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The Root of Creativity

My friend asked me if I ever consume media even though I feel like it won't be of any use to me. I answered that yes, sometimes I read articles, listen to podcasts or attend conferences on subjects I'll probably never apply to what I work on. I consume ideas for the sake of it. The follow-up question was obviously why do I do this, why learn about these topics if they are no use to me? I thought I was simply of a curious nature but as it turns out, this made me realize that creativity isn’t inventing from nothing; it’s the iterative process of linking ideas.

For the longest time, I was under the impression that musicians, painters and authors simply had something that I didn't. Their brains could naturally come up with ideas that were never seen before. The issue with this thought is that it clashed with another part of me that never really liked the idea of natural talents. While I think we can be born with affinities to certain skills, I strongly believe that everyone can learn any skill or craft, and that they can master them. The concept of natural talents discredits the hard work of those who spend years honing their craft and is demoralizing to anyone who wishes to learn something new.

I've always felt like I had difficulties coming up with ideas of my own, sometimes I thought that I was on a "permanent writer's block". Looking back, the issue was not that I couldn't come up with original ideas but that I misunderstood what an original idea is and how to come up with one. After watching Eskil Steenberg's Where do I get all my ideas? talk, I realized my approach was wrong. Whenever I tried to create something, I would think of what I personally enjoy and try to copy it. While this isn't a bad start, this approach will often lead to something that feels soulless, without a "me" essence.

In his talk, Eskil says the main point is to identify what makes a great idea and base yourself off that. One of the examples he gave is that if you love Star Wars' story and wish to create something like it, you shouldn't try to copy its spaceships or Jedi but should instead look at what makes Star Wars work. The example he gave was that what makes the story great is the duality allowed by having two main characters. Luke Skywalker's presence lets us explore the serious side of the world while Han Solo gives the audience a charismatic character to break the tension. From there, you can create your own story with those two main character archetypes.

While this is great advice for storytelling, it made me realize something deeper about creativity. What I mean by creativity is anything that requires coming up with ideas. I introduced this article talking about musicians, painters and authors but who I didn't talk about are engineers, designers, biologists, carpenters, nurses and the like. Creativity is often related to the "artsy" crafts but the truth is that all tasks that require some kind of problem solving or critical thinking are inherently creative. Being human is inherently a creative task.

This misconception of creativity is the same misconception people often have regarding inventors. Many think of engineers and inventors as two different things: one solves problems by using state-of-the-art solutions while the other creates something new. You might have noticed that this definition of inventors fits the original definition we had of creativity, and this is closely related to what makes the term "creativity" confusing. While the definition of the word is not wrong (to be the originator of something), it only corresponds to the result of inventing and not the process. The process of inventing is actually the same process as engineering: to create something from the common knowledge we share.

Looking back through time, we often talk about inventors who changed the world by creating things that no one knew could ever exist but when we look at today's inventors, it feels like what they invented isn't necessarily something we couldn't think of, more that we didn't think of. This is because the logs we leave through time keep track of our results, our achievements, and never the process or context of creation. Creation is never achieved in one day and never done from nothing. For example, if you look at the light bulb, you can see that multiple people worked on it prior to its invention and that they already had prior knowledge on related subjects:

From History of the Light Bulb: "[Thomas Edison] was neither the first nor the only person trying to invent an incandescent light bulb. In fact, some historians claim there were over 20 inventors of incandescent lamps prior to Edison’s version."

From Tyler Glaiel: "Like 95% of game design essays look at a completed game and try to explain the design choices from that perspective. But games start as a blank project file and get built up iteratively from that. If you're trying to MAKE games, you need to view design as a process, not a result. Not to say that there isn't value in pointing out cool design in finished games, its just that that is not a tutorial [...]"

