Creativity #

Constraining the Problem Space #

One of the main enemies of creative work getting done is the “blank page” - the mental state of staring at a blank page and being paralyzed either with too many thoughts or no thoughts. One useful tool to avoid this is by constraining your problem space, sometimes dramatically. For instance, what if you could only fold the page and do nothing else? Suddenly, it’s much easier (for me at least) to start just doing something. This helps a lot with “Just Getting Started”.

Constraining the problem space could also involve setting a hard deadline for finishing X in 30-60mins. This will often introduce an urgency that can help produce something.

Another idea along these lines is to intentionally try to come up with the dumbest solution/idea and start implementing it. Since you are intentionally trying to do a bad job, all the thinking and anxiety that comes when trying to do stuff right is removed, which may facilitate doing something which can later be polished.

Just Getting Started #

Once you get on the path of creation, the small choices you encounter will generally be much more manageable decisions, and through them something complex often emerges.

Remixing #

Our minds create new things by mixing the old together. A classic examination of this is Everything is a Remix.

A corollary of this idea is that to be creative it’s helpful to expose yourself to many other ideas. In my opinion, art in any form is spectacularly useful here. One way to think about art is as an expression of (hopefully new) ideas specifically designed to appeal to human sensibilities - the perfect coupling of novelty with a mechanism to get it to stick in your head. Art is also great at encouraging engagement with the world, especially new parts of it.

Vision and Confidence #

Being “Determinant” as described by Peter Thiel in You Are Not a Lottery Ticket may help with this.

Being Unreasonable #

One (unpolished) thought I’ve had is that being “unreasonable” could help with creativity. By unreasonable, I mean not considering all possibilities, ignoring objectively better optimizations, and ignoring people’s good opinions when in the process of creating. I’ve found for myself that, although this consideration in theory makes for a better end result, it can fracture the strong focus on a vision that is required to make something at all. Or it can warp the vision into something that is “better”, but actually different to the point where the original vision is unfulfilled in some way.