The Element

CHAPTER THREE Beyond Imagining

FAITH RINGGOLD is an acclaimed artist, best known for her painted story quilts. She has exhibited in major museums all over the world, and her work is in the permanent collections of the Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art. In addition, she is an award‐winning writer, having received the Caldecott Honor for her first book, Tar Beach. She has also composed and recorded songs.

Faith’s life brims with creativity. Interestingly, though, she found herself on this path when illness kept her out of school. She got asthma when she was two, and because of this, had a late start to formal education. During our interview, she told me that she felt that being out of school with asthma made a positive difference in her development “because I was not around for some of the indoctrinations, you know? I was not around to be really formed in the way that I think a lot of kids are formed in a regimented society, which a school is and I guess it has to be in a sense. Because when you have a lot of people in one space, you have to move them around in a certain way to make it work. I just did not ever get hooked into the regimentation. I missed all of kindergarten and the first grade. By the second grade, I was going. But every year, I would be absent for at least, I don’t know, maybe two or three weeks with asthma. And I absolutely did not mind missing those classes.”

Her mother worked hard with her to help her keep pace with what she was missing in school. And when they weren’t studying, they were able to explore the wider world of the arts that existed all around Harlem in the 1930s.

“My mother took me to see all the great acts of that time. Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Billy Eckstine—all these old singers and bandleaders and all those people who were so wonderful. And so these people were the ones who I thought of as being highly creative. It was so obvious that they were making this art out of their own bodies. We all lived in the same neighborhood. You just ran into them—here they are, you know? I was deeply inspired by their art and by their willingness to give of themselves to the public and to their audience. It made me understand about the communication aspect of being an artist.

“I was never forced to be like the other kids. I did not dress like them. I did not look like them. And in my family, it was not expected that I should be like that. So, it came quite natural to me to do something that was considered a bit odd. My mother was a fashion designer. She was an artist herself, although she would never have said she was an artist. She helped me a lot, but she was very keen on the fact that she did not know whether art would be a good lifetime endeavor.”

When Faith at last began going to school full‐time, she found encouragement and excitement in her art classes.

“We had art in elementary school right straight through. An excellent experience. Excellent. I distinctly recall my teachers getting excited about some of the things that I had done and me kind of wondering, Why do they think this is so good?—but I never said anything. In junior high school, the teacher did a project with us in which she wanted us to try to see it without looking. We were supposed to paint these flowers in that way. I said, ‘Oh my god, I do not want her to see this, because this is really awful.’ And she held it up and said, ‘Now, this is really wonderful. Look at this.’

“Now I know why she liked it. It was free and it was the same kind of thing that I like when I see children do art. It is expressive; it is wonderful. This is the kind of magic that children have. Children do not see anything so strange and different about art. They accept it; they understand it; they love it. They walk into a museum and they are looking all around, they do not feel threatened. Whereas adults do. They think there are some messages there they do not get, that they are supposed to have something to say or do in relation to these works of art. The children can just accept it because somehow or other they are born that way. And they stay that way until they begin to start picking themselves apart. Now, maybe it is because we start picking them apart. I try not to do that, but the world is going to pick them apart and, you know, judge them this way and that—this does not look like a tree, or this does not look like a man. When children are little, they are not paying attention to that. They are just—they are just unfolding right before your eyes. ‘This is my mommy and this is my daddy and we went to the house and cut down the tree and this and that and the other,’ and they tell you a whole story about it, and they accept it and they think it is wonderful. And I do too. Because they are completely unrepressed where these things are concerned.

“I think children have that same natural ability in music. Their little voices are like little bells that they are ringing. I went to a school where I did a forty‐minute session with each of the grades, starting with the prekindergarten, going all the way up to the sixth grade. I did this art session with them in which they would read from a book and then I would teach them. I would show them some of my slides and then I would teach them how to sing my song ‘Anyone Can Fly.’ They just picked that up, whether they were little prekindergarten, kindergarten, first grade, second grade, third grade, fourth grade. By the fifth grade, you are running into trouble. Their little voices are no longer like bells; they are feeling ashamed of themselves, you know, and some of them who can still sing will not.”

Fortunately, Faith never felt stifled in this way. She loved exploring her creativity from an early age, and she managed to keep that spark alive into adulthood.

“I think the minute that I started studying art in college in 1948 I knew I wanted to be an artist. I did not know which road I would take, how it would happen, or how I could be that, but I knew that was my goal. My dream was to be an artist, one who makes pictures for a lifetime, as a way of life. Every day of your life you can create something wonderful, so every day is going to be the same kind of wonderful day that every other day is—a day in which you discover something new because as you are painting or creating whatever it is you are creating, you are finding new ways in doing it.”

