
Ask HN: How do you learn to be creative? - quizbiz
I overheard an MIT admissions representative talking about what they look for and he focused on the concept of expressed creativity. His views were that creativity is very difficult to teach. Hence the question.
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nreece
I feel that one of the ways to realize and induce (your) creativity is by
getting bored - proscrastinate - do nothing, and let your thoughts guide you.

Often, I see/find people trying to stay busy doing something or the other all
the time, but I think somewhere down the line it blocks their creative side.

Try taking a walk through the park, and relax on the grass for sometime.
You'll feel more connected to your creative side.

~~~
qaexl
This is the best advice I've seen here. You have to relax enough for the
creative side to come out. This is one thing that striving forth with a Type-A
personality will hinder you. The more you try to be creative, the less
creative you will be. The reasons are rooted in physiology. I've posted two
comments pointing out the specific physiology, though they are buried and
you'd have to scroll down.

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patio11
If I were a cynical man, I'd note that "expressed creativity" means anything
you want it to mean, that it is largely in the eye of the beholder, and that
you can find it in any applicant you want to accept and fail to find it in any
applicant you don't want to accept.

Ask your MIT admissions representative whether music is creative.

Then ask him whether it matters if the music is freestyle rapping or concert
violin since the age of three.

Then tell him the rapper was Asian and the violinist was black.

~~~
chris11
While I see your point, I'd argue that some expressed creativity is easy to
see. I'd argue that an accomplishment in a domain marginalized in a person's
environment requires some creativity.

When I am not in school, I live in Colorado. So the skiing there is great. So
if I found out someone had been a competitive skier at some level, I would not
be shocked. If I found out that someone had lived in Colorado while
successfully competing as a surfer, I would be shocked. I think that being
able to effectively train as a surfer while surrounded by mountains would show
some creativity.

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tjpick
Being creative is not something you learn. It's something you _do_.

Examples: start building webapps or working on free software, publish writings
on your blog, do paintings, record yourself playing music and put it on
youtube, tinker with mechanical devices or build your own electronics, build
furniture, conduct physical or chemical experiments, publish your cooking
recipes... and so on and so forth.

It's not "expressed" if it's all in your head.

Quite literally: make something, and show people.

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Eliezer
<http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/10/original-seeing.html>

<http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/10/cached-thoughts.html>

<http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/10/how-to-seem-and.html>

<http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/10/outside-the-box.html>

------
mtinkerhess
Know your craft. Find inspiration in everything. Practice, practice, practice.

~~~
jacoblyles
It is certainly easier to be creative when one has reached a high level of
proficiency at one's craft.

Sugar Ray Leonard can pull off dance moves in the boxing ring, I keep my hands
up and my jab out or I'll get my head knocked off.

~~~
qaexl
It is easier because

(1) The tasks becomes so automatic, you no longer have to think about it and
"work through it". It sinks into the subconscious. This is important.

(2) When the tasks becomes automatic, you naturally relax. Being relaxed,
creativity and inspiration comes out. You cannot force it out. Stress kills
creativity. Fear-inspired creativity typically manifests as paranoia.

(3) This is why some people can get oddly-inspired brilliance as a complete
n00b in a craft. He doesn't know anything, yet sometimes he is relaxed enough
that some randomly brilliant thing comes out. Often, this fades away with more
mastery of the craft. It is why children are often perceived as naturally more
creative.

(4) Someone who has mastered a craft to the point where it requires no
thinking can be far more creative than the complete n00b. A master's
inspiration takes advantage of deep understanding of his craft, so not only
would it be far more effective, it is much more consistent.

(5) The four stages of competancy: unconsciously incompetant, consciously
incompetant, consciously competant, unconsciously competant.

Most people reach the stage of consciously competancy (which requires
concentration) and stop there. This is the stage where you've "learned"
something and you "get" it. To reach the stage of unconsciously competancy,
however, requires an incredible amount of practice and repetition (Malcom
Gladwell's ballpark-nice-round-number of 10,000 ... which depending on the
skill, really isn't all that much).

