inkling culminated in his creative leap to the theory of natural selection.

Contrast this immersion with the kind of person who says, “I want to start a business. I’m just waiting for an idea.” Ideas don’t arise in a vacuum. They arise in the context of observing and learning about the world. If you want to start a new business, often the best thing is to go work in one. Not only for the general business skills you’ll acquire, but because you’ll find specific problems faced by your company or its customers and be in a position to come up with ways to better solve those problems. You’ll have the raw materials for thinking.

Once a master has identified a problem, he can begin searching for answers. The foundational skillset here is, surprisingly enough, remembering. When you try to remember something, you query your subconscious. For example, in The Mind’s Best Work, D. N. Perkins asks us to think of ten white things. Now, he says, add more conditions: “Remember and list several things that are characteristically white, and soft and edible.” Finally, he asks us, “Remember and list vegetables whose names start with the letter c.” He concludes:

Certainly all this identifies some interesting capacities, but what do they have to do with creating? Simply that in creating one often has to think of things satisfying several conditions, and furthermore, the conditions frequently lie on both sides of the boundary between thing and name.

The example Perkins gives is a poet, who strives to say something about reality—yet must choose words in part based on their sounds. But the larger lesson is that when you search for answers, you do so by asking for material from your subconscious that meets one or more conditions. This isn’t some foreign skillset masters have. Everyone engages in this kind of remembering day in and day out. Instead, what distinguishes masters is the quality of their queries and the results of those queries.

When I work with young writers, for example, I find that they typically don’t know how to judge their piece. They’ll write something, reread it wondering, “Is this good?” and if nothing jumps out at them as bad, they’re ready to sign off. One of the first things I teach them is a method for judging their own writing, starting with a series of questions, such as, “Who is the audience?,” “What is your conclusion?,” “What is your argument?” I’m teaching them how to query their own work. Instead of asking, “Is this good?” they learn to break down “good” into components so that their subconscious will start feeding them more useful information. When they ask, “Who is the audience?” they may realize that they are skipping crucial steps their audience needs to understand their argument, while in other cases they are belaboring the obvious. Their queries become more effective. Over time they’ll automate the process so that when they write a draft, their subconscious will feed them material that’s largely targeted to their audience, that’s relevant to their conclusion, and that makes a coherent argument. (That doesn’t mean masters turn out perfect drafts. It just means that their drafts are of a far higher quality than a novice’s.)

What I’ve been describing you can think of as “targeted remembering”: the goal is for your subconscious to feed you the right answer. But sometimes you cannot remember anything that satisfies your conditions, or you’re not fully clear on all of the conditions that need to be satisfied. In these cases, what you want to remember is not quality answers, but a large quantity of answers. The master’s tool here is brainstorming: generating as many possibilities as possible without pre-judging them. You apply your conditions only after you have a wide range of options on the table.

For example, in my novel, I Am Justice, there is a crucial scene where the heroine is subjected to torture. The question was: How would she be tortured? My query had several conditions: it had to be original, it had to bring her to the brink of death, but it couldn’t incapacitate her for an extended period of time. But nothing great came to mind—presumably because I have little first-hand experience with torture. So instead of trying to come up with good ideas I sat down with goal of coming up with a lot of ideas. I filled pages of my journal with every manner of torture I could dredge up from my subconscious then supplemented that with research into unusual torture techniques from history. (Yeah, thriller writers are weird.) Once I had that list, I was able then to assess each item to decide which best met my conditions.

Observe that I supplemented remembering with fresh data. This is an example of another creative skillset: noticing. “Noticing” is searching your environment for solutions to problems. Sometimes this means actively doing research, but it can also happen seemingly by accident. When your mind is focused on solving a creative problem, solutions can jump out at you from surprising places. Think of Darwin reading Malthus’s essay. Because Darwin was actively thinking about the mechanism for evolution, he was prepared to notice that Malthus’s notion of a struggle for survival held the key to the answer. Same for Newton and his apple. Same for Archimedes and his bath.