The Promise of Creativity

I mentioned that I like to ask audiences how intelligent they feel they are. I usually ask these same people how they rate their creativity. As with intelligence, I use a 1 to 10 scale, with 10 at the top. And, as with intelligence, most people rate themselves somewhere in the middle. Out of perhaps a thousand people, fewer than twenty give themselves 10 for creativity. A few more will put their hands up for 9 and 8. On the other end, a handful always puts themselves at 2 or 1. I think that people are mostly wrong in these assessments, just as they are about their intelligence.

But the real point of this exercise reveals itself when I ask how many people gave themselves different marks for intelligence and for creativity. Typically, between two‐thirds and three‐quarters of the audience raise their hands at this point. Why is this? I think it is because most people believe that intelligence and creativity are entirely different things—that we can be very intelligent and not very creative or very creative and not very intelligent.

For me, this identifies a fundamental problem. A lot of my work with organizations is about showing that intelligence and creativity are blood relatives. I firmly believe that you can’t be creative without acting intelligently. Similarly, the highest form of intelligence is thinking creatively. In seeking the Element, it is essential to understand the real nature of creativity and to have a clear understanding of how it relates to intelligence.

In my experience, most people have a narrow view of intelligence, tending to think of it mainly in terms of academic ability. This is why so many people who are smart in other ways end up thinking that they’re not smart at all. There are myths surrounding creativity as well.

One myth is that only special people are creative. This is not true. Everyone is born with tremendous capacities for creativity. The trick is to develop these capacities. Creativity is very much like literacy. We take it for granted that nearly everybody can learn to read and write. If a person can’t read or write, you don’t assume that this person is incapable of it, just that he or she hasn’t learned how to do it. The same is true of creativity. When people say they’re not creative, it’s often because they don’t know what’s involved or how creativity works in practice.

Another myth is that creativity is about special activities. It’s about “creative domains” like the arts, design, or advertising. These often do involve a high level of creativity. But so can science, math, engineering, running a business, being an athlete, or getting in or out of a relationship. The fact is you can be creative at anything at all—anything that involves your intelligence.

The third myth is that people are either creative or they’re not. This myth suggests that creativity, like IQ, is an allegedly fixed trait, like eye color, and that you can’t do much about it. In truth, it’s entirely possible to become more creative in your work and in your life. The first critical step is for you to understand the intimate relationship between creativity and intelligence. This is one of the surest paths to finding the Element, and it involves stepping back to examine a fundamental feature of all human intelligence—our unique powers of imagination.

It’s All in Your Imagination

As we discussed in the last chapter, we tend to underestimate the range of our senses and our intelligence. We do the same with our imaginations. In fact, while we largely take our senses for granted, we tend to take our imaginations for granted completely. We’ll even criticize people’s perceptions by telling them that they have “overactive imaginations” or that what they believe is “all in their imagination.” People will pride themselves on being “down to earth,” “realistic,” and “no‐nonsense,” and deride those who “have their heads in the clouds.” And yet, far more than any other power, imagination is what sets human beings apart from every other species on earth.

Imagination underpins every uniquely human achievement. Imagination led us from caves to cities, from bone clubs to golf clubs, from carrion to cuisine, and from superstition to science. The relationship between imagination and “reality” is both complicated and profound. And this relationship serves a very significant role in the search for the Element.

If you focus on your actual, physical surroundings, you generally assume, I’m sure, that there’s a good fit between what you perceive and what’s actually there. This is why we can drive cars on busy roads, get what we’re looking for in shops, and wake up with the right person. We know that in some circumstances— through illness, delirium, or excessive use of controlled substances, for instance—even that assumption can be mistaken, but let’s keep moving forward for now.

We know too that we can routinely step outside of our immediate sensory environment and conjure mental images of other places and other times. If I ask you to think of your best friends at school, your favorite food, or your most annoying acquaintance, you can do that without having any of those things directly in front of you. This process of seeing “in our mind’s eye” is the essential act of imagination. So my initial definition of imagination is “the power to bring to mind things that are not present to our senses.”

Your response to this might very well be, “Duh.” That would be an appropriate response, but it helps make a critical point— that perhaps more than any other capacity, imagination is the one we take for granted most. This is unfortunate because imagination is vitally important to our lives. Through imagination, we can visit the past, contemplate the present, and anticipate the future. We can also do something else of profound and unique significance.

We can create.

