MALE SPEAKER: Good afternoon,
everyone. And we're excited to have
you all here for another Outstanding Authors
at Google Event. And today we're going to
dispatch with the formalities and get straight to the point. Robert Green is here to talk
about his new book, "Mastery," so this is what happens after
you get the 10,000 hours, you get the 20,000 until
once you're a true expert at something. What does that mean, and
how you get there? So Robert will lead us along
that path, and we'll also have time for some Q&A at the end. So please join me in welcoming
Robert to Google. Thanks. [APPLAUSE] ROBERT GREENE: Thank you. I've been a huge admirer of your
company for many years. I've blogged about it, I've
compared Google to the French Revolution at Napoleon
Bonaparte, and your competitors to the Prussians. So you can imagine that I'm
deeply honored and very happy to be here. My talk is about creativity. I have a lot of, I
hope, practical information to convey. And I know how valuable your
time is, so please excuse me if I dispense with any cute
anecdotes to begin, and I just dive right into the
information part. Now, I'm sure that all of us,
or maybe most of us, have encountered more or less
the following scenario. We have a problem to solve, a
project to create or direct. Along the way to completing
this project, at certain junctures, we have to
make some decisions. We have to choose between A,
B, or C. Whether go in this direction, over here,
or over here. We do the best we can based on
our knowledge and experience. But often after the work is
done, we have the sensation that there's something
missing. That, perhaps, we could
have done it better. What if the answer or
the best decisions involved D, E, and F? Something that we never
even considered. What blocks or limits us from considering these wider options? We're all aware of great
historical figures who've indeed demonstrated the ability
to consider D, E, F, and beyond. This is the source of their
incredibly creative power to make uncanny discoveries or to
invent the kind of things that change how we think and act. We see examples of such people
around us in the world today. What makes some people more,
seemingly more, creative and imaginative than others? Is it genetics, a matter of
luck, is it being born into a great family, going to the
right school, et cetera? Well, in my book, "Mastery," I
attempt to definitively answer this question. I maintain that true creativity
comes through a process that I describe in
great detail in my book. To summarize it as briefly as
possible, this process begins with the critical first step
of choosing which field or subject to pursue. Creative people are those who
opt for career paths that mess with their deepest interests
and inclinations. They feel a deep personal need
to discover something about the world, to solve a problem
that perplexes them, to invent something that's simply
not there. Feeling personally engaged and
motivated in their work, they focus more, they learn faster,
they're more patient and persistent than other people. Having begun on the right career
path, the first step. The next step is to go through
an effective apprenticeship, absorbing all of the rules and
standard procedures in your field and accumulating the
maximum amount of skills. Now, I believe we all go through
an apprenticeship phase of one sort or another. And, at a certain point in this
phase, we reach a kind of turning point or crossroads. Either our minds will become
active and experimental with the knowledge that we have
accumulated, in which case we will slowly awaken
creative energy. Or we will become prisoners
of that knowledge. We remain conservative and
conventional, our minds just simply rotating between
A, B, or C. Well, masters are those who
take the first path. And after years of generating
creative energy, they reach a point where they
have a complete feel for their subject. They have internalized it,
they have mastered it. They can see all the way to
the end of the alphabet. So, in my talk today I want
to focus exclusively on creativity. And moving past that
ABC syndrome that stymies so many of us. I'm going to be assuming that
many or most of you have chosen career paths that mesh
with your deepest interests, that you've gone through
or nearly finished the apprenticeship phase, having
absorbed the necessary knowledge and accumulated
an array of skills. You're perhaps poised at that
turning point in which your minds could take the path
towards greater creative energy or you could settle for
the conventional route, never being aware of how that
settling is occurring. My goal in my talk
today is twofold. I want to convince you that the
human brain is a naturally creative instrument. It is designed for making
connections between ideas, for envisioning DEF and beyond. It wants to go in
that direction. Creativity is not a function
of some freakish genetic wiring that occurs in the
brains of a few people. It is instead the function of
awakening and exploiting the natural creative energy
we all possess. Second, I want to show you what
prevents many of us from taking this path towards greater
creative energy, how we blocked and inhibit
ourselves. In doing so, I'm going to be
revealing to you certain strategies that highly creative
people, past and present, have used to move past
these blocks and awaken that natural energy. My hope is that I will plant a
seed in your brain, that the ability to go past ABC is
already there, and with a few gentle indications of the right
direction you'll find your way there on your own,
