Creative Think

Things Go Swimmingly at Huge Birthday Party

This is how I spent New Year's Day morning — at a huge birthday party.

The Palo Alto Weekly sent a photographer (Norbert von den Groeben) out to chronicle various activities in and around Palo Alto during the final 12 hours of 2006 and the first 12 hours of 2007. One of his stops on New Year's day was a morning workout at Stanford to take some photos of the Stanford Masters Swimming team. This particular shot made the cover.

I am in lane two (with the white cap with the red "S" on it).

This was also a very large birthday party. There were 100 swimmers there and it was everyone's birthday. You see, for competition purposes all Masters swimmers "age up" on January 1st. Attendance is always high on this date. Our coach, Tim Edmunds, gave a us a tough workout and called it the "Resolutionizer" — about 4,500 meters with a lot of -5 and -10 second sendoffs.

I've written earlier about Masters Swimming (FINA World Championships). It's an important community in my life. People are friendly and give each other good-natured razzing from time to time. Also, your identity is pretty much your personality in the water and how well you swim. Thus, you can swim with someone for six months and have no idea what that person does outside the pool. Then you start chatting, and that person says, "I teach physiology at Stanford Medical School," or "I'm head of strategy at Google," or "I manage a hedge fund for the Waltons."

I swim with some interesting people. For example, in the photo I'm talking to IDEO designer Peter Macdonald. Right behind me is Fred Mitchell who was a long-time new venture VP for Adobe. Next to him is chemical engineer Ming Wong, and Marine Captain Sean Kelly. The bald man in the next lane over is Steve Fusillier, and he's a real "rocket scientist" at Lockheed. The woman in lane 1 is Jody Maggio Smith, former Stanford great backstroker and currently cover girl of Swim Magazine. We've also got three former Olympians — two of them gold medalists.

Writing this post made me realize how many contacts I've made through the Masters swimming community over the past thirty years: my dentist, accountant, web designer, and physician are all current or former Masters swimmers. I guess that's the way communities work! You learn to trust people while you do something together that you enjoy.

Pause for a Bit

In a recent post, Set A Deadline to Goad Your Creative Juices, I extolled the wonders that time constraints can produce for your creativity. Now, just to show how paradoxical the creative process is, I'd like to show that doing the opposite can also provide fine results.

To introduce this concept, I'd like to turn my good buddy, the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus. One of his insights was: "A thing rests by changing."

Like all of Heraclitus' insights, this one can be interpreted in a variety of ways. But the creative strategy I see today is:

Pause for a bit.

In other words, sometimes delaying action can be the best course of action. That's because while you are waiting, you can gather more information about the most fruitful way to proceed.

For example, designer Christopher Williams tells a story about an architect who built a cluster of large office buildings that were set on a central green. When construction was completed, the landscape crew asked him where he wanted the pathways between the buildings.

"Not yet," the architect said. "Just plant the grass solidly between the buildings."

This was done, and by late summer pedestrians had worn paths across the lawn, connecting building to building. The paths turned in easy curves rather than right angles, and were sized according to traffic.

In the fall, the architect simply paved the pathways. Not only did the new pathways have a design beauty, they responded directly to user needs.

Moral: pause for a bit and let the important things catch up with you.

Here are several questions to think about: What problems can you put off trying to solve? What might you discover by waiting?

Set A Deadline to Goad Your Creative Juices

[Note: Earlier this week Kathy Sierra (Creating Passionate Users) paid me a compliment in her post on the Five Things I Don't Know About You meme. So, I'll dedicate my post today to her because it deals with a topic that she has also written about (Creativity on Speed) back in December, 2005. Here's my take on the joy of deadlines.]

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Strict limits can be a powerful stimulant to the creative process. If you've ever been asked to solve a challenging problem with a small budget or a tight deadline, you've probably found that you were much more resourceful than if you had been granted a ton of money and time. As architect Frank Lloyd Wright repeatedly told his students,

"Limits are an
artist's best friend."

That's because they force us to think beyond conventional solutions and find answers we might not otherwise have discovered.