Through imagination, we not only bring to mind things that we have experienced but things that we have never experienced. We can conjecture, we can hypothesize, we can speculate, and we can suppose. In a word, we can be imaginative. As soon as we have the power to release our minds from the immediate here and now, in a sense we are free. We are free to revisit the past, free to re‐frame the present, and free to anticipate a whole range of possible futures. Imagination is the foundation of everything that is uniquely and distinctively human. It is the basis of language, the arts, the sciences, systems of philosophy, and the all the vast intricacies of human culture. I can illustrate this power with an example of cosmic proportions.

Does Size Matter?

What’s the purpose of life? This is another good question. It doesn’t seem to bother other species much, but it bothers human beings quite a bit. The British philosopher Bertrand Russell presented this question simply and brilliantly. It’s in three parts, and it’s worth reading twice: “Is man what he seems to the astronomer, a tiny lump of impure carbon and water crawling impotently on a small and unimportant planet? Or is he what he appears to Hamlet? Is he perhaps both at once?”

You’ll have to forgive the male language here. Russell wrote this a long time ago, when he didn’t know people might frown upon it later. Russell’s three questions capture some of the core puzzles of Western—though not necessarily Eastern—philosophy. Is life essentially accidental and meaningless, or is it as profound and mysterious as Shakespeare’s great tragic hero believed it to be? I’ll come back to Hamlet in a minute. Let’s look first at this idea of our inhabiting a small and unimportant planet.

For years now, the Hubble telescope has been beaming back to Earth thousands of dazzling images of distant galaxies, white dwarfs, black holes, nebulas, and pulsars. We’ve all seen spectacular documentaries about the facts and fantasies of space travel, all framed with ungraspable statistics about billions of light‐years and infinite distances. Most of us now get the point that the universe is gigantic. We also get the point that Earth is relatively small.

But how small?

It’s very hard to get a clear sense of this because with planets, as with everything else, size is relative. Given the immense distances between us and the other heavenly bodies, it’s difficult to have much of a basis for comparison.

I was delighted to come across a great set of images that helped me get a sense of the relative size of the Earth. Someone had the bright idea of taking distance out of the equation altogether by plucking the Earth and some other planets out of the cosmos and laying them side by side on the floor like a team photograph. In this way, we get some sense of the scale of things, and it’s frankly surprising. Here’s the first image:

This is Earth, sitting down with some of our immediate neighbors. We’re looking rather good here, especially in relation to Mars and Mercury. I think too that we’re less worried than ever about being invaded by Martian hordes. Bring it on, I’d say! Pluto, by the way, is no longer a planet and we can see why in this picture. What we were we thinking of in the first place? It’s barely a boulder.

Let’s pull back a bit now. Suddenly, the scenario seems a bit less encouraging. Here’s Earth with some of our larger partners in the solar system.

Earth’s looking a little less impressive now compared with Uranus and Neptune, and certainly in the company of Saturn and Jupiter. Pluto at this point has become a cosmic embarrassment. Still, we’re holding our own—I mean, at least we’re visible.

We already know there’s more to the story, though. For instance, we know that Earth is small when compared with the Sun. But how small? Here’s how:

On this scale, Earth is the size of a grape seed, and we should stop talking about Pluto now. But as big as it is, the Sun is far from the cosmic giant it seems here.

If we pull back a little more, the picture changes dramatically, even for sun worshippers.

Earth has simply disappeared on this scale, and the Sun is itself is barely a garbanzo bean. But even now, we’re still comparing ourselves to objects that are comparatively small and close in cosmic terms.

Keep your eye on Arcturus as we pull back just once more to take in Betelgeuse and Antares.

On this scale, the Sun is a grain of sand and Arcturus is a kumquat. Antares, by the way, is the fifteenth‐brightest star in the sky. It is more than a thousand light‐years away. Astronomers would say it is only a thousand light‐years away. A light‐year, you’ll recall, is the distance that a beam of light travels in a year. That’s far. So a thousand light‐years sounds impressive, especially if you’re Pluto. But it’s actually not that not much in galactic terms. Compare it with this final image, which is from the Hubble telescope.

This is an image of the Magellanic Cloud, one of the closest galaxies to our Milky Way, a near neighbor in the scheme of things. Scientists estimate the Magellanic Cloud to be about 170,000 light‐years across. It’s almost impossible to picture the size of Earth on this scale. It’s pitifully, unimaginably, undetectably small.

And yet…

We can take away some encouraging things from this. One is a bit of perspective. I mean, really, whatever you woke up worrying about this morning, get over it. How important in the greater scheme of things can it possibly be? Make your peace and move on.

The second is this. At first glance, these images do indeed suggest that the answer to Russell’s first question might be yes. We certainly do seem to be clinging to the face of an extraordinarily small and unimportant planet. But that’s not really the end of the story. We may well be small and insignificant. However, uniquely among all known species on Earth—or anywhere else, to our knowledge—we are able to do something remarkable. We can conceive of our insignificance.

