Cliff Notes: Creativity: A Short & Cheerful Guide by John Cleese

Introduction

By Creativity, I simply mean new ways of thinking about things. Whenever you can find a way of doing things that is better than what has been done before, you are being creative.
Another myth is that Creativity is something you have to born with. This isn't the case. Anyone can be creative.
And you can teach Creativity. Or perhaps I should say, more accurately, you can teach people how to create circumstances in which they will be more creative.

The Creative Mindset

This is how I began to discover that, if I put the work in before going to bed, I often had a little creative idea overnight, which fixed whatever problem it was that I was trying to deal with. It was like a gift, a reward for all my wrestling with the puzzle. I began to think to myself, ‘it can only be that while I'm asleep, my mind goes on working at the problem so that it can give me the answer in the morning.’
Chewing this over, I realised it was like the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon: when you can't remember a name, and you chase after it in your mind, and find that you just cannot recall it…..and then a few moments later, when you are thinking about something else, the name pops into your mind. Clearly, your brain was still working on it even after you’d given up.
So I began to realise that my unconscious was working on stuff all the time, without my being consciously aware of it .
The same applies to speaking. You use words the whole time without having the slightest idea how they happen to pop into your head. We’ve no idea. It’s literally an unconscious process.
Now, think of the really skilful things that you can do without conscious effort. Like driving, or even more complex things like playing the piano. When someone is doing that, they are not consciously thinking which key they have to hit with which finger; their sub-conscious knows how to do that, but that is only because they practise and practise and practise. It is the same in sports, for golfers, tennis players and cricketers, their abilities become effortless in the sense that no mental input is required.
This intelligent unconscious of ours, then, is astoundingly powerful. It allows us to perform most of our tasks in life without requiring us to concentrate on them. Without it, we couldn't function at all; there’d be too much to think about.
But, that doesn't mean that our intelligent unconscious behaves in an entirely predictable way. It is unconscious - you can't order it about or hit it with a stick. You have to coax it out in all sorts of strange and crafty ways. And, then we have to be clever about interpreting what is does tell you. In other words, you can't ask your unconscious a question, and expect a direct answer - a neat, tidy little verbal message. This is because, your unconscious communicates it's knowledge to you solely through the language of the unconscious. The language of the unconscious is not verbal. It is the language of dreams, it shows you images, it gives you feelings, it nudges you around without you knowing what it's getting at.

Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind

Schools teach us to think logically, analytically and verbally; while this way of thinking is absolutely right for solving certain kinds of problems, it's no good at all for other kinds.

