7 steps of creative thinking: Raphael DiLuzio at TEDxDirigo

whoa thank you I'm going to be talking today about things lost and things discovered I'll also be talking about demystifying the creative process to start I have to begin with a little background story in a question how many of you have suffered one great loss or another in your lives okay it's a roomful well we are told that were not defined by the loss but we're defined by how we respond to it and that holds true for all so things that happen to us that are good it's not the events that happen to us but it's about how we respond to those events I am recovering from what they call a post concussive condition I had nine concussions which is a few too many in my life I think after the age of 10 you're only supposed to have three and people have to collect something so why not collect concussions but with concussions um when you recover from it they call it post concussive disorder and many of the boys that are girls and girls that are coming back from overseas are suffering from something similar called post concussive disorder which were just beginning to find out about um mine happened in 2008 I was hit by a 18-wheel truck that decided to park in the back seat of my car a bad parking spot and when I came out of the accident about a week later I lost a lot of things um one of the things I lost was my ability to talk and my ability to remember who I was which may have been a good thing um I was told I'm much nicer now since the accident I'm not sure how to take that from my best friend's um also I lost a superpower when I was a little child I started drawing and I start started studying art at the of nine and was formally trained and could literally draw anything both in my head and in front of me and after the accident my hand would just go like this my doctor also told me that I would never get my higher words back which was upsetting as a professor and that it would take ten years before I could teach her recover and I'll start tomorrow teaching the university that I taught at allowed me to teach one course my students were really lovely in letting me come in but in order to do that I had to learn how to talk again and I wasn't really sure what to do because they were going to wait six months before giving me speech therapy they like your brain to settle one night before going to bed I had a sudden little flash of an idea a little Eureka moment which I'll talk about those in a second I thought of reading the New York Times newspaper listening to the audio edition of it and recording myself and watching myself over and over to retrain myself to talk and I did that and my girlfriends to my girlfriends dismay over and over and over and over one word at a time one sentence at a time until I could talk and by the time I went to speech therapy they said you're doing quite well what'd you do and I told them they said well how did you figure that out I said I don't know I just came up with this idea and I want to talk to you about that process of coming up with ideas before the accident people used to ask me if I was an artist and I thought being called an hour artist was pretentious and I used to say no I'm a painter as if that has any less pretension and I real I thought that because I was defining myself as a painter I wasn't attaching my creative process in the same way which I thought was this thing that came from this mysterious place and I thought that by not being an artist and just being a painter it was more like a blue collar worker somehow and my creative process was more like that but I didn't really understand it and I be to study it and investigated a little bit and oddly the things that came back to me in memory after the accident were things from way before the accident in my studies of the creative process one of the things I came across from Plato was the dialogue the theaetetus that talks about the seven stages of philosophical midwifery and in early 1990s I met Murray Gelman a Nobel laureate physicist who was doing research and creativity at the Institute and they discovered seven processes in creativity - and I'm going to share those with you the the fifth stage of the creative process which I'll talk to them out of order but since the brain injury I can't really count so it's okay the fifth stage is that Eureka moment and that Eureka moment is very important how many of you have a little flash of an idea before you go to bed or when you wake up in the morning or while you're driving we have little flashes of ideas whether it's a song or how to fix something or how to overcome some problem at a job these little flashes are very important these are our Eureka moments and when we have these how many of you jumped out of the bed in the middle of winter and write those down or pull your car over not do it while you're driving because you'll run into me and then I'll get my tenth concussion and write these ideas down these ideas are very important and we often don't realize how important they are to us and it's not that we don't believe in ourself but we don't believe in the validity of these little ideas these little moments this fifth stage but these are important and these are important to write down so you can get to the first stage now the first stage and the creative process is just forming a question or an idea or a problem so if you don't have one of those little Eureka moments then you can begin at the first stage and try and come up with an idea or a question or perhaps you're at work and you're your boss has a question or a problem or there's a difficult situation you have to overcome at in in in at your work again or if you're working in school many of us have many problems at school students have to go through every day being given challenges but you take these problems and you form a question around them you try to frame a question and then what you do is you engage in the process of research and research comes second nature to us think about when you give a child a rattle the first thing they do in their research is stick it in their mouth actually anything goes in a little baby's mouth that's a process of research and engaging the world we're curious creatures we do this by Nature and research can manifest itself in many different ways you can as an artist look at things and look at different visual things and sketch them if you're a chef you taste and smell things but what you do is you go into the world and you experience the world and gather information from the world around that question do you form now the third stage is very interesting I call it the bosta stage the Italian stage where you say enough is enough you can research for a long time you can be at 20,000 feet where you're looking out over everything and seeing just the generalities of it or you can be down in the weeds lost in the particulars and we can research to death on things so you have to know when to say enough is enough and as students is some of your students you don't get that choice because you have these deadlines and then comes the fourth stage and this is a very important stage this is and I say that about every stage I have a friend who's got this little daughter over in Germany she says Raphael what's your favorite thing and I name three she goes you can have only one favorite I said I'm lucky I get more than one so the next most important thing is the fourth stage and this stage is a