Using the power of imagination, someone made the images I just showed you. Using this same power, I’m able to write about them and have them published, and you’re able to understand them. The fact, too, is that as a species we produced the Hamlet of which Russell speaks—as well as Mozart’s Mass in C, the Blue Mosque, the Sistine Chapel, the Renaissance, Las Vegas, the Silk Road, the poetry of Yeats, the plays of Chekhov, the blues, rock and roll, hip‐hop, the theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, industrialism, The Simpsons, digital technology, the Hubble telescope, and the whole dazzling cornucopia of human achievements and aspirations.

I don’t mean to say that no other species on Earth has any form of imaginative ability. But certainly none comes close to showing the complex abilities that flow from the human imagination. Other species communicate, but they don’t have laptops. They sing, but they don’t produce musicals. They can be agile, but they didn’t come up with Cirque du Soleil. They can look worried, but they don’t publish theories on the meaning of life and spend their evenings drinking Jack Daniel’s and listening to Miles Davis. And they don’t meet at water holes, poring over images from the Hubble telescope and trying to figure out what those might mean for themselves and all other hyenas.

What accounts for these yawning differences in how humans and other species on our small planet think and behave? My general answer is imagination. But this is really about the much more sophisticated evolution of the human brain and the highly dynamic ways in which it can work. The dynamics of human intelligence account for the phenomenal creativity of the human mind. And our capacity for creativity allows us to rethink our lives and our circumstances—and to find our way to the Element.

The Power of Creativity

Imagination is not the same as creativity. Creativity takes the process of imagination to another level. My definition of creativity is “the process of having original ideas that have value.” Imagination can be entirely internal. You could be imaginative all day long without anyone noticing. But you would never say that someone was creative if that person never did anything. To be creative you actually have to do something. It involves putting your imagination to work to make something new, to come up with new solutions to problems, even to think of new problems or questions.

You can think of creativity as applied imagination.

You can be creative at anything at all—anything that involves using your intelligence. It can be in music, in dance, in theater, in math, science, business, in your relationships with other people. It is because human intelligence is so wonderfully diverse that people are creative in so many extraordinary ways. Let me give you two very different examples.

In 1988, former Beatle George Harrison had a solo album coming out. The album featured a song called “This is Love” that both Harrison and his record company felt could be a big hit. A common practice in those pre‐download days was for the artist to accompany a single release with a B‐side—a song that didn’t appear on the album the single appeared on—as added value for consumers. The only problem in this case was that Harrison didn’t have a recording to use as a B‐side. However, Bob Dylan, Roy Or‐bison, Tom Petty, and Jeff Lynne were all spending time with him in the Los Angeles area, where Harrison was living at the time.

As Harrison came up with the bones of the song he wanted to record, he realized that Lynne was already working with Orbison. Harrison soon asked Dylan and Petty to join them and to sing along on the song’s chorus. In a casual setting with the minimal pressure associated with recording a B‐side, these five rock legends generated “Handle with Care,” one of the most memorable songs of Harrison’s post‐Beatle career.

When Harrison played the song a few days later for Mo Ostin, chairman of Warner Brothers Records, and Lenny Waronker, head of A&R, the two were stunned. Not only was the song much too good to serve as a lowly B‐side, but the collaboration generated a sound at once easygoing and brilliant that begged for a grander platform. Ostin and Waronker wondered to Harrison if the team that created “Handle with Care” could generate an entire album. Harrison found the idea intriguing and took it back to his friends.

Some logistical items needed addressing. Dylan was going out on a long tour in two weeks, and getting everyone in one place after that was going to be a problem. The five decided to squeeze whatever they could into the time they had before Dylan’s departure. Using a friend’s studio, they laid down the tracks for the entire album. They didn’t have months to dedicate to polishing the songwriting, doing dozens of alternate takes, or worrying over a guitar part. Instead, they relied on something much more innate—the creative spark generated by five distinctive musical voices joining together.

They all collaborated on songs. Each donated vocal harmonies, guitar lines, and arrangements. They fed off each other, goaded each other, and, most importantly, had a great time. The result was a recording that was both casual—the songs seem invented on the spot—and unmistakably classic. In fitting with the relaxed nature of the project, the five decided to downplay their stardom and to call their makeshift band the Traveling Wilburys. The album they recorded went on to sell five million copies and spawn multiple hit singles, including “Handle with Care.” Rolling Stone magazine named The Traveling Wilburys one of the “100 Best Albums of All Time.” I think that this is a great example of the creative process at work.

