Art is hard. Creative insights are hard to predict, and just when it gets difficult, your mind immediately jumps to a distraction: something easier to do, an excuse, a scapegoat.
Art is hard. Creative insights are hard to predict, and just when it gets difficult, your mind immediately jumps to a distraction: something easier to do, an excuse, a scapegoat.
To get the most out of your creative energy, carve out space for creative work. To make that space, you need to make space for the other types of work, too. The key to this is understanding how creative insights happen.
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In 1891, German scientist Hermann von Helmholtz—whose accomplishments included inventing the ophthalmoscope—was honored with a party for his 70th birthday. He got up to make a speech, and shared how he achieved his creative insights:
Often … [ideas] arrived suddenly, without any effort on my part, like an inspiration.… They never came to a fatigued brain and never at the writing desk. It was always necessary, first of all, that I should have turned my problem over on all sides to such an extent that I had all its angles and complexities “in my head.” … Then … there must come an hour of complete physical freshness and quiet well-being, before the good ideas arrived. Often they were there in the morning when I first awoke.… But they liked especially to make their appearance while I was taking an easy walk over wooded hills in sunny weather.
Thirty-five years later, social psychologist Graham Wallas cited Helmholtz’s speech, and proposed four “stages of control”: Preparation, Incubation, Illumination, and Verification.
These four stages have been cited in thousands of research papers on creativity. As neuroscientists Mark Beeman and John Kounios wrote in their book The Eureka Factor, Helmholtz’s observations still stand up more than 120 years later. The unconscious mind “Incubates” the information collected, and finds connections that lead to “Illumination.”
The mistake most people make when trying to do creative work is they don’t work according to the stages of thought that lead to creative insights. We sit down and try to write a blog post or a novel, or just daydream about starting a YouTube channel. But then we just get overwhelmed.
There’s always a distraction within reach. It’s more satisfying in the short term to check our email, or sit on the couch and watch Netflix $NFLX.
But if you work with these stages, creative insights can come more easily, with less discomfort. You can work with the ebbs and flows of your creative energy so that you work like a perpetual motion machine—each action feeding the next, and your energy being replenished before it’s drained.
If you arrange your creative work according to these seven categories, you can ease creative insights through the four stages of control. You can avoid getting blocked, and avoid getting distracted or burnt out.
In a perfect world, you’d know exactly what time of day, and exactly what time of week your energy is ideal for each of these seven categories of creative work. By focusing on one category at a time, you would keep yourself from procrastinating.
You could write a rough draft of your novel (or Generate), confident that you’d eventually get the dialogue right for 1890’s England (which you would later Research). You wouldn’t get distracted when you suddenly remembered that you were almost out of hand soap, because you’d know you’d get it taken care of at another time (or Administrate).
In reality, implementing these categories is an ongoing process. Start by protecting a tiny bit of time to Generate. Then, as that crack grows, arrange the other pieces of your life and work to serve the best use of your creative energy.
Once you’ve grown through these three stages—the creative habit, taking time to Prioritize, and resting with a purpose—other elements should start falling into place. You’ll get a feel for when your energy is right for Researching or Polishing, and you’ll establish a system for keeping Administrative details from interfering with your best work.
With enough practice, you’ll fall into your ideal week, and you’ll be able to boost your creative output without burning out, or getting off-track from distractions.
Doing creative work can feel like banging your head against solid stone. But if you manage your energy for persistence, and recognize the stages of creative insights, you can find the rhythm that would carve a tiny crack of creativity into The Grand Canyon.
