The Daily Boost #462

Use your creative grit

Photo by Marcelo Novais on Unsplash

Consider these words by Annie Murphy Paul on the subject of the role of persistence in creativity. They also apply to life in general, since life is, well, creative at its core:

1. Apply some “creative grit.”
   Bring passion and perseverance to one narrow area, exploring it from every angle. Keep going even when it seems like you’ve reached the end of your useful thinking on the subject. You haven’t. 

2. Use disfluency as a cue to keep going.
   People generally expect creative ideas to flow smoothly and easily. When they don’t—when coming up with original ideas starts to become more challenging—people take that as a sign that they should stop. Instead, we should be using the uncomfortableness of disfluency as a signal that we’re just now getting to the good stuff. 

3. Make use of your negative mood.
   Positive mood is associated with expansive thinking, of the kind we expect from the insight model of creativity. Negative mood, by contrast, leads our thinking to narrow and contract: a useful development when our goal is to persist in a focused way. You could even try deliberately inducing a negative mood when employing the persistence model of creativity. Play some angry, clashing music as you work (not music that makes you feel sad, a “deactivating” emotion that actually discourages creativity).

My favorite line: “we should be using the uncomfortableness of disfluency as a signal that we’re just now getting to the good stuff.” What’s yours?

Read Annie’s full post on “The Benefits of `Creative Grit’” here.

(My thanks to Annie Murphy Paul at Science of Creativity.)

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The Gentle Nudge

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