On Creative Persistence
About 13 years ago, I took an advanced writing for television masters course with Kimberly Costello and she gave me some advice that felt unintuitive at the time: if you have a big reveal or twist you think belongs in a season finale, put it in the pilot. Don’t hold anything back, just put it out there.
Part of this makes sense because when you are pitching, you really want to impress the decision-makers and get them involved. But the fear then is, where do you go from there?
This is something that all creatives fear: What if this is my last good idea?
Fortunately, this fear is unfounded. What you have come up with is actually your first good idea. You need to keep going.
The Evidence:
While I was doing research for my book, I came across this interesting tidbit from Wendy Wood’s Good Habits, Bad Habits: When we force ourselves to be persistent beyond our initial good ideas, we become more creative. This is based on the fact that we severely underestimate the connection between persistence and creativity.
In one example outlined in the book, professional improvisers were given a situation and had four minutes to generate as many ideas as possible. When asked how many more they thought they could come up with if given another four minutes, most assumed it would be fewer than the first round. In reality, they generated about 20 percent more ideas in the second round.
I tried this out with Seth where I asked him to come up with as many solutions as he could for an issue he was having at work. When he seemed to run out, I told him he had 5 minutes to come up with three more. He came up with six excellent, high-impact ideas.
In similar studies, students were asked to estimate how strong their output would be after an initial period of productivity. Again, they underestimated themselves. When they were explicitly instructed to persist, they produced more work than they did initially, and independent reviewers judged this later work to be higher quality and more creative.
Crazy, right?
How to take this forward:
Start framing creativity as a habit instead of an action. Habits are automatic actions we repeat often. That means they use a different kind of energy and cognitive load than our intentional actions. Habits are what we fall back on when we are tired, exhausted or just not thinking too hard.
Understanding this allows us to update some expectations: our creativity is only limited by our persistence. So, the next time you feel stuck, set a timer and push for five more minutes. Once you start circling back to your old ideas, that’s usually the signal that you’ve done the work.
Have you practiced persistence? I’d love to hear about it.
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