An example in the case of programming: I remember when I first learned the
Ruby syntax. While I had other languages under my belt, I still had to
mentally, and deliberately parse the syntax, and _then_ try to understand the
flow. Now, if I look at a codebase I am reasonbly familiar with, I can glance
at it. I don't really see the code itself so much as how it all fits together.
I have not yet mastered the syntax to the point where I can glance at
unfamiliar code and do that.

Another example related to programming: I've seen would-be-programmers
struggle to _type_ their programs. For them, they have not reached a stage of
unconscious competancy with typing. They have to frame bits of their thoughts
and then deliberately type it out. Some touch-typists I know are not that much
better. For me, having played so much MUDs back in its heyday, I've learned
how to type well enough that it is no longer an interface bottleneck for me.

Example from martial arts: There is actually a ton of material written about
this subject of creativity in the "boxing ring", some of the surviving ones
written a couple hundred years ago or more. One of my favorite is the Japanese
densho, Neko no Myojutsu. A modern (though more obtuse) treatise about this
subject is "Effortless Power". Both books discusses the cases about
creativity, the newbie, and the master craftsmen.

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dbul
My bias is that creativity is something that you develop as a child.

Nevertheless, I also think creativity can be emergent: when you are focusing
on being creative in one area, draw analogies from other areas
(interdisciplinary). I knew someone who once determined where to situate a
package shipping center by using physics for example.

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vamsee
Hmm, I think creativity comes from being bold, and not being afraid to
experiment and putting something out there that is uniquely your own. I takes
being comfortable with oneself and what you have to say. And being able to
handle ridicule/disappointment if it flops, and being able to keep
experimenting.

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jacoblyles
Depends on the field. If you are a musician, empirically I would recommend
drugs.

~~~
josefresco
I would expand that advice to all artistic pursuits.

~~~
wallflower
For artists and maybe hackers, I have some friends who found inspiration
through this book (it's not easy to do some of the exercises, very internal)

Book recommendation: The Artist's Way

"The Artist's Way is a workbook for anyone who is creative, feels blocked in
their creativity or wishes that they were more creative. The book begins with
the statement that everyone is creative and has an artist within them, and the
point of this course is to recover that inner artist. It is divided into a
twelve-week course, with assignments much like any semester-long college
class."

<http://www.theartistsway.com/>

<http://paperartstudio.tripod.com/artistsway/>

~~~
blue1
Also, "Creating" by robert fritz is not bad. But beware, reading books about
creatity may become a form of procrastination.

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chaosmachine
There are some interesting connections between creativity and schizophrenia.

<http://www.google.com/search?q=creativity+schizophrenia>

Furthermore, there are various drugs that induce schizophrenic-like mental
states.

It's been shown drugs can make you smarter, faster, stronger, why would
creativity be any different.

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whacked_new
I'm with the camp that it's hard to teach. I'm talking about "creative" in the
romantic sense of the word: the kind that is stereotypically exhibited by mad
scientists, hermit authors, and bipolar playwrights. The kind of "useful
abnormality" that does not occur to the common mind.

In these cases, I would argue the creativity stems from a different brain
structure, and I would not be wrong in saying so. To this extent, it cannot be
taught. But in the same vein, everybody is creative in their own ways. But it
needs to be coaxed. The coaxing is the job of the perceptive teacher, and I
think the early years of life are critical for healthy development in this
area.

How do you learn to be creative? I would sum it up as "de-inhibit your brain."
If you grew up in an oppressive environment where you could be punished for
any arbitrarily bad expression, it is imaginable that you would be conditioned
to avoid thinking in certain non-standard ways.

------
briancooley
I don't know how to actively increase creativity, but I do know how to
actively decrease my fear of failure.

It seems like the less I fear failing, the more my creativity emerges.

------
qaexl
This link was posted up on YC recently: <http://the-programmers-
stone.com/about/>

While it does not directly address "creativity", I have found that the
"juxtapositional thinking" state it describes as a required state for creative
thinking. Look on the second article for the precise neuroscience.

In summary, the pre-frontal cortex has (at least) two different mode: focused
attention, and juxtapositional thinking. The first works well when you have
predictable task order. You know precisely what steps you need to do something
in. However, it also shuts down any chance you have to be "inspired" or
"creative". It is the precise reason when you _try_ to be creative, you stop
being creative.

The site lists some easy ways to encourage juxtapositional thinking in people.
There are other methods I have found help trigger this.

I do want to point out though, the juxtapositional state will not
automatically make you more creative, though it is a pre-condition that needs
to be fulfilled before you creative insight pops up in your head.

However, this precondition does show why creativity is difficult to teach. It
is something you _learn_ , not something you teach. It requires a state of
mind that you have to access yourself, you cannot be simply be told "be
creative".

Whatever the case may be, creativity is _not_ a genetic or an edge case.

