Category: Art

Recently, I listened to a very inspiring interview with a film director (as well as a writer, producer, editor, composer, etc.) Robert Rodriguez, who shared some neat ideas about creativity, which, according to him, can be found in every human activity. More precisely, we can bring creativity into everything that we do.

This is a neat way of looking at the dilemma of striving to be a polymath versus being a narrow specialist. Rodriguez says that when people ask him why he does so many different things, he replies that he does only one thing – leaving a creative life.

In practical terms, he suggests doing things in short bursts, over periods of half-an-hour of so at a time. In my experience, this approach generally works, although there are some activities (e.g. academic research) that requires larger chunks of uninterrupted time. In fact, working in brief, regular sessions, so called BRSs, can be shown to be the best approach to academic work too. As Rodrigues puts it, you just need to chip away at various personal projects, whether it is learning to play a guitar or painting between filming scenes of a movie, on the daily basis, and by the end of the week, if look back, you’ll see that you are leaving your dream.

A key moment here is not to be afraid to try new things. This requires one to believe in oneself, in the sense that mastery of almost any kind of skill or activity at a very high (indeed, world-class) level is possible, given sufficient time and effort. Rodrigues gives an example (which might not be true, BTW – I don’t think there was a formal study on this) that when very young children are asked, who among them thinks that he/she could be an astronaut, a composer, etc., there is a forest of raised hands, probably due to the lack of life experience on part of the kids. When the same question is asked of the same kids a couple of years later, much fewer hands are raised – there is no significant increase in expense, but somehow the children lose their belief in themselves. As adults, we have an advantage of being aware of what is happening with us, so we should consciously keep raising our hand.

According to Maria Popova, the author of an enormously popular blog Brain Pickings, in order for a piece of work to have a chance to become an important and lasting contribution to the field, rather count-intuitively, this work has to be done with only one person in mind as the potential audience – the author him/herself. This applies to nearly all areas of activity, and certainly all creative areas, such as writing, arts, sports, academic work, etc.

The concept is counterintuitive, because we tend to think that value equals popularity. This tendency is based on human’s inherent desire for positive reinforcement, so we mistake interest in our work for evidence of its worthiness and value.

I personally see the grain of truth in the concept of doing the work for ourselves in the fact that doing something consistently, on the daily basis, and fully engaging in the activity (i.e. “showing up”) requires enthusiasm, and it is not possible to be genuinely enthusiastic about something without being interested in it. This echoes Richard Feynman’s story of how he re-discovered scientific research for himself after being burnt out during the work on Manhattan project. He said that decided to work on problems that were fun, without worrying about whether they were already solved by someone else or if they would potentially lead to important discoveries or applications.

With several millions of blog visitors per month, there is no doubt that Popova’s writing is popular. Of course, according to her own thesis, this is not a proof that her contribution is important or that it will be lasting, but she claims to be writing for herself, and her enthusiasm is evident.