Pragmatism Applied to Foundational Creativity (How to be More Creative)
Thomas Edison valued sleep, of all things, as a primary source for inspiration. One of the most prolific inventors of the modern world kept a pad and pencil near his bed, ready to capture fleeting images or ideas that might spark during his rest. In fact his greatest invention, the light bulb, is said to have been conceived in a dream.
Edison did not come up with this practice, and certainly was not alone in leveraging the subconscious. Even his competitor, Nicola Tesla, credits using some of his more vivid dreams for inspiration. Plenty of famous minds have been known to employ the “dream journal” technique, especially among artists. Salvador Dalí, Frida Khalo, Stephen King, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Stevie Wonder, and Carl Jung all mentioned dreams as a creative source.
Quickly, some definitions before we go further:
Pragmatism “is a philosophical approach that emphasizes the practical consequences of ideas, beliefs, and actions.”
Creativity “is the ability to generate novel and valuable ideas and solutions”.
As a result, creativity is often coined as “outside the box” thinking. Let’s have “Foundational Creativity” more specifically represent the core factors that underpin creative thinking, such as imagination, knowledge, open-mindedness, and problem solving skills.
Richard Hamming (American Mathematician and Information Theorist) said this during a speech in 1986 about creativity:
The unconscious mind refers to the part of the mind that operates below the level of conscious awareness. It encompasses thoughts, feelings, memories, and other mental processes that are not currently in focal awareness but still influence behavior, emotions, and perceptions. Main priorities of this system include automatic processes (breathing, heartbeats, routine functions), memory storage (you hold a wealth of knowledge even when you’re not directly thinking of a topic), habits and conditioning, intuition, and sleeping/dreaming.
So it’s not a secret that exploration of the unconscious mind can greatly influence art when applied pragmatically. Simply put, the subconscious mind has much easier access to novelty than our conscious thoughts.
But, as explained in Hamming’s quote, creativity comes at a cost.
Creativity in a specific field comes at the cost of obsession.
Whatever problem your mind is spending the bulk of its day in conscious energy solving for x will impact the information your brain has to sort, sift through, clear out, shuffle and reorganize during recovery and rest.
Still, many of us don’t have the luxury of time to focus all day over one specific task of interest. And still more, you won’t wake up every night and recall a dream, let alone one that creatively solves your task at hand. But you can approach each night and new day with a strategy that promises growth. There are a couple solutions to implement:
- Let your focus at the end of the day have outsized influence. Whether it’s winding down by reading a book on a certain subject, meditating and visualizing before falling asleep, or journaling about an issue before bed, do these things as a night cap to your day.
- Upon rising the next morning, write down your current thoughts. You will have a new start, a fresh mind, a reset of emotions, and clarity from rest. If it’s a decision and you can make it binary, write down your answer without thinking too much about it using intuition.
Example: If you had a week to decide whether to accept a certain job offer and feel paralyzed with indecision, start with addressing the matter poised in a simple binary question “Should I accept this new job?”. Take 7 or any odd numbers of days and each morning write down your best intuited answer (all the critical thinking from the day before will be factored in and doing this first thing in the morning will remove the emotional weight that can come with the day).
Day 1: Yes | Day 2: No | Day 3: No | Day 4: Yes | Day 5: Yes | Day 6: Yes | Day 7: Yes
At one point, the answer will become painfully clear to you. *Creative pursuits are less binary and may take more time and nuance.
Are you trying to create a work of art? Or working through a challenging, big life changing decision?
There’s a reason why people, when processing a tough decision, often say “Let me sleep on it”.
What is the ☀️SOL Series☀️?
SOL simply stands for a Subject Of Learning. I am pushing myself to process thoughts into more concrete understandings of the world providing material conclusions while simultaneously improving my writing.
The collective profile (an eventual community) will become a Strategic Atlas for individuals to gain perspective on global trends, philosophy, and cognitive science. The aim is nothing other than to become rich in perspective leading to strategic mental growth.
— Atlas