~~~
qaexl
Let me mention some more specifics.

There are skills you can use to help trigger this that goes beyond the
specific suggestions in that linked article. Specifically, you train yourself
to increase the amount of alpha-band and theta-band activity in your brain.
Theta-band is where you start getting creative; alpha-band allows your working
consciousness (the one you use to read these words) to visualize/verbalize it
in a form that you can understand and remember. The book I sourced this from
and use is Anne Wise's High Performance Mind. Note that I didn't really see
any double-blind papers cited in there. I can only offer anecdoptal evidence
that the techniques in there works for me. YMMV.

------
tripngroove
"creativity" is all about process. come up with methods for putting ideas /
objects / anything together and when you have a whole series, pick the ones
that are most intriguing and run with them.

it's a tough sell to imply that any product, any idea, or any thing is
creative in the sense that it appeared out of some sort of magical, big-bang
of inspiration. your brain works by building connections, so anything you
build is going to be an expression of everything you know; it's just a matter
of not being afraid to experiment, and of iterating as fast as possible to
find combinations of ideas virulent enough to claw their way above the slew
and become something special.

and the energy you spend searching, identifying and implementing those
combinations of ideas is directly related to the likelihood of their
success... however you choose to define it.

don't be afraid to fail. by failing you're educating yourself about what
doesn't work, which, in turn, makes it easier to identify what will.

also, when you're trying to be creative, the easiest way to fail is to not do
anything at all. it's too easy to cogitate endlessly about what good solutions
COULD be, rather than taking real steps to implement and identify what good
solutions ARE.

i'd go with nike... "just do it." ...or maybe, "obey your thirst."

------
grandalf
Creativity is the process of getting your brain not to shut down ideas that it
comes up with before you can really give them a chance.

One way to do this is to focus on asking questions:

\- What if this is the wrong approach? \- How can this be made more general?
\- Should it be more general? \- Should I be doing the opposite? \- What other
uses might this have? \- What problem is this a better solution to? \- What
are the pieces of this idea? \- What can I make with each piece? \- (Repeat
first steps) \- How can I implement this idea? \- On a budget? \- With an
unlimited budget? \- "Green" \- For Red staters \- For blue staters \- For the
third world? \- For free? \- Why not do this before now? \- Why not do this
after now?

You get the idea. Just let your questioner run wild and enjoy the process. I
recommend asking about 1000 questions and figuring out what makes you most
excited or what you think packs the most punch.

I think creativity is more of the absence of a trait (excessive internal
"downmodding" of thoughts) vs the presence of a trait.

Oh, and this may be a bit cliche, but sleep on it. Doze off thinking about it
and then maybe in the shower the next day you'll get some ideas.

Also brainstorming with a friend can be a fun way to flush out cool ideas.

