The other day on Twitter, I accidentally nailed down what I’ve been trying to say on this blog for the past 18 months:
We so easily associate creativity with creative thinking that they are often treated as synonymous. Whereas, in fact, you can do a hell of a lot of creative thinking (brainstorming, lateral thinking, daydreaming etc) without creating anything at all.
On the other hand, if you start with creative doing – i.e. rolling your sleeves up and trying to actually make something amazing, the ‘creative thinking’ bit tends to take care of itself. If you’re hammering away at a prototype in the garage, or the first draft of your novel, or the first iteration of your website, it’s hard not to obsess about it, and keep thinking about it – even when you’re supposed to be relaxing out of working hours.
And as we all know, it’s when you’re in the bath/on the golf course/on the dancefloor at three in the morning, that that brilliant idea is most likely to strike. It’s not the bathing/golfing/clubbing per se that produces the idea – let alone any fancy creative thinking techniques – but the fact that your previous creative doing set the wheels in motion in your unconscious mind.
Creative thinking doesn’t (necessarily) lead to create doing.
Creative doing leads to creative thinking. More importantly, it gets results.
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« Previous 1 2 3Hi Mark,
I find this post to be so true. I am always energize by the creative things I do and it seems to give me strength to do more. It's the excitement!
I love all your post Mark, please keep sharing.
This false dichotomy between thinking and doing really gets on my nerves.
Who can claim thinking isn't doing in itself anyway?
Hear this for obvious:
"You cannot do anything without thinking".
If you deem your work as "creative doing", then you were thinking creatively WHILE doing it.
I understand the whole idea of the blog which stresses the value of acting upon ideas, not just sitting on them. But how you put it in this post is too problematic in my eyes.
It starts with the assumption about creative thinking and (creative) doing, that one comes after the other. In reality, thinking is there all the time. One can apply creative thinking to things he does (~or processes). It is just that.
Actually not only that; how you put it in the above also devalues another thinking activity: planning. What if you end up hammering away a prototype that is unnecessary (didn't think over its market potential), or that is not useful (not everyone may be a fan of your ideas)? [This reminds me of the Simpsons episode where Homer designs the perfect automobile. ] Not only you may miss out on the opportunity of hammering away a better design, you may even not realize that it was a mistake to start in the first place.
How does that get us a result now?
I won't even go into how important theories and models are in science, where scientists take up on their colleagues' work from decades ago with the newly available technologies. They couldn't have made models of the human cell, the atom, the DNA if they categorized it as "just creative thinking". Similarly this type of thinking goes against many of the established ways the business world works (ie. specialization). It is rare to come by a product that didn't go through a collaborative process (think research, marketing, engineering, sales etc.)
To repeat, I fully agree with the value of acting on ideas, and I also agree with other ideas on this blog where you try to demystify the creative process in a way and to get people to realize that it is a skill that can be learned.
It is just too unfortunate that you beat up on "creative thinking" when you go about underlining the importance of action. Thinking doesn't equal pre-doing.
I'd happily concede to "creative doing beats JUST creative thinking" but that would be somewhat tautological after all.
@ Necati:
But you CAN think something without doing anything. Hence the emphasis in my article.
That's more of a black-and-white dichotomy than anything I wrote.
And it wouldn't be much of a headline. :-)
Sometimes creative doing involves NOT thinking CONSCIOUSLY. You have to learn to put your white-collar, concept-based, language-based, time-and-energy-saving mind in a box and just do intuitive, blue-collar, unarticulated, unconsidered ACTION.
It is a kind of thinking, yes. But it requires thinking on a LESS than conscious level. I'd compare it to thinking on a nonverbal level if you're working with objects or code, or thinking on a non-conceptual level if you're working with words.
Some of the best writing on creativity: crisp yet trendy language. This gets the message across with the right emotional weight. Thank you!