if you haven't already found your way there. But before I discuss these
ideas, I want to involve you in a very short and
simple exercise. It's going to seem kind of
moronic, but the purpose of it will become clear soon enough. I'm going to be asking all of
you to close your eyes, and for the space of a
minute to try to completely empty your minds. Have no conscious thoughts,
no mental images, go totally blank. See if you can do this, and
what happens if you can't. I'm going to time it. A little gong will go off to
indicate that the minute is up, and then we'll discuss. OK? So, prepare yourselves
for a moment. It's going to be completely
silent. OK. Close your eyes. And begin. [GONG SOUNDING] Very good. OK. How many of you were able to
experience total emptiness, not a single mental image during
that entire minute? Come on, how many? You were? Are you a Zen master
or something? That's very good. For the majority of you who
couldn't, did any of you experience something like the
following scenario, where an image will suddenly pop up in
your mind of a person that you know, and that will lead to an
event that is associated with that person, and that event
will then lead to the [INAUDIBLE] image of another
person associated with that event, on and on and on. Any kind of links like
that going on in your brains, anybody? Uh huh. You don't have to share it
with us, I want you to embarrass yourself or anything,
but where did these images come from? Were you somehow consciously
controlling them in any way? AUDIENCE: It was stuff
on my to do list. ROBERT GREENE: There was stuff
from your to do list. Right. But were you consciously calling
them up or did they just come to you? AUDIENCE: They just
filled the void. ROBERT GREENE: Are these things
that come up in your mind totally random, or is there
some sort of apparent logic to it? Are they just totally random
images from anywhere? AUDIENCE: I think the logic
is [INAUDIBLE]. ROBERT GREENE: Right. But it's not the logic that
you have in your conscious daily life, right? OK. I happen to practice a form
of Zen meditation. I do it 30 minutes every
morning religiously. I've been doing it for close
to three years now. And even after that much
practice, I've noticed that it's nearly impossible for me
to still the conscious mind for more than a few minutes. Images keep bubbling up to the
surface which lead to all different kinds of chains
of connections. The deeper I go into my
meditation and the more I'm able to somewhat still the
conscious mind, the more bizarre and seemingly random
these associations are. Well, the reason I had you do
this simple exercise is to illustrate what I consider the
basic principle about the human brain. Its natural state is one
of constant motion and association. It's like a smooth ball bearing
at the top of an endless incline, unless it is
obstructed, unless it is made still, it will just keep
rolling and rolling and rolling until the day we die. It moves in constantly
shifting chains of connections, between ideas,
sensations, and memories, equally what we call the stream
of consciousness. The human brain is a dual
processing system in which any piece of information or
perception is instantly compared to another one in our
short or long term memory. To generate a sense of pattern
and continuity, or to take notice of things that don't
fit into these patterns. The brain functions through
comparison and association. If we are tired or about to
fall asleep, or even if we dream, we can suddenly become
aware of the most bizarre associations that are going on,
as if the brain were doing this on auto pilot below the
level of consciousness. In our daily conversations we
might make some joke or witty remark that is connected
to something that somebody just said. This connection, the source of
our joke or witticism would be impossible for us to trace
back because it occurs so naturally and so rapidly. Our conversations themselves
reflect this basic pattern. Endlessly shifting angles and
chains of connection building on what other people say. Well this is the brain
in its pure form. Never stopping, always
connecting. And by the way, that's sort of
why I think the internet is so addictive and engaging. It reflects this basic
pattern of the brain on a global scale. It's like a global brain. But this is so incredibly
natural to us. We only have to look
at children. Almost Instantly, acquiring a
basic vocabulary, at the age of three, they'll begin to
make the most interesting associations between
words and ideas. Their drawings can also bring
together the most unexpected and imaginative connections. In my book I call this mind
that children possess, "original mind." It is
marked by incredible fluidity and openness. But children do not create great
works of art, and they do not invent significant pieces
of technology, and they don't make discoveries
about the world. And neither do we when we
daydream, or dream, or make a joke, or change the subject
of a conversation. These are all examples of what I
call "low-level creativity." Exhibiting the natural
associating power of the human brain. But let us add to this natural
associating power of the human brain, something else. Years of study, practice, and
experiment within a field. With all of this experience, a
great deal of knowledge is stored in our long-term
memory. The brain has a much larger
range of information that it has access to. Much larger than anything
a child could play with. With all of this accumulated
knowledge and experience, the mind can roam about in this
vastly expanded cognitive space making all kinds of novel,