------
tsally
You don't. It's not so much that you learn to be creative as it is finding
something you're inspired by. I've never seen someone fail to be creative at
something they were inspired by. I'm not sure you can teach someone to be
creative about a non inspirational thing. How do you find the inspirational
thing? Iteration.

------
lpolovets
Michael Michalko has two excellent books on creativity:

Thinkertoys ([http://www.amazon.com/Thinkertoys-Handbook-Creative-
Thinking...](http://www.amazon.com/Thinkertoys-Handbook-Creative-Thinking-
Techniques-2nd/dp/1580087736))

    
    
      and 
    

Cracking Creativity ([http://www.amazon.com/Cracking-Creativity-Secrets-
Creative-G...](http://www.amazon.com/Cracking-Creativity-Secrets-Creative-
Genius/dp/1580083110))

They're both among my fave books of all time, though they are relatively
similar in content so getting just one is fine.

They cover a lot of different strategies for thinking creatively and outside
the box, provide tons of examples, and have a lot of exercise that you can try
yourself (and while it sounds cheesy, the exercises are actually fun)

------
simianstyle
Get outside of your comfort zone and experiment with things that would
otherwise seem 'ugly' to you.

------
Zev
Its pretty hard (if not impossible) to write a step by step guide on how to be
creative. This makes it very hard to teach someone creativity, which is
probably what the admissions rep was talking about.

But if I had to take a gander at answering "How to be creative", It would go
something along the lines of... Take initiative. Do something, anything. Then
ask "What if this was done differently?" and follow through on the question or
modification. See where that leads you and question/modify that. Ad infinitum.

Once you start, don't ever stop doing things or questioning everything about
them. If you're stuck, or just need a change in something, talk to other
people. Creativity doesn't mean being alone forever.

------
ggruschow
One way may be to get stupid.

"Thinking outside of the box" is tough when you're used to living in the box.
Maybe it's easier to just get away from things you're familiar with to see
creativity expressed.

For instance, take your average boring chemistry student out of a lab, and
tell them they've got to make 20 loaves of bread every day next week for the
local bakery.. but don't tell them how, let them look it up, or give them the
standard equipment. Just give them the ingredients -- maybe even throw in more
than is necessary including some that aren't normally used.

I bet you'd get some creative work out of people that weren't considered very
creative in their normal work.

------
noodle
in my humble opinion, everyone is creative in their own area of expertise. its
just much more difficult and less obvious when expressing creativity in fields
like engineering. and it is difficult to express creativity when jumping
fields. as an engineer-type, i can't really do creative graphic design. i've
tried, and i just can't seem to cough anything up. but i can definitely come
up with creative solutions to a problem.

and if that fails, this essay is kind of interesting
[http://www.scottberkun.com/essays/56-creative-thinking-
hacks...](http://www.scottberkun.com/essays/56-creative-thinking-hacks/)

------
bengtan
I used to read an article 'How to be creative'. This is the updated version:

Ignore everybody
<http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/000932.html>

------
bkbleikamp
"Observe everything. Communicate well. Draw, draw, draw." Frank Thomas
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Thomas_(animator)>)

------
chris11
Scientific America had a good article on creativity:
[http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=how-to-unleash-your-
crea...](http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=how-to-unleash-your-
creativity&print=true)

Brief guidelines for creativity:

1\. Get a good system for capturing and preserving new ideas without judging
their merits.

2\. Challenge yourself. Challenging problems will force you to use more
diverse skills.

3\. Learn. Become skilled in more than one area.

4\. Manage your physical and social surroundings. Get to know a diverse set of
people. Make sure your day is filled with interesting and novel things.

------
ganley
Just produce. A lot. It's hard to produce original work in a medium without
first mastering the medium itself. There's an old chestnut about the pottery
class in which half was graded on quality and the other on quantity; in the
end, the quantity half produced better work. Picasso's early work, while
technically good, was pretty run-of-the-mill as far originality.

Also, as some other commenters have said, expose yourself to as much different
stimulus as possible. If you're not an out-of-the-box thinker, this serves to
make your box bigger.