stage of gestation where you hold that question now in this stage there's three activities that can occur that are part of the creative process when you hold the question you enter into a state of detachment when I was 16 I studied um Zen Buddhism I grew up in Southern California I was a little weird at a sensory deprivation tank in my garage that I went into every night instead of sleeping very different lifestyle than main but from 16 to 25 I went to a Zen Center and studied Zen Buddhism and one of the things you do in Rinzai Zen is you get koans study where the Roshi gives you an impossible question one that no from almost every movie and TV show is what is the sound of one hand clapping or how do you manifest your buddha-nature at this sound these are questions that can't be answered in logic we call these wicked questions not a main thing which are questions that are very informal they can't be answered very directly one way or another but they have multiple answers and the idea is to hold on to these questions and keep them in the back your mind and do a divergent behavior something different go sweep go mow anything else it's important to do that or think of other things another thing is to while you're holding that question approach the question through metaphor if you're working on a mathematical equation ask yourself what that equation would look like if it were a tree how would it be if it were a herd of geese things that are so crazy and might seem so far away from the question that they'll take you to a new place now artists do this all the time because we operate with this kind of fearlessness of imagination and there's these two worlds that have to come together we all live in the world of operations the day-to-day world where we have to do all our organizational life putting toothbrush and toothpaste together going to work punching the time clock which I don't think they have anymore driving to and fro and all these operations draw us away from our true nature which is our inventive nature they say that Nate necessity is a mother of invention but I really think that invention is second it's second nature to us it's a very primal aspect of our being and our inventive nature comes through our imagination and our world of imagination is very important so you have this world of operations over here the day-to-day world then you have this world of daydreaming and imagination and you don't want to do this too much because people will slap you and say hey wake up stop daydreaming but it's important to do that because you have to go away from this world of operations and through divergent behavior or through metaphor imagine and think of things differently visualize the problem imagine what that calculation might look like imagine what that thing that answer you have might seem like if it were something else and mesh these two worlds together we call in science the world of empiricism and an artists intuition and you have to weave the fabric of both together and in doing so you can get to again the most important stage the fifth stage the Eureka moment the big Eureka where you get the idea again but now you have an answer to it and then comes the six stages where a lot of people fail and that's the process of making when challenged with having a good idea and bringing it into being or birth actually making it is very difficult for us because we're afraid of failure we're afraid that it won't look good we're afraid that people won't like it or us and you have to operate without fear you have to accept that you might fail in in fact failure might actually be good I tell my students I'd rather have eloquent failure than boring success and this failure is really important or this success that you have but if you don't know how to make the thing let's say you've imagined a new process for renewable and your energy but you're like me you're just a dumb painter well then you get people around you that can help you make that thing or if you can't find them you write it down you describe it in detail so eventually you can either patent the idea which is always a good thing or you can find the people who can help you bring that idea into being but it's important to remember that we have to bring these ideas out we have to share these ideas because if we don't then the world doesn't move forward we don't innovate and we don't create and the last most important stage I keep saying that is the stage of testing and criticism or when we share things when we bring them into the world in the world of science is testing in art in criticism in the real world it's just sharing and asking what people think and not being afraid whether people like it or they don't like it whether you've made something that's wonderful or in the theaetetus what they call a wind egg which is a philosophical platonic word for a fart they call it a wind egg sounds better in the Greek but this idea of bringing things into the world is really important and very critical so I sort of want to kind of go back over these to make sure we understand everything there's seven stages in this creative process and these stages do not come in any particular order but you have to learn to recognize these stages the more that you recognize them the more that you'll be able to enter in and out of them fluidly so it's not like you start in one and now I'm going to - and now I'm going to three but allow yourself to maybe journal and keep track of when you're in the state of research when you're in the state of gestation I have my students write down the feeling states that happen while they're around it how do you emotionally feel when you get a great idea or when you pop into an idea or when you've researched so much your brain is just exhausted keep track of those feelings the other thing is that when you're in these states and especially the fifth state these little Eureka moments capture these ideas don't think that they're worthless I've had some really crazy ideas I was in Chicago 15 years ago at which University was it the Chicago Institute of Technology and this german doctor professor Epps called me upstairs because they were going to hire their first artist he goes why would we hire an artist what can you invent or imagine I said I don't know what about a cell phone data projector now this is way before we had the technology and he said absolutely impossible that's a dumb idea can get that small the battery power blah blah blah blah blah when the first white paper was released by this and by the way I wrote the idea down and sent it to Nokia Samsung I'm not taking credit for it but I sent that idea out into the world but when the first white paper came out I sent it to dr. Epps I said crazy idea huh these ideas are really important that we have and we don't know how valid they are or how invalid but what is important is to know to keep them to make them and to share them so I ask you before I leave the most important thing that you take away from this talk is to value your ideas and be fearless in your ability to bring them in the world and make them and share them with one thank you very much

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 507,868

Keywords: Maine, tedx, USA, tedx talk, ted talks, ted x, TEDxDirigo, English, Rafael diLuzio, United States, artist, tedx talks, ted, ted talk

Id: MRD-4Tz60KE

Length: 15min 33sec (933 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 28 2012