Here’s another one that seems completely different.

In the early 1960s, an unknown student at Cornell University threw a plate into the air in the university restaurant. We don’t know what happened after that to the student or to the plate. The student may have caught the plate with a smile, or it may have shattered on the floor. Either way, this would not have been an extraordinary event but for the fact that someone extraordinary happened to be watching it.

Richard Feynman was an American physicist, and one of the undisputed geniuses of the twentieth century. He was famous for his groundbreaking work in several fields including quantum electrodynamics and nanotechnology. He was also one of the most colorful and admired scientists of his generation, a juggler, a painter, a prankster, and an exuberant jazz musician with a particular passion for playing the bongos. In 1965, he won the Nobel Prize in Physics. He says this was partly because of the flying plate.

“That afternoon while I was eating lunch, some kid threw up a plate in the cafeteria,” Feynman said. “There was a blue medallion on the plate, the Cornell sign, and as he threw up the plate and it came down, the blue thing went around and it seemed to me that the blue thing went around faster than the wobble, and I wondered what the relation was between the two. I was just playing, no importance at all, but I played around with the equations of motion of rotating things, and I found out that if the wobble is small the blue thing goes around twice as fast as the wobble goes round.”

Feynman jotted some thoughts down on his napkin, and after lunch, he got on with his day at the university. Some time later, he looked again at the napkin and carried on playing with the ideas he’d sketched out on it.

“I started to play with this rotation, and the rotation led me to a similar problem of the rotation of the spin of an electron according to Dirac’s equation, and that just led me back into quantum electrodynamics, which was the problem I had been working on. I kept continuing now to play with it in the relaxed fashion I had originally done and it was just like taking the cork out of a bottle—everything just poured out, and in very short order I worked the things out for which I later won the Nobel Prize.”

Apart from the fact that they both spin around, what do making records and understanding electrons have in common that can help us understand the nature of creativity? As it happens, quite a lot.

Creative Dynamics

Creativity is the strongest example of the dynamic nature of intelligence, and it can call on all areas of our minds and being.

Let me begin with a rough distinction. I said earlier that many people think they’re not creative because they don’t know what’s involved. This is true in two different ways. The first is that there are some general skills and techniques of creative thinking that everyone can learn and can apply to nearly any situation. These techniques can help in generating new ideas, in sorting out the useful ones from the less useful ones, and in removing blocks to new thinking, especially in groups. I think of these as the skills of general creativity, and I’m going to say more about them in the chapter on education. What I want to discuss in this chapter is personal creativity, which in some ways is very different.

Faith Ringgold, the Traveling Wilburys, Richard Feynman, and many of the other people in this book are all highly creative people in their own unique ways. They work in different domains, and individual passions and aptitudes drive them. They have found the work they love to do, and discovered a special talent for doing it. They are in their Element, and this drives their personal creativity. Having some understanding of how creativity works in general can be instructive here.

Creativity is a step beyond imagination because it requires that you actually do something rather than lie around thinking about it. It’s a very practical process of trying to make something original. It may be a song, a theory, a dress, a short story, a boat, or a new sauce for your spaghetti. Regardless, some common features pertain.

The first is that it is a process. New ideas do sometimes come to people fully formed and without the need for much further work. Usually, though, the creative process begins with an inkling—like Feynman watching the wobble of the plate or George Harrison’s first idea for a song—which requires further development. This is a journey that can have many different phases and unexpected turns; it can draw on different sorts of skills and knowledge and end up somewhere entirely unpredicted at the outset. Richard Feynman eventually won the Nobel Prize in Physics, but they didn’t give it to him for the napkin he’d scribbled on over lunch.

Creativity involves several different processes that wind through each other. The first is generating new ideas, imagining different possibilities, considering alternative options. This might involve playing with some notes on an instrument, making some quick sketches, jotting down some thoughts, or moving objects or yourself around in a space. The creative process also involves developing these ideas by judging which work best or feel right. Both of these processes of generating and evaluating ideas are necessary whether you’re writing a song, painting a picture, developing a mathematical theory, taking photographs for a project, writing a book, or designing clothes. These processes don’t come in a predictable sequence. Instead, they interact with each other. For example, a creative effort might involve a great deal of idea generation while holding back on the evaluation at the start. But overall, creative work is a delicate balance between generating ideas and sifting and refining them.

Because it’s about making things, creative work always involves using media of some sort to develop ideas. The medium can be anything at all. The Wilburys used voices and guitars. Richard Feynman used mathematics. Faith Ringgold’s media were paints and fabrics (and sometimes words and music).