Whether it’s remembering or noticing, mental leaps tend to come when you’re not engaged in concentrated thinking. A master struggles to solve a difficult problem. The problem seems hopeless. The master plows ahead, pushes, but still cannot make progress. And then? Then she goes for a walk, or takes a shower, or takes a nap and suddenly, the solution appears. According to Lehrer, this isn’t an accident. It’s precisely the act of relaxing our mind that opens us up to such insights:

Why is a relaxed state of mind so important for creative insights? When our minds are at ease—when those alpha waves are rippling through the brain—we’re more likely to direct the spotlight of attention inward, toward that stream of remote associations emanating from the right hemisphere. In contrast, when we are diligently focused, our attention tends to be directed outward, toward the details of the problems we’re trying to solve. While this pattern of attention is necessary when solving problems analytically, it actually prevents us from detecting the connections that lead to insights.

I said earlier that our default mental state is one of drift, in contrast to focus. And I stressed that focus is not the same thing as concentration. Lehrer’s point helps us hammer home the crucial difference. Breakthrough thinking rarely takes place when you are concentrating. But it also doesn’t take place when you are drifting. Instead, breakthroughs tend to happen in a state Lehrer calls “daydreaming.” It’s similar to drift in that your subconscious “blends together concepts that are normally filed away in different areas. The result is an ability to notice new connections, to see the overlaps that we normally overlook.” The difference is that with drift, you don’t maintain sufficient awareness to notice a creative thought when it occurs. Lehrer again:

The lesson is that productive daydreaming requires a delicate mental balancing act. On the one hand, translating boredom into a relaxed form of thinking leads to a thought process characterized by unexpected connections; a moment of monotony can become a rich source of insights. On the other hand, letting the mind wander so far away that it gets lost isn’t useful; even in the midst of an entertaining daydream, you need to maintain a foothold in the real world.

I would put it this way: daydreaming is a state where you’re still exercising mental management. Only it is not a state of concentration but mental oversight. You’re self-consciously allowing your mind to wander instead of zoning out. You cannot reach breakthrough ideas if you passively drift—but you will often not reach them if you stay stuck in a state of concentration.

I learned this while writing my first book. I found that whenever I got stuck on a hard problem, there was a surefire way for me to solve it. I would define the problem as clearly and precisely as I could and then I would go on a walk and allow my mind to wander. I would find the solution during the walk roughly 80 percent of the time. The walk was crucial, but so was the first part. If the problem was vague or fuzzy, a walk would sometimes help, but often not. The more guidance you can give your subconscious, the better it will perform.

One final point on searching. Often your thinking becomes stuck in a closed loop. To reach an answer, you have to break free of (often hidden) assumptions that are keeping you searching for answers in the wrong place. One way to break out of closed loops is to use what I call “questions of imagination.” These are questions designed to help you expand your thinking and come up with creative insights, particularly if your thinking feels narrow and you’re hitting dead ends or running in circles. Examples include, “What if this problem were easy to solve?,” “What if the opposite were true?,” or simply, “What would be a completely different way to think about this issue?”

When I was writing I Am Justice, I would regularly prod myself with these kinds of questions, even when I anticipated that they would be fruitless. “I’m assuming this person is my protagonist. What if she were the villain?” “I can’t think of a way for my protagonist to defeat the villain. What if she made him an ally?” In most cases, these questions led nowhere. But in a few cases, they dramatically changed the direction of the book and made it far more surprising and original than if I had not self-consciously attempted to break out of my assumptions.

Judging

Though searching and judging aren’t fully distinct processes, we’ve been focused primarily on searching so far. What, then, can we say about judging?

In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche writes:

Artists have a vested interest in our believing in the flash of revelation, the so-called inspiration . . . shining down from heavens as a ray of grace. In reality, the imagination of the good artist or thinker produces continuously good, mediocre or bad things, but his judgment, trained and sharpened to a fine point, rejects, selects, connects. . . . All great artists and thinkers are great workers, indefatigable not only in inventing, but also in rejecting, sifting, transforming, ordering.

Searching gives you possibilities and sometimes leads you to insights that feel like revelations. But the search process cannot be disentangled from a constant process of judging. You query and you assess the results of your search. You ask yourself a question and you evaluate the quality of the answer that occurs to you. You formulate a hypothesis and then check it against the facts. You type out a few words and hit the backspace key when they don’t convey what you want to express.