For example, skyscrapers weren't developed by people with cheap, unlimited land, but rather by innovators who wrestled with the problem, "How do we create abundant office space on small pieces of expensive real estate.

Another example: Islamic artists were (and are) generally forbidden by the Koran to depict images of the human body and recognizable life forms in their work. As a result, they channeled their passion for form into representing patterns that can be found in the natural world.

Their ingenuity is especially evident in the Alcazar and Alhambra palaces in Spain, where fourteenth century Moorish designers crafted intricate symmetries in their wall and floor mosaics. (Interestingly, seven centuries later, physicists have determined that there are thirty-two different ways in which atoms and molecules in a crystal can be symmetrically arranged in a pattern and these are all represented in the Moorish mosaics!)

Similarly, a poet may be more inspired by the challenge of writing a sonnet, which must follow a standard pattern of rhyme and meter, than by writing free verse. Indeed, some people enjoy adding constraints to their problems as a way of spurring their thinking. Composer Stephen Sondheim says:

"If you ask me to write a song about the ocean, I'm stumped. But if you tell me to write a ballad about a woman in a red dress falling off her stool at three in the morning, I'm inspired."

Over the years, I've asked many, many people when they get their ideas. The answers I've received run pretty much along these lines:

• "When I'm just playing around."
• "When I'm faced with a problem."
• "When I'm doing something else."
• "When I'm not taking myself too seriously." 
• "When things break down and I have to fix them."

However, the one comment I've heard more than any other is:

"The ultimate inspiration is the deadline."

Thus, having limited time is a constraint that seems to goad lots of people's creativity. I've found this has been true for me both professionally and personally. 

When I assign specific open-ended problems to groups in my seminars, I've found that those groups that have less time to generate ideas (e.g., 15 minutes vs. 25 minutes on the same problem) often have better and more creative solutions than the groups with more time. That's because they seem to get right to the point, have less self-censorship, and are less concerned with proper protocol.

This is also the way I prefer to work personally. If I have a project, I like to give myself tight mini-deadlines. This does several things: first, it forces me to get rid of my excuses and dive right in to do some work.  Second, it forces me to trust my own creative instincts. Third, since I'm actually doing stuff, I feel comfortable making little experiments along the way. And fourth, it allows me to get "big chunks done" and then to feel comfortable temporarily stepping away from the problem and be in a position where additional inspiration might arise while I'm "thinking aside." (Everyone has their own creative style; this is what works for me.)

Some questions to think about: What's your objective? Can you state it in a simple sentence? What are the three key things you'll need to do to reach it? Where is your sense of urgency? What tight deadlines can you give yourself?

Be Like Janus: "Think Something Different"

So here we are in January, named after the two-faced Roman god Janus, who in their mythology was the god of gates and doors, and beginnings and endings.

I  believe that Janus's double-faced nature also symbolizes much of what goes on when we engage in creative thinking, that is, seeing something in more than one way. I love how the Nobel prize winning physician Albert Szent-Gyorgyi describes creative discovery:

Discovery consists of looking at
the same thing as everyone else
and thinking something different.

When we tap into our "Janus-like" powers, it's as though we use one head to "look at the same thing as everyone else," and the other head to be creative and "think something different."

When we think like Janus, we take something out of a familiar context and then think about it in other contexts so that it takes on fresh new meanings. Human beings have been using their imaginations in this way since the beginning.

• The first person to look at an oyster and think "food" did this.
• So did the first person to look at a ship's sail and think "windmill."
• As did the first person to look at sheep intestines and think "guitar strings."
• And the first person to look at a perfume vaporizer and think "gasoline carburetor."
• And the first person to look at baby's urea and think "skin moisturizer."
• And the first person to look at a trapeze safety net and think "trampoline."

Do you have these Janus-like powers? Well, if you've ever used a pen as a weapon, or a potato as a radio antenna, or a T-shirt as a tourniquet, or a telephone book as a booster seat, then the answer is a resounding "Yes!"

So, this month, every time you see or hear the word "January," think to yourself:

"Oh yes, Janus — that's my cue to use my
imagination and think something different."

Have a good month!