Creative work also often involves tapping into various talents at your disposal to make something original. Sir Ridley Scott is an award‐winning director with such blockbuster films as Gladiator, Blade Runner, Alien, and Thelma and Louise to his credit. His films have a look distinct from other film directors. The source of this look is his training as an artist.

“Because of my background in fine art,” he told me, “I have very specific ideas about making films. I’ve always been told I have this eye. I’ve never thought about what it is, but I’m usually accused of being too pretty, or too beautiful, or too this, or too that. I’ve gradually realized that this is an advantage. My first film, The Duellists, was criticized for being too beautiful. One critic complained about ‘the overuse of filters.’ Actually, there were no filters used. The ‘filters’ were fifty‐nine days of pissing rain. I think what he was taken by was how I look at the French landscape. Probably the best photographers of the Napoleonic period would be painters. So I looked at the Russian painters of Napoleon going to the front on that disastrous journey to Russia. A lot of great nineteenth‐century views on that are frankly just photographic. I would take everything from those and apply that to the film.”

People who work creatively usually have something in common: they love the media they work with.

Musicians love the sounds they make, natural writers love words, dancers love movement, mathematicians love numbers, entrepreneurs love making deals, great teachers love teaching. This is why people who fundamentally love what they do don’t think of it as work in the ordinary sense of the word. They do it because they want to and because when they do, they are in their Element.

This is why Feynman talks about working on the equations of motion “just for the fun of it.” It’s why he talks about “playing” with the ideas in “a relaxed fashion.” The Wilburys produced some of their best work when they were just trying things out and having a good time together making music. The fun factor isn’t essential to creative work—there are many examples of creative pioneers who were hardly a laugh a minute. But sometimes when we’re playing around with ideas and laughing, we’re most open to new thoughts. In all creative work, there may be frustrations, problems, and dead ends along the way. I know some wonderfully creative people who find parts of the process difficult and deeply exasperating. But there’s always profound pleasure at some point, and a deep sense of satisfaction from “getting it right.”

Many of the people I talk about in this book think they were lucky to find what they love to do. For some of them, it was love at first sight. That’s why they call the recognition of their Element an epiphany. Finding the medium that excites your imagination, that you love to play with and work in, is an important step to freeing your creative energies. History is full of examples of people who didn’t discover their real creative abilities until they discovered the media in which they thought best. In my experience, one of the main reasons that so many other people think they’re not creative is that they simply haven’t found their medium. There are other reasons, which we’ll come to, including the idea of luck. But first let’s look more closely at why the actual media we use are so important to the creative work we do.

Different media help us to think in different ways. A great friend of mine, the designer Nick Egan, recently gave my wife Terry and me two paintings he’d done for us. A couple of things I’d said in some public lectures had moved Nick in a significant way. The first was, “If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never produce anything original.” The second was, “Great education depends on great teaching.” I think both of these are true, which is why I go around saying them. Nick found himself thinking about these ideas and about how they’d applied to his own life, growing up and then working as an artist in London. He decided to create some paintings about them, and he worked on them nearly full‐time for several weeks.

Each of the paintings he did for us features one of those statements and is a kind of visual improvisation on it. They are both powerful images with an almost primal energy. One of them is primarily black, with the words scrawled and scratched into the paint on half of the canvas like graffiti. The other one is largely white, with the words written in a childlike way in dripping black paint across the background. One features a glaring cartoonlike face that’s somewhere between a cave painting and child’s drawing.

At first glance, the paintings seem rushed and chaotic. But a careful examination of the canvases reveals layers upon layers of other images beneath, carefully built up and partly painted over. This gives the paintings real depth. He also laced each with intricate textures of colors and brushstrokes that become more vibrant as you look at them. All of the complexity in the paintings generates their sense of simplicity and urgent energy.

Although my words inspired them, I couldn’t have created these paintings. Nick is a designer and a visual artist. He has a natural aptitude and passion for visual work—sensitivity to line, color, shapes, and textures and to how they can be formed into new, creative ideas. He develops his ideas through paint, chalks, pastels, printmaking, film, digital imaging, and a whole host of other visual media and materials. The materials he uses on any given project affect the ideas he has and how he works on them. You can think of creativity as a conversation between what we’re trying to figure out and the media we are using. The paintings that Nick finally gave us were different from how they started out. Their appearance evolved as he worked on them, and what he wanted to express became clearer as the paintings took shape.

Creativity in different media is a striking illustration of the diversity of intelligence and ways of thinking. Richard Feynman had a great visual imagination. But he wasn’t trying to paint a picture of electrons; he was trying to develop a scientific theory about how they actually work. To do that, he had to use mathematics. He was thinking about electrons, but he was thinking about them mathematically. Without mathematics, he simply couldn’t have thought about them as he did. The Wilburys were thinking about love and relationships, life and death, and the whole damn thing; but they weren’t trying to write a psychology textbook. They were thinking about these things through music. They were having musical ideas, and music is what they made.