------
KentBeck
My experience is that I am often creative but I am inconsistent in my follow
through. When I get an odd idea, at my best I just try it. That makes me more
likely to have another odd idea, and if I try that the cycle accelerates. If
instead I listen to The Editor and get back to the humdrum, the cycle runs in
reverse: fewer ideas, less follow through, fewer ideas. So I think,
paradoxically, that action is the key to creativity. It's not the ideas, it's
what you do with them.

------
spaghetti
Solving algorithm puzzles helps a lot for general creativity. I think the most
important thing to understand and embrace when being creative is: a lot of
people will not understand/like/approve of your creative efforts. Do NOT let
this get you down or discourage you. Enjoy being creative simply because it's
fun. Don't think about the opinions of other people!

------
jyothi
Have a lot of peace, smile - be happy then pump in a lot of passion, get
excited and just think how to make things better.

------
DarkShikari
I wrote a post here:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/862en/you_and_your_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/862en/you_and_your_research_a_lecture_on_how_to_win_a/c08clzk)

that, IMO, somewhat explains how "creativity" comes about--how seemingly great
ideas come out of nothing (or do they?).

------
csomar
Creativity needs to think: Good Learning and practicing.

It's simple, if you want to write English, then first you should learn the
basics of grammar and spelling. Next, depth learning, like reading articles on
news papers or blogs. Finally practicing like writing on own blog or on
forums.

------
csomar
Creativity needs to think: Good Learning and practicing.

It's simple, if you want to write English, then first you should learn the
basics of grammar and spelling. Next, depth learning, like reading articles on
news papers or blogs. Finally practicing like writing on own blog or on
forums.

------
HeyLaughingBoy
It may be difficult to teach, but it's not hard to learn.

1) Hang around other creative people

2) Do stuff. Just try to build something, don't be afraid of failing. Some
people get together for "bad art nights"

3) I am always inspired when I visit museums, galleries, etc. It just makes me
want to do _something_

------
ambulatorybird
I believe Einstein once said, "The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide
your sources."

------
kwamenum86
Go against the grain. Look for beauty in unusual places and you will find
untold riches.

~~~
erlanger
Hunan King tonight?

~~~
kwamenum86
That is how I come up with interesting ideas.

------
wensing
Give yourself a chance to have an original thought--dramatically reduce or
eliminate TV, and at least temporarily cut out 90% of the music you listen to.
You'd be surprised how stuck in a rut you are until you try it.

------
tokenadult
_I overheard an MIT admissions representative_

When was this? Undergraduate admissions?

~~~
quizbiz
Yes, an undergraduate admissions booth at a robotics conference.

------
josefresco
Get happy and optimistic. Creativity comes to me when I'm feeling good about
life and my future. Pessimism and slacking creeps in when I'm down and feeling
negative about past/future events.

------
rjurney
Feed your muse by consuming creative things, and then repetition.

------
gcheong
Be widely read, dabble in a lot of different things and always look for
opportunities to apply solutions from one field to problems in another field.

------
brianto2010
Be around creative people. Participate alongside them.

------
braindead_in
Dissect things which appeal to you. Break down the elements. Get to the root
of it. Learn from them. Most importantly keep it simple.

------
jpedrosa
Over produce according to one's own standards. ;-)

Keep pushing.

~~~
qaexl
Keep pushing won't make you more creative. Sometimes, it keeps you from
becoming inspired. If anything, you _stop_ pushing.

------
wenbert
I think you would have to change your mindset, the way you think etc.

------
jpwagner
Learn to re-define problem statements!

------
stevenjames
Apply your imagination.

------
cb33
think different

------
erlanger
You can't learn creativity, but you can keep it in good shape. It has plenty
to do with social inhibitions as well. With a tendency to question others'
ideas and to trust yourself comes creativity. Here's a start: Be more creative
than to ask others for this answer.