Though we typically think of judgment as coming at the end of a creative process, Perkins notes that:

judgment applies not only to close editing of the final product but to decisions made much earlier in the course of creating. Is such-and-such a problem worth pursuing? Is such-and-such a theory worth developing? What initial approaches seem most fruitful? Questions of these sorts are answered, at least implicitly, at the beginnings of a creative effort, and the answers send the maker down one or another path. Failures of judgment in those early decisions therefore constitute just as much of a limit on a maker’s creating as failures of judgment later on.

Though masters are excellent searchers, the sine qua non of mastery is excellent judgment. A master has clearly defined, demanding standards. We’ve already seen how in The Fountainhead, Howard Roark holds that a building’s shape must be determined by the “purpose, the site, the material,” and that “Nothing can be reasonable or beautiful unless it’s made by one central idea, and the idea sets every detail.” When Roark says these words, he is not yet a master.

Shortly thereafter, he seeks out a job with the architect he most admires, Henry Cameron. When he shows Cameron his drawings, Cameron responds:

“So you think they’re good? Well, they’re awful. It’s unspeakable. It’s a crime. Look . . . look at that. What in Christ’s name was your idea? What possessed you to indent that plan here? Did you just want to make it pretty, because you had to patch something together? Who do you think you are? Guy Francon, God help you? . . . Look at this building, you fool! You get an idea like this and you don’t know what to do with it! You stumble on a magnificent thing and you have to ruin it! Do you know how much you’ve got to learn?”

What’s going on here? Roark knows the basic principles of architecture. He studied the foundational skills in college and understands the basic process of selecting a single theme for a building that will set every detail. What more does he have to learn?

What Roark is missing is all the lower-level architectural premises he needs to implement his architectural principles. Yes, he knows the central idea of a building should set every detail, but he doesn’t know how to translate the theme into the countless sub-decisions designing a building involves: for example, whether or not to indent a plan. Without worked-out standards for when to indent a plan, he has to rely on what strikes him as “pretty.”

Mastery requires establishing a rich universe of premises of judgment. And it takes time, effort, and practice to develop these premises. By the time I became a professional writer, I understood that every piece had to have a theme—it had to add up to single idea—and that the theme had to be made clear and convincing to the audience. What I couldn’t do was assess whether I had achieved the clear communication of a theme to my audience. It took me more than five years of feedback from my editors before I gained competence at assessing my work objectively—before I could say with confidence whether the words would communicate what I wanted to the reader.

In the act of creation a master is constantly judging his progress, but he also knows when and how to judge. Judgment, if not exercised with care, can paralyze the search process. A writer, for instance, learns to separate out drafting and editing. To draft, you need leave your subconscious free to put words on the page—the raw material you later craft into something clear and beautiful. It is only when you turn to editing that you put your conscious, critical mind in charge. Many a writer has been stopped by demanding that every word he put on the page be perfect from the start.

When it does come time to judge, masters rarely self-consciously apply critical criteria. Nor do they blindly and intuitively make choices. Perkins refers to creative judgment as “realizing reasons.” A painter looks at her work-in-progress and realizes that the vividness of the blue undermines the emotional tone she is aiming to achieve. A writer reads his manuscript and realizes that his protagonist’s actions aren’t consistent with that character’s values. A teacher realizes that the example she planned to use to illustrate a point is too advanced for her class and hunts for something simpler. These realizations often come to the master automatically, without effort.

Sometimes, however, a master will not be able to immediately identify the reasons for a positive or negative judgment. He’s received messages in the form of feelings. Recall Malcolm Gladwell’s art experts looking at the Greek statue. Georgios Dontas, head of the Archeological Society in Athens instantly knew the statue was fake because “when he first laid eyes on it, he said, he felt a wave of ‘intuitive repulsion.’” Emotions, particularly cognitive emotions such as confusion or boredom, can give the master clues that something is amiss (or that something is working particularly well). These are not infallible, but they are critical hints—they are leads to further thinking.

The conditions of creativity

Creative thinking, I’ve stressed, is not some foreign act. It’s really about learning to harness familiar mental processes in pursuit of demanding and inventive goals. What, then, stops people from reaching their creative potential?

Above all, fear. In their book Art & Fear, David Bayles and Ted Orland describe the kinds of fears that stop artists. Most of what they say is applicable to everyone attempting to engage in creative work.