Understanding the role of the media we use for creative work is important for another reason. To develop our creative abilities, we also need to develop our practical skills in the media we want to use. It’s important that we develop these skills in the right way. I know plenty of people who have been turned off math for life because they were never helped to see its creative possibilities—as you already know, I’m one of those people. Teachers always presented math to me as an interminable series of puzzles to which someone else already knew the answers, and the only options were to get it right or wrong. This is not how Richard Feynman thought of math.

Equally, I know many people who spent endless hours as children practicing scales on the piano or guitar and never want to see an instrument again because the whole process was so dull and repetitive. Many people have decided that they were simply no good at math or music when it’s possible that their teachers taught them the wrong way or at the wrong time. Maybe they should look again. Maybe I should.…

Opening Your Mind

Creative thinking involves much more than the sorts of logical, linear thinking that dominate the Western view of intelligence and especially education. The frontal lobes of the brain are involved in some higher‐order thinking skills. The left hemisphere is the area that’s most involved in logical and analytical thinking. But creative thinking usually involves much more of the brain than the bits at the front and to the left.

Being creative is about making fresh connections so that we see things in new ways and from different perspectives. In logical, linear thinking, we move from one idea to another through a series of rules and conventions. We allow some moves while rejecting others because they’re illogical. If A + B = C, we can figure out what C + B equals. Conventional IQ exams typically test for this type of thinking. The rules of logic or linear thought don’t always guide creative thinking. On the contrary.

Creative insights often come in nonlinear ways, through seeing connections and similarities between things that we hadn’t noticed before. Creative thinking depends greatly on what’s sometimes called divergent or lateral thinking, and especially on thinking in metaphors or seeing analogies. This is what Richard Feynman was doing when he saw a connection between the wobbling plate and the spin of electrons. The idea for George Harrison’s song “Handle with Care” came from a label he saw on a packing crate.

I don’t mean that creativity is the opposite of logical thinking. The rules of logic allow enormous room for creativity and improvisation within themselves. So do all activities that are bound by rules. Think of all the creativity in chess and in different types of sport, poetry, dance, and music, where there can be very strict rules and conventions. Logic can be very important at different stages in the creative process, according to what sort of work we’re doing, particularly when we’re evaluating new ideas and how they fit into or challenge existing theories. Even so, creative thinking goes beyond linear and logical thought to involve all areas of our minds and bodies.

It’s now widely accepted that the two halves of the brain have different functions. The left hemisphere is involved in logical, sequential reasoning—with verbal language, mathematical thinking, and so on. The right hemisphere is involved in recognition of patterns, of faces, with visual perception, orientation in space, and with movement. However, these compartments of the brain hardly work in isolation from each other. If you look at images of the brain at work, you’ll see that it is highly interactive. Like the rest of our bodies, these functions are all related.

Legs have a major role in running, but a leg on its own is frankly rather poor at it. In the same way, many different parts of the brain are involved when we play or listen to music, from the more recently evolved cerebral cortex to the older, so‐called reptilian parts of the brain. These have to work in concert with the rest of our body, including the rest of the brain. Of course, we all have strengths and weaknesses in the different functions and capacities of the brain. But like the muscles in our arms and legs, these capacities can grow weaker or stronger depending on how much we exercise them separately and together.

By the way, there’s some suggestion in recent research that women’s brains may be more interactive than men’s brains. The jury is still out on this, but reading about it reminded me of an old question in Western philosophy that professors often give college freshmen to debate. It’s about the relationship between our senses and our knowledge of the world. The essence of the question is whether we can know something is true if we don’t have direct evidence of it through our senses, and the usual example is this: “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” I used to teach some philosophy courses, and the students and I could debate this sort of thing in an earnest way for weeks on end. The answer, I think, is, “Of course it does, don’t be so ridiculous.” But, you know, I had tenure, so there was really no need to rush this conversation. A recent trip to San Francisco reminded me of these debates. I was wandering through a street market and saw someone wearing a T‐shirt that said, “If a man speaks his mind in a forest and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?” Probably.

Whatever gender differences there may be in everyday thinking, creativity is always a dynamic process that may draw on many different ways of thinking at the same time. Dance is a physical, kinesthetic process. Music is a sound‐based art form. But many dancers and musicians use mathematics as an integral part of their performances. Scientists and mathematicians often think in visual ways to picture and test their ideas.

