1: Sir Ken Robinson had the opportunity to interview George Lucas.
“Hey, George,” he asked, “why do you keep remaking all those Star Wars movies?”
“In this particular universe,” George responded, “I’m God. And God isn’t satisfied,”
Sir Ken is one of the leading proponents for creativity. “His TED Talk on the subject remains the most watched of all time,” Steven Kotler writes in The Art of Impossible: A Peak Performance Primer.
“He’s argued that creativity should be considered as critical to a child’s education as literacy and numeracy. He’s argued that creativity’s the most important survival skill in a world of accelerating technological change.”
Steven asked Ken what he thought were the necessary ingredients for ongoing, long-term creativity.
“Frustration,” was his response.
“Long-haul creativity,” Sir Ken believes, “requires a low-level, near-constant sense of frustration. . . It’s a constant, itchy dissatisfaction, a deep sense of what-if, and can-I-make-it better, and the like.”
2: Steven has written fifteen books. “Two are in drawers. Thirteen are in stores,” he notes.
What is one thing they all have in common?
“At some point during the writing, I lost my mind,” Steven writes.
“Without question, at least once a book, I end up facedown on the ground, sobbing, shouting, and punching the floor. I don’t know how it happens. It just seems to happen. One minute I’m sitting at my desk; the next I’m completely unglued.”
What are we to make of this behavior?
“Nearly everyone I’ve spoken to about long-haul creativity has a similar story,” Steven notes. “So, yes, creativity is insanely frustrating, and it’s insanely frustrating for everybody.”
Next question: What do we do about it?
Steven’s answer is surprising. We do nothing.
Because “frustration is a fundamental step in the creative process,” he writes. “Freud talked about ‘sublimation,’ a defense mechanism that transforms private, often socially unacceptable frustrations (me, facedown, punching the floor), into socially acceptable expressions of creativity (the book we’re now reading [about]).”
Gestalt psychologist Kurt Lewin takes it a step further. He believes frustration is an obstacle to a goal that demands an innovative response.
“A considerable amount of science backs up this idea,” Steven writes. “The general thinking is that unsolved problems stick in the brain, in the form of easy-to-retrieve memories.”
In their book The Eureka Factor, John Kounios and Mark Beeman write: “This memory is much more than a mental note. It energizes all of our associations to the information in the problem, sensitizing us to anything in our environment that might be relevant, potentially including the solution.
“Thus, when we encounter something that’s even remotely associated to the problem—a word, a sound, a smell—it can act like a hint that triggers an insight.”
3: The frustration we feel isn’t a sign that what we are doing is wrong. Instead, we can choose to see our frustration as a necessary step in the creative process.
“We need to stop treating its arrival as a disaster,” Steven suggests. “For creativity, frustration is a sign of progress, a sign that that much-needed breakthrough is a lot closer than we suspect.
“Or, as the playwright Edward Albee once said: ‘Sometimes it’s necessary to go a long distance out of the way to come back a short distance correctly.'”
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: How might I re-frame the frustration I feel when I’m trying to be creative or doing a task that requires creative thinking?
Action: Experiment with this idea. Today.