insightful associations between ideas over here,
and ideas over there. What we call creativity is
nothing more than the ability that some people cultivate to
search wider, to imagine more possibilities, to imagine more
connections, to associate what has never been associated
before. Namely, to go beyond
the A, B, and C. As an example of what I'm
talking about, I want to look at a particular discovery by
one of the most creative scientists who's ever lived,
the 19th century scientist Louis Pasteur. Pasteur was trained as a chemist
and mineralogist, but later in his career he became
fascinated with the subject of germs and bacteria. He studied them for years,
elaborating a radical new theory on how germs are created
and the role that they play in disease. After decades of study and
experiment on this field in his late 50s, he decided to
investigate the deadly disease of cholera. He wanted to figure out how
these germs operate, and what makes them so fatal. As part of his research, he
injected chickens with cholera and he observed how the
disease progressed. He needed to abandon work on
these experiments over one summer, but when he came back
to his lab he resumed them. And he once again injected some
cholera into a group of chickens, which we shall
call group A chickens. These chickens fell ill, but to
Pasteur's surprise, all of them survived. He surmised that the batch of
cholera that he had injected into them had become weakened
over the summer months. And so he ordered a new, fresh
batch of cholera and he proceeded to inject it once
again into the group A chickens, and to a new
collection of chickens which we shall call group
B chickens. All of the group B chickens
died, and all of the group A chickens survived. Now this phenomenon, which occur
totally by coincidence, it wasn't the purpose of his
experiment, this phenomenon had been noticed before. Over 100 years prior to
Pasteur's experiment, it had been the practice to inject
people with cow pox in order to prevent an outbreak
of smallpox. But nobody understood how or
why this worked, and it was simply limited to this
one disease. When Pasteur's group A chickens
survived, news of this incident came to all of
his eminent colleagues. And they basically all reacted
in the same way. Some of them said that the
difference between group A and group B chickens was merely a
coincidence, and that a larger sampling would reveal this. Still others ascribed the
differences to what the chickens had been exposed
to in their environment. A third group said they didn't
know how to explain it, maybe there'd be an explanation
someday, but this simply wasn't a significant enough
phenomenon to warrant any special attention or
some new theory. Well, Pasteur was different. He'd studied germs so intensely
and much longer than any of these other scientists. He understood their complexity
and how their behavior of these germs did not fit
into the simple theories of his time. He felt certain that the
difference between group A and group B chickens represented
something truly significant. As he pondered what had happened
in his laboratory, he entertained the wild,
seemingly irrational possibility that one set of
weakened germs still in the bodies of group A chickens could
potentially fight off another form of the
same germs. In other words, germs, illness, fighting against illness. Pasteur, in other words, had
connected two pieces of knowledge, of information,
that had never been connected before. We might take this concept
totally for granted, but decades before the discovery
of antibodies, this represented, this idea of germs
killing germs, illness fighting illness, represented
an incredible lead of imagination. A leap that was made possible
by simply the fact that Pasteur was willing and able
to entertain more possible theories and interpretations
than any of his fellow colleagues. Naturally, after entertaining
this hypothesis, he worked to verify it. And he then thereby created
the science of immunology. Well, this is an example of
what I call "high-level creativity." it is a function
of two critical elements. First, a great deal of knowledge
that is stored and organized in our long
term memory. And second, the willingness
and ability to roam freely through all of that knowledge. This second quality is what we
might call fluidity of mind. We notice this fluidity if we've
had a few drinks, or we take some drugs, or we saw
smoke some pot, or we're feeling extremely tired. Suddenly, it seems as if doors
are opened up, and our minds can move about more freely, and
they can come upon ideas, interesting ideas, that
eluded us before. Well, highly creative people do
not need this extra bit of stimulation. They have managed to retain or
rediscover that fluid original mind of the child, and wedded
it to all of this knowledge and experience, giving them what
I call the "dimensional mind." A mind capable of seeing
more dimensions of the visible and invisible
world around us. High-level creativity requires
these two elements. If you have an open and fluid
mind, but not enough knowledge and experience, you will
basically remain on the level of a child. If you have a lot of knowledge
and experience, but your mind is tight and unwilling to roam,
you will come up with the same conventional responses,
the same A, B, and C, like Pasteur's colleagues. Well, highly creative
people have both. They have the knowledge and
the experience, plus the mental fluidity which gives them
the ability to see more possibilities in the world
around them and to maximize, to realize to its fullest, the
natural connecting power of the human brain. The great psychologist Carl