[I]f making art gives substance to your sense of self, the corresponding fear is that you’re not up to the task—that you can’t do it, or can’t do it well, or can’t do it again; or that you’re not a real artist, or not a good artist, or have no talent, or have nothing to say. The line between the artist and his/her work is a fine one at best, and for the artist it feels (quite naturally) like there is no such line. Making art can feel dangerous and revealing. Making art is dangerous and revealing. Making art precipitates self-doubt, stirring deep waters that lay between what you know you should be, and what you fear you might be. For many people, that alone is enough to prevent their ever getting started at all—and for those who do, trouble isn’t long in coming. Doubts, in fact, soon rise in swarms:
I’m not an artist—I’m a phony
I have nothing worth saying
I’m not sure what I’m doing
Other people are better than I am
I’m only a [student/physicist/mother/whatever]
I’ve never had a real exhibit
No one understands my work
No one like say work
I’m no good

Fear is valuable. It alerts us to threats and helps prevent reckless mistakes. But it can also stop us from taking intelligent risks. It can even cause us to see risks where none exist. When I decided to turn down a job and try to build a career for myself as an independent writer, my then-wife was apprehensive. She understandably wanted the stability of employment. But I argued that stability was illusory. After all, I had been employed only to find my job erased when market conditions changed. Self-employment, I noted, actually reduced our risks because now instead of effectively having one customer, I would have many. There is no risk-free career. And yet how many people want to start their own business but cling to a job they dislike because it gives them the illusion of safety?

The reason fear has so much power to stop you from achieving your goals is because you misconstrue how best to deal with it. You believe that to move forward, you first must conquer your fear. But this is like the person who says, “I’ll start working out once I’m motivated.” More often than not, motivation doesn’t precede action—it follows from action. You dread the thought of going to the gym—until you’re there, moving your body, building your sense of efficacy and progress. Something similar is true of fear. Fear is not to be conquered—but harnessed.

That’s the lesson former Navy SEAL Brandon Webb drives home in his book Mastering Fear.

Far too often, we focus on that awareness of danger, and by focusing on it we magnify it, cause it to expand until it starts filling the space in our heads. We start having the wrong conversation about it. We spin this story and then keep telling and retelling it, like that hamster running on its wheel, over and over. Rather than our mastering fear, fear masters us.

Fear stops you when you lose control of your internal conversation. When you focus on everything that could go wrong, everything that you do not want. You cannot think of anything else. The fear fills your whole world and you will do anything in your power to escape it—usually by surrendering what you want. Fear makes that easy. It feeds you excuses: not to try, not to take chances, not to create.

You master fear by accepting it. By putting it in its proper place. You tell yourself: “These fears are normal. Their job is to keep me alert as I move forward. But I must move forward—focused, not on the fear, but on my aim.” If you’re paralyzed by fear, then the solution is simple: start. Move forward. Keep going. Don’t quit.

There is one more creativity killer to discuss—one that has become all too common today—and that is: distraction. Creative work is hard. It takes long stretches of unbroken time. And yet how often do we give ourselves those stretches? We’re bombarded by email, texts, and Slack messages. At the first hint of boredom or discomfort we reach for stimuli. What are people saying on Twitter? What are people posting on TikTok? Externally and internally, we allow ourselves to be pulled away from our creative task.

Cal Newport calls the process of building and using rare and valuable skills “deep work.” One of the biggest lies of the success genre is that the key to productivity is spending long, exhausted hours grinding. To succeed, you supposedly have to optimize every minute. “Shave three seconds off emails by not signing your name! Over the course of the year you could save three hours!” I will grant that some jobs require grinding and that every job probably requires periods of intense, non-stop effort. But busyness isn’t what creates value. It’s thought—intense, creative thought—that creates value. And that, as Newport notes, requires “a state of unbroken concentration.”

Deep work is so demanding that you cannot do it for eight hours a day, let alone ten or twelve. For most people, four hours is the absolute max. But what they can achieve in those four hours is far more valuable than what others can achieve in forty. The key is making those four hours count. And that means eliminating distractions.

You must set aside time for deep work and protect that time. Turn off your phone. Close your email. Close Slack. Immerse yourself in your creative task. Learn to accept boredom and look forward to the mental pressure. You’ll be rewarded with ideas that just might change your life.

Earthly Idealism

Master Creativity