Creativity also uses much more than our brains. Playing instruments, creating images, constructing objects, performing a dance, and making things of every sort are also intensely physical processes that depend on feelings, intuition, and skilled coordination of hands and eyes, body and mind. In many instances—in dance, in song, in performance—we do not use external media at all. We ourselves are the medium of our creative work.

Creative work also reaches deep into our intuitive and unconscious minds and into our hearts and feelings. Have you ever forgotten someone’s name, or the name of somewhere you’ve visited? Try as you may, it’s often impossible to bring it to mind, and the more you think about it, the more elusive it becomes. Usually, the best thing you can do is stop trying and “put it to the back of your mind.” Sometime later, the name will probably show up in your head when you’re least expecting it. The reason is that there is far more to our minds than the deliberate processes of conscious thought. Beneath the noisy surface of our minds, there are deep reserves of memory and association, of feelings and perceptions that process and record our life’s experiences beyond our conscious awareness. So at times, creativity is a conscious effort. At others, we need to let our ideas ferment for a while and trust the deeper unconscious ruminations of our minds, over which we have less control. Sometimes when we do, the insights we’ve been searching for will come to us in a rush, like “letting a cork out of a bottle.”

Getting It Together

While you can see the dynamic nature of creative thinking in the work of single individuals, it becomes much more obvious when you look at the work of great creative groups like the Traveling Wilburys. The success of the group came about not because they all thought in the same way, but because they were all so different. They had different talents, different interests, and different sounds. But they found a process of working together where their differences stimulated each other to create something they wouldn’t have come up with individually. It’s in this sense that creativity draws not just from our own personal resources but also from the wider world of other people’s ideas and values. This is where the argument for developing our powers of creativity moves up a gear.

Let’s go back to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, the prince of Denmark is torn by raging feelings about the death of his father and the treachery of his mother and uncle. Throughout the play, he wrestles with his feelings about life and death, loyalty and betrayal, and his significance in the wider universe. He struggles to know what he should think and feel about the events that are engulfing his spirit. Early in the play, he greets Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, two visitors to the royal Danish court. He welcomes them with these words:

My excellent good friends! How dost thou, Guildenstern? Ah, Rosencrantz! Good lads, how do you both?

…what have you,

My good friends, deserved at the hands of fortune,

That she sends you to prison hither?

The question surprises Guildenstern. He asks Hamlet what he means by “prison.” Hamlet says, “Denmark’s a prison.” Rosencrantz laughs and says that if that’s true, then the whole world is a prison. Hamlet says it is, and “a goodly one, in which there are many confines, wards and dungeons, Denmark being one of the worst.” Rosencrantz says, “We think not so, my lord.” Hamlet’s reply is profound. “ ’Tis none to you for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so: to me it is a prison.”

The power of human creativity is obvious everywhere, in the technologies we use, in the buildings we inhabit, in the clothes we wear, and in the movies we watch. But the reach of creativity is very much deeper. It affects not only what we put in the world, but also what we make of it—not only what we do, but also how we think and feel about it.

Unlike all other species, so far as we can tell, we don’t just get on in the world. We spend much of our time talking and thinking about what happens and trying to work out what it all means. We can do this because of the startling power of imagination, which underpins our capacity to think in words and numbers, in images and gestures, and to use all of these to generate theories and artifacts and all the complex ideas and values that make up the many perspectives on human life. We don’t just see the world as it is; we interpret it through the particular ideas and beliefs that have shaped our own cultures and our personal outlook. All of these stand between us and our raw experiences in the world, acting as a filter on what we perceive and how we think.

What we think of ourselves and of the world makes us who we are and what we can be. This is what Hamlet means when he says, “There is nothing good or bad, only thinking makes it so.” The good news is that we can always try to think differently. If we create our worldview, we can re‐create it too by taking a different perspective and reframing our situation. In the sixteenth century, Hamlet said that he thought of Denmark metaphorically as a prison. In the seventeenth century, Richard Lovelace wrote a poem for his love, Althea. Taking the opposite view, Lovelace says that for him an actual prison would be a place of freedom and liberty so long as he could think of Althea. This is how he closes his poem:

Stone walls do not a prison make,

Nor iron bars a cage;

Minds innocent and quiet take

That for an hermitage;

If I have freedom in my love

And in my soul am free,

Angels alone, that soar above,

Enjoy such liberty.

In the nineteenth century, William James became one of the founding thinkers of modern psychology. By then, it was becoming more widely understood that our ideas and ways of thinking could imprison or liberate us. James put it this way: “The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitude of mind.… If you change your mind, you can change your life.”

This is the real power of creativity and the true promise of being in your Element.