Jung, he called this "serious play." The combination of the
playful exploratory spirit of the child, with the
serious tasks and experience of the adult. Now let me engage in a little
metaphor, or a symbol to sort of explain more fully the idea
I'm elaborating here. Imagine a relatively
small circle. This circle represents what we
know of our field when we begin our apprenticeship. As we proceed and accumulate
knowledge and experience, this circle keep slowly expanding,
increasing the cognitive space within which we can
explore and make connections between ideas. But as this base expands,
we confront a paradox and a challenge. Part of our apprenticeship
involves learning the rules, the standard operating
procedures, and the paradigms that prevail in our field. It also involves learning how to
work with other people, how to fit into the group ethos. When we begin work on a project
we feel the pressure, conscious or unconscious, to
adhere to these rules and paradigms, to follow
the procedures that other people follow. To break these rules and
conventions would entail a lot of risk. Probably a lot of criticism, and
certainly a lot more work. All of this tends to limit what
we consider and imagine. Instead of exploring that
expanding cognitive space, we unconsciously hold ourselves to
those A, B's, and C's that we have assimilated. We've become consummate
insiders, strict adherers to the rules and paradigms
in our field. Ideas in different parts
of our cognitive space are never connected. If we're not careful,
this establishes a momentum of its own. Once we turn conservative and
defensive with our knowledge, it becomes increasingly more
difficult to move in the opposite direction. Furthermore, the mind, like
any muscle, tends to tighten with age. This is why, in the history
of science and great technological innovation, so
many of the most significant discoveries of our people who
are relatively young, or who are outsiders to the field,
or who are both. This is the paradox. In order to have high-level
creativity, we have to assimilate a great deal
of knowledge. And that knowledge includes
rules and paradigms and conventions which make
us conservative. Highly creative people learn
the value of moving against this conservative tendency by
making their minds experiment and explore with their
increasing knowledge. Emerging from their
apprenticeships they may begin this on a relatively small
scale, but they slowly rediscover the original fluid
spirit of the child. They adopt certain strategies
to force the mind out of its conventional and conservative
and defensive positions. They learn how to loosen and
return the mind to its original fluidity. Instead of narrowing what they
consider as they get older, they find a way to continually
expand their horizons. I want to focus now on these
creative strategies that I've just mentioned. They form a large part of
chapter five in "Mastery." I want to focus on these
strategies in the form of four simple exercises that I believe
if you adopt somehow in your practice they will
slowly loosen up the mind and push it in this direction that
I'm talking about of greater creative energy. These exercises are
the following. Cultivate negative capability. Think like an outsider. Use active imagination. And finally, subvert your
patterns of thinking. This first exercise, cultivate
negative capability, is the most philosophical. And it basically involves an
attitude, a way of looking at the world, that will naturally
loosen up the mind. The term negative capability
comes from the great early 19th century poet and
writer John Keats. Keats was struggling to
understand what makes one person like a William
Shakespeare so much more creative and imaginative
than another. In his opinion, fear
and anxiety play a determining role. When we are physically
frightened by something in our environment we have
a particular physiological response. Our minds naturally narrow
their focus onto what is immediately present,
preparing us for a fight or flight response. Well, something similar happens,
although more subtly, in the intellectual realm. Where we are confronted with
new problems or set of circumstances, or when we begin
work on a project, we are unconsciously plagued by
insecurities and anxieties, and we don't like this. Mysteries, any apparent
contradiction, situations that are unfamiliar and ambiguous
and elude immediate understanding, all of this
makes us uneasy. Under these circumstances, we
are in a rush to come to a conclusion, to make
a judgment, to explain what is happening. Being able to make a judgment
or explain what is happening soothes our insecurities and
anxieties, makes us feel confident and consistent. We can express an opinion
before other people. In this way, our egos become
enmeshed in our creative work, in our interpretations
of the world. Think of how difficult it is for
us to admit that we don't know an answer, or that
we were wrong on a particular issue. Admitting that we don't know or
that we were wrong, should be a sign of intelligence, of
a questioning nature, of a willingness to reassess
our own ideas. Instead of that, we will hold
onto our ideas with double the tenacity if ever we are made to
feel doubtful or insecure about them. Well mysteries, uncertainties,
anything ambiguous, it all has a similar effect upon us as a
physically frightening set of circumstances. The mind tightens and narrows
its focus, a fearful reaction. According to Keats, the
Shakespeare's of the world, the highly creative types,
cultivate what he calls "negative capability."