The common pitfall that everyone tends to fall into is to only look at the results of creativity the same way they only look at the results of inventions. Human creativity is an iterative process that stems from prior knowledge. The same way we don't invent new things over a day, we don't find great ideas out of thin air. I used inventors as an example but you could do the same thought exercise on any topic. Everyone inspires everyone else. At a macro scale, you can find that every creation can be related to one that preceded it in the field's history. For generations we have been building up and sharing knowledge based on the work of our ancestors. At a micro scale, every idea we have actually come from something that influenced us in our lives. This is definitely not a new concept as most people know this, but I think not many people realize how to use this actively. Creativity as always been about making links between things in our minds and the greatest ideas come from relating concepts, sometimes seemingly unrelated, together.

A first step to original ideas is to stop thinking in terms of results and instead look around us at what already exists. The same way Eskil looked at what made Star Wars a great story, we should look at what is behind the things we consume. As it turns out, most things in life are not simply "face value". Just like inventions, the reason that they are this way can be explained by decisions made through iterations and context. By taking the time to think about why someone did something, we can get a partial picture of the decision-making. From there, we are able to figure out what actually made it a good idea. Because all ideas come from an iterative process, as outside observers we sometimes have the opportunity to notice reasoning that the original author wasn't aware of.

Let's take another talk from Eskil as an example. In You should finish your software, Eskil says that when it's time for a new version of his software, he deletes everything and restarts from scratch. To him, the main benefit is avoiding fights with the existing architecture and using what he learned to rewrite it better. As an outside observer, we can agree that not having to rework existing code in a constrained environment is much easier but what Eskil doesn't tell us, and maybe doesn't realize himself, is that this is only half of the benefits of his approach. From his point of view, he probably found out this method of work by trying things and seeing that it worked pretty well for him, but from our point of view we can ask ourselves "Is working without constraints really what benefits him the most?".

It's pretty hard to think further than this without knowing much about the subject but if you've built prior knowledge on system design (e.g. from Ryan Fleury's blog Digital Grove or talk Cracking the Code: Realtime Debugger Visualization Architecture), you would know about the value of iteration and feedback loops. Now from these two pieces of information, we are able to build our new and original idea about Eskil's approach to development! As it turns out, the main benefit of his method doesn't come from deleting everything but instead simply comes from iterating on his design. In this case, the answer was partly said by Eskil ("[...] using what he learned to rewrite it better.") but it doesn't mean that Eskil personally realizes that the cycle of iteration is the best part of his method, to him the solution might be that starting from scratch is really what makes this great. By linking two topics together instead of taking everything at "face value", we not only avoided switching to the "restart from scratch" approach but we also figured out what makes his approach great and from here we can easily think about how to switch to a more iterative approach instead in our projects.

This example come from a system design perspective since this is what I am knowledgeable about, but once again this thought exercise can be applied to anything. If you want to write a song, you can try to find where the person who wrote what inspires you took their idea from, why they did it that way and what their context was at the time. Most often, the more you dig into the history, the more you are able to figure out. Maybe a specific song inspired them too at the time, and what was the context of this one, etc. You can even try to figure out where my ideas came from in this article and then, with that better understanding, write your own original idea of what creativity is :).

Another example of this approach to creativity is Casey Muratori's talk The Big OOPs: Anatomy of a Thirty-five-year Mistake where he explores the history of the Object-Oriented Programming paradigm. In a way, while he digested most of the information for us, we can see that by going through the history of this topic he managed to figure out what made software great back in the 1960s, and what others missed when designing new software. This is not necessarily a case where you would want to analyze his ideas but instead see how he built new ideas from per-existing ones.

To sum this up, creativity doesn't come from some kind of hidden talent; it's certainly a skill that can be trained. Being aware of this allows us not to limit ourselves to what we think we can do but instead push ourselves into discovering the whys behind the things we love. By consuming various sources of information, we build knowledge that we can use to fuel our creativity whether it is directly linked to what we do or not. We should never pressure ourselves with the misconception that every original idea needs to be completely new and revolutionary, and instead try to build on those who preceded us. Think of existing ideas as vectors to your own and yours as vectors to others': maybe your next idea won't be like the first-generation iPhone but it still might be the BlackBerry that allowed Steve Jobs to come up with it.