Creativity as the Ultimate Form of Freedom
And how slow productivity wins the creative race
Introduction to Monthly Theme
Creativity is perhaps the ultimate form of freedom. It is about telling one’s story and giving life to one’s own imagination—Seeing something in the mind’s eye and then finding a way to give it breath and allow it to find its own footing in the world.
Creativity is fundamental to every aspect of our lives. We have to use it within our jobs, within our personal lives, in the things we think and say. Creativity is what gives color to the every day existence, and deep within us, we understand it allows us to flourish because when we are given the opportunity to be creative it allows us to leave a footprint of ourselves on the sands of time, even if for just a brief moment.
Steve Jobs once said creativity was simply the act of “connecting things.”
“To connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they've had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.”
It is through our own life experiences that we bring true creativity to life, taking our unique perspectives and bringing those to the world.
It is the self that rearranges these things. The most creative people don’t replicate, they make something no one else has seen, they are visionaries in ways only they see at first. And it is through their visions that they connect themselves to the world, and others to each other.
To put it simply, creativity is the bond that connects us to one another.
For the month of August, we’re exploring the theme of creativity—what it is, how we can harness it, and how it keeps us alive.
For many, creativity is a luxury.
Creativity today is the ability to think outside the box, to tackle the problem at hand with new and innovative solutions, or to showcase writing, painting, or another form of art.
But for the world, it is just a term used for a desire no one has time for.
Today, we’ve restricted our own creative outputs due to the jobs we work and the pressures of maximum productivity, the hurried nature of work, and the desire to maximize profits.
Unfortunately for both ourselves and those who consume the work we create, this means an ongoing problem of continuously back burning creativity for ways of performing a task as it was done in the past, doing this work as fast as we can, and offering a minimum viable products instead of long-term scalable solutions.
An obvious problem with this is that we decide to sidestep advancements that take time and instead choose fast and quick methods, profit over innovation, product over strategy.
We say we’ll fix it down the line, that we just need something. But when people move this fast, down the line never truly comes, and the foundation is nothing but a house of cards, waiting to fall with the slightest gust of wind.
In return, the company and shareholders, and potentially ourselves, are rewarded for the short term sacrifices on creativity rather than the long-term profits on it.
In his book, Slow Productivity, Cal Newport tackles this issue head on, stating:
“professional efforts should unfold at a more varied and humane pace, with hard periods counterbalanced by relaxation at many different timescales, and that a focus on impressive quality, not performative activity, should underpin everything.”
By focusing on short-term gains, the world short-changes itself on true innovation. If we look at some of the greatest accomplishments in history, they didn’t happen overnight, let alone in the same year. They take time to develop and it is through the ability to let creativity run wild that these ideas have an opportunity to flourish and grow, to become the life-changing ideas they were meant to become.
As Newport points out in his book, rather than just maximizing productivity, we need to maximize creativity, and that takes time and dedication to the craft at hand. As he wrote about in his other book So Good They Can’t Ignore You, Steve Martin spent years perfecting his standup act before he found any form of success.
Isaac Newton spent decades working on the problem that would eventually become gravity.
And more recently, Lin-Manuel Miranda spent countless years toiling away at various musical projects before Hamilton was conceived and could be launched into the international hit it became.
Creativity is the foundation for all of this. Yet, the time constraint of modern-day “success” did not play a role. Instead, it was the art of long-view creativity and its effects that eventually broke through.
Creativity does not necessarily flourish on our time scales, or the timescales of those external to us. It needs time to flourish. It needs oxygen to breath, effort to grow, and resilience to blossom.
It’s not always about speed and productivity. Sometimes in order to maximize long-term advancement, we need to put in the creative work over long stretches of time, hours upon hours of sifting through ideas, seeing what works and what doesn’t, and figuring out how to make the connections necessary for it to find success.
Creativity does this on its own timescale though. So to give it breath to flourish, we need to give it the time it needs.
Until next time,
D.A. DiGerolamo
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