Hare brain thinking is the one that employs a way of knowing that relies on reason and logic on deliberate conscious thinking. The other kind of thinking is the one that is done by the Tortoise Mind; it proceeds more slowly, is ofter less purposeful and clear-cut, more playful, leisurely or dreamy. In this mode we are ruminating or mulling things over, being contemplative or meditative. We are pondering a problem, rather than earnestly trying to solve it.
More importantly, the leisurely Tortoise Mind, for all it's aimlessness is just as intelligent as the much faster Hare Brain. This type of intelligence is associated with what we call Creativity, or even Wisdom.
The Creative Mind, knows how to play the game, and they always deferred decision-making for as long as they were allowed.
Knowing how to play means to get enjoyably absorbed in a puzzle, not just try to solve it so that you an get on to the next problem, but to become really curious about it for it's own sake. For the most part it involves exploring, not knowing where they're going, and not caring either. Since the play has no defined purpose, there is no anxiety.
Deferring decision-making means that Creative people are able to tolerate that vague sense of discomfort that we all feel, when some important decision is left open, because they know that an answer will eventually present itself. So, if an important decision has to be made, the first question to be asked is: ‘When does this decision have to be made?’ If you can wait longer to take a decision, two important things happen: (a) you may get new information and (b) you may get a new idea. So, why take a decision when you don't need to? It does lead to discomfort, and the creative kinds are much better at tolerating the vague sense of worry that we all get when we leave something unresolved.
The greatest killer of creativity is interruption. It pulls your mind away from what you want to be thinking about. Research shows that, after an interruption, it can take eight minutes for you to return to your previous state of consciousness, and up to twenty minutes to get back into a state of deep focus.
Interruptions can be from outside, like someone coming over and talking to you, or an email, or suddenly remembering something that you've forgotten to do, or worry that time is running out.
The biggest interruptions coming from your inside is caused by your worrying about making a mistake. This can paralyse you; you say to yourself, I mustn't think that because it might be wrong.
When you’re being creative, just remember there is no such thing as a mistake. The reason is that you can't possibly know if you’re going down a wrong avenue until you've gone down it. So, if you've an idea, you must follow your line of thought to the end to see whether it’s likely to be useful or not. You must explore, without necessarily knowing where you’re going. As Einstein once pointed out, if we know what we’re doing when we’re investigating something, then it's not research.
In order to resolve such interruptions, whether internal or external, so that you can enter your Tortoise Mind, you have to create a safe place, where you can play. This involves first creating boundaries of space, and then boundaries of time. You create boundaries of space to stop others interrupting you. You create boundaries of time, by arranging for a specific period, to preserve your boundaries of space.
You will find that the first time you actually sit still, your head is full of silly little thoughts and worries. As Hindus say, the mind is like a chattering, drunken monkey. On and on, and all completely trivial and uninvited. If you’re strong minded you can overcome these thoughts. If not, write them down straight away on a yellow sticky note on your desk, and then forget about them. Once you start chasing away any distracting thoughts, you'll discover, just like meditation, that the longer you sit there, the more your mind slows and calms down and settles. Once that starts to happen you can begin to focus on the problem you've chosen to think about.
Once you just sit there and, eventually, as the mind quietens, odd ideas and notions relevant to your puzzle start popping in your mind, but they are….odd! And the reason they seem odd is that they’re not what our usual logical, critical, analytical mind is used to. They don't arrive in the form of words, in neatly typed little sentences. Because they come from your unconscious, they speak the language of the unconscious.
Einstein had this to say on the subject of ideas: The words or the language as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be voluntarily reproduced and combined…..this combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought - before there is any connection with logical construction in words ot other kinds of signs which can be communicated to others.
The fact is that when you’re playing with images and feelings, you never know where a vital prompting might come from. So, when we’re in touch with our unconscious, it sends us hints and gentle nudges, and that’s why we have to be quiet. That’s why we’re practising a kind of meditation. Because, if we don't, if instead we are running around, there’s not a hope in hell that we’re going to notice the subtle messages we’re being sent.
Warning: When we’re trying to be creative, there’s a real lack of clarity during most of the process. Our rational, analytical mind, of course, loves clarity - in fact it worships it. But at the start of the creative process, things cannot be clear, they’re bound to be confusing. So much of our Tortoise Mind work takes place in an atmosphere of uncertainty and gentle confusion. And, remember that the Tortoise Mind will give you a new idea, but it might be a terrible one, or it might be brilliant. So, what you do at this point is to bring your critical, analytical, fact-seeking mind to assess it - your Hare Brain. It is important however that once you have a new idea, you don't get critical too soon. So, exercise patience until you have a clear sense of what it is that you've come up with, then you can bring in your Hare Brain, not before that.
In other words, you go backwards and forwards into your creative mode and your intellectual mode, from your Tortoise Mind to your Hare Brain all the time. This back and forth process is called Iteration; it's what creative people do all the time.
The Tortoise Mind and the Hare Brain need each other, but keep them separate.

Hints and Suggestions

You are most likely to be creative in an area that you already know and care about. When you start something creative for the first time, you have no idea what you are doing! But, whether youre writing or painting or composing a song, you do need to start with an idea. So, borrow an idea from someone you admire, an idea that appeals to you personally. Start working on that and make it your own as you play with it. You're learning, and learning from something or someone you admire is not stealing. It's called 'being influenced by'.
The anthropologist Gregory Bateson once said: 'You can't have a new idea till you've got rid of an old one'. Getting discouraged is a total waste of time.
Writing is easy, writing well is difficult. Brevity is the soul of the wit. It is also the soul of not boring people. So, after you've finished writing, cut anything that is not relevant, don't repeat yourself, unless it is deliberate.
Feeling creative isn't exactly an emotion, it's a frame of mind. But, if you're in the wrong frame of mind, if you're distracted or worrying about something, it follows that you're not going to be creative.
As a general rule, when people become absolutely certain that they know what they're doing, their creativity plummets. This is because they think they have nothing more to learn. Once they believe this, they stop learning and fall back on established patterns; it means they don't grow. The trouble is that most people want to be right. The very best people, however, want to know if they're right. In comedy, if the audience doesn't laugh, you know you've got it wrong.