The Key to Creativity? Expanding Your Mindset
Creativity thrives on knowledge expansion. Learn how exploring new ideas and experiences can fuel innovation and help you grow as a creative thinker.
Hey Friends! Spring break is over in the teaching world. That means senioritis is just around the corner. Don’t forget your weekly dose of creative inspiration to stave it off.
Action Bias
Wikipedia defines action bias as:
…the psychological phenomenon where people tend to favor action over inaction, even when there is no indication that doing so would point towards a better result.
In fields like medicine and politics and roles like leadership and management, the consequences of action bias can be adverse. Sometimes, the status quo is preferred and change for its own sake counterproductive. New initiatives that lack purpose and direction can be discouraging to employees and confusing to stakeholders.
In creative endeavors, the opposite is often true. Too often projects never get off the ground for fear of making the wrong decision. When you birth something from nothing, it’s nearly impossible to predict all of the downstream consequences of any one decision. Still, that decision needs to be made.
I’ve found that in fiction writing, even when I’ve plotted out a storyline, I never know how the story will take shape until I actually start writing. If I waited until I was sure of every detail, I’d never write at all.
It’s less about making the right decision than it is about making that decision right. What sets the novice apart from the master has to do with how the master responds to the mistakes that they make. The best learn from them and develop techniques to disguise the fact that they ever happened or better yet turn those mistakes into features.
Thus, the individual who steps up, takes action, makes mistakes, and overcomes them improves faster and produces more than those who are paralyzed by the fear of the consequences of their actions.
I possess a bias towards action.
I can’t always see my destination before I start my journey, but I move onward nonetheless and find joy in the journey.
Takeaway: It’s rare to manifest the vision in your mind’s eye exactly as you see it. Don’t let that stop you from making something else that’s equally great. No one else will ever know the difference.
Invisible Growth
There’s a great nature center near my home that features a glass-walled exhibit of prairie flower root systems (I bet you didn’t see that sentence coming). Tap roots, as they’re called, found in wildflowers and shrubs like purple coneflower and prairie dock, can reach depths of 10 feet or more, enabling the plant to reach and store nutrients deep in the soil during times of drought.
The root system is significantly larger than the above-surface plant. I was reminded of the exhibit when I saw the visual below from Mélodie TLD that features three plants of equal height with progressively large roots labeled “Growth is not always visible.”
See the original below.
Creative skill acquisition is sometimes like this. In logo design, for example, two designers of vastly different skill levels might produce something of equal quality at the surface level. What would differentiate the two designs, however, is the designer’s ability to justify their creative decisions.
The novice might justify their logo by saying something like, “It looks cool,” and that might be true, but the expert’s justification would be rooted in a much deeper rationale including factors like:
Foundational Strategy – Informed by brand research, history, and context.
Visual Simplicity – Striking yet minimal designs, free from clutter and unnecessary complexity.
Typography & Color Theory – Thoughtful choices that evoke specific emotional responses.
Symbolism – Layers of meaning embedded in the design, like the hidden 31 in the Baskin-Robbins logo, a nod to their original 31 flavors.
Execution – Precision in spacing, alignment, and proportion, ensuring a polished final product.
Future-Proofing – A timeless design that remains relevant over the years.
In short, the creative who has grown more will possess a depth to their work far greater than the novice who produces only surface-level output.
Takeaway: It’s often more instructive to discuss process than product when vetting a creative partner.
Type A vs Type B Fun
A friend of mine, Eric Lillstrom, once introduced me to the idea of Type A vs. Type B Fun. For reference, Eric leads expeditions to the North Pole, has circumnavigated the island of Crete in a sea kayak, and competed in the Eco Challenge Fiji, which is known as the world’s toughest race. He’s kind of a badass.
Eric explained, Type A Fun is fun in the moment: going on a roller coaster, for example. Type B Fun is fun only after the fact: like participating in strenuous endurance activities.
Engaging in creative work can fall into both of these categories. As a kid, I hated writing. I never knew what to say. I had low confidence in my word choice. I could barely string a sentence together, and I was an awful speller. Memories of staring at the flashing cursor of an empty Word Document are etched into my brain. To me, writing was Type C: not fun in the moment or in retrospect.
Somewhere along the line, that all changed—probably around high school when I connected with a teacher who helped me find my voice as a writer. She helped me break the mold of the academic five-paragraph essay and write like I spoke and thought, providing just the right encouragement. Thanks Mrs. Owens.
Writing was still hard at this point, but afterward, I enjoyed that I had done it. It became Type B fun.
Through college and grad school, I got better at writing, so it became less of a burden, but I was rarely proud of anything I actually wrote. Writing was simply a means to an end with that end being a degree.
Today, writing is both Type A and B fun. I write about what I want. I actually enjoy the process while I’m doing it, and I enjoy it after the fact.
Takeaway: We aren’t static creatures. As we grow and evolve, our preferences and interests change. It took me roughly 40 years to discover a love for crafting prose. Perhaps something you once despised could be the thing you look forward to most.
Imitation Precedes Creation
In Stephen King’s On Writing, he states:
“Imitation precedes creation.”
In three words, he summed up a fundamental truth about creativity—especially in artistic endeavors. Before you’re able to produce anything that is both original and meaningful, you tend to mimic those who inspired you to pursue your creative work in the first place.
Musicians almost universally start out by covering songs before writing their own. Even successful original singer/songwriters find success covering others: Jeff Buckley’s cover of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah comes to mind.
Eventually, the mimicry of your varied influences merges into something distinctly yours, though traces of your early influences often echo through your body of work. Over time, small personal choices, whether a guitarist's unique phrasing, a singer's tone of voice, or a writer’s rhythm and word choice, transform imitation into something uniquely their own.
Takeaway: If your creative efforts feel like imitations of your heroes, try to remember that your heroes too likely imitated theirs.
Expand Your Mind
The thumbnail in the video below is quite something. The title is pure clickbait, I’m not sure why the guy in it doesn’t smile, and you’d be forgiven if you were to get lost in his selectively colored eyes. Fortunately, the content inside the video is actually pretty interesting.
At 2 minutes and 13 seconds, YouTuber and entrepreneur Dan Koe says this about creativity:
Creativity is dependent on the expansion of your mind… through education and exposing myself to the unknown, I registered new opportunities to solve my own problem.
This serves as a good reminder that if you’re seeking a different outcome, you may first need a different input. By increasing both your breadth and depth of knowledge, you exponentially increase the number of connections that could be formed between that knowledge.
You never know what might result from chasing curiosity down different rabbit holes. Each time you do, you position yourself for something new.
Innovations rarely instantiate from nothing. They evolve over time through remixing and reconstituting available ingredients into new recipes. Expanding your understanding of the available ingredients increases both the quantity and, generally, the quality of the recipes you can prepare.
Koe’s quote underscores the importance of intellectual expansion for creativity, which resonates with a well-known saying often misattributed to Albert Einstein, regarding insanity, which is defined as:
Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Whether or not Einstein actually said it, the idea holds true. Just as repetition in action leads to stagnation, so too does repetition in thought.
Takeaway: If you’re hoping to move in a new creative direction or innovate in a domain, you cannot do what you’ve always done. You must first grow.
One More Thing
Good things are better when shared. If you liked this, it would mean the world to me if you sent it to someone who might like it too.
I’ll see you in your inbox again next week.
Until then,
-Mike
Hey Mike, it’s your FIL. This is one of your best Friday blogs to date, at least the most interesting and relevant to me!
On a separate and personal note, thanks to you and your other half for helping me out on the Amazon Jack and James choices, see you at the festivities and time permitting I’d like a quick tour of your guitar project!