They can negate the ego and it's anxieties. They are not in a rush to come
to a conclusion about the world or any new phenomenon. They are completely open to
entertaining this idea or that idea at the same time, while
continuing to observe what's going on around them. They can look at ambiguous or
contradictory evidence and not be disturbed or feel the need
to explain them away. This ability to withstand what
seems mysterious, to manage the lack of knowing something
with certainty, is the primary quality of all creative people
no matter their profession. Because they feel less anxious
and in need to rush to a conclusion, they consider more
possibilities when confronted with a problem which allows for
greater possibilities, a greater range of connections
and creative associations. Let me give you two examples
of negative capability in action, one in the arts and
the other in the sciences. The first example involves
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the composer. At a somewhat advanced part
in his career after he was famous, Mozart suddenly
discovered the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. And in looking at Bach's
elaborate counterpoint, he realized that this represented a
diametrically different, and even superior form of
music to his own. At least in its complexity. Now, the reaction that most
composers have would be to emotionally close them self off
from any uncertainty or doubts about their own music,
and to assert their own ideas and to make themselves imagine
that the music of Bach represented something old
fashioned or irrelevant. But Mozart possessed negative
capability. He could look at two
diametrically opposing forms of music at the same time
and not feel anxious. He could explore them and try to
synthesize the differences between them. He decided to spend a year
intensely studying Bach's counterpoint and finding a way
to incorporate it, which he later did with his operas,
creating a whole new style that revolutionized
music in the West. In physics, at a very early age,
at the age of 16, Albert Einstein was struck by the
paradox in the following thought experiment. A man standing on earth looking
at a light beam and the sky, and another man
theoretically moving at the speed of light alongside that
light beam in the sky, that both people would see that light
in exactly the same way in exactly the same form. That is what Maxwell's law on
the absolute speed of light necessitated, but how
could it be so? Certainly somebody moving at the
speed of light would see that light before it could
travel far enough to appear as light. In other words, he
would see it as electromagnetic particles. Well, for 10 long laborious
years, Einstein thought only of this paradox and thought
experiment. Without straining for quick
answers or simple conclusions, in a complete state of
negative capability, considering every possibility,
until it finally bore fruit with his theory of the
relativity in time and space. The special theory
of relativity. What possessing negative
capability will do for you is help you push past the
impatience and the anxiety that make you come to
conclusions too early on in the process. Here's how you could potentially
adopt negative capability in your life. First, you practice it on
a micro daily level. In your personal relationships,
you counter the tendency that we all have to
label and categorized the people that we encounter,
the people around us. Your goal is to judge these
people much less and to observe them more. People are infinitely complex
and they never fit into the little categories that we
have of their behavior. Your goal is to move inside
their prospective, try to see the world from their point of
view, to get a more nuanced and individualized sense
of who they are. This will instantly make you
less anxious, less judgmental, and more perceptive. Now, you apply this
to your work. Before you begin on a project, I
know it's difficult, but you throw out as many assumptions
as possible. It may be difficult, but you
open yourself up to other possible theories,
interpretations. The kinds of interpretations
and theories that you never usually entertain. You speculate and think about
the information in front of you, but you control that
constant desire to rush to some sort of conclusion. Third, and finally, you
learn to embrace uncertainty and chaos. Life is inherently chaotic
and it doesn't fit into our tidy formulas. Not only does this not make
you anxious, but you find chaos and uncertainty deeply
exciting and stimulating. Slowly adopting this as an
overall philosophy will naturally loosen the
mind up and give it greater creative flow. You will naturally consider
more options and possibilities. The second exercise, think like
an outsider, is related to a notable phenomenon in the
history of creativity. Some of the most important
discoveries, inventions, and innovations within a field
come from people who are trained in a much different
field, and who have an outsider's approach. Louis Pasteur was a classic
example of this. He was trained as a chemist
and mineralogist, so he brought a much different way of
thinking to the subject of medicine and germs,
a method that was infinitely more creative. Albert Einstein was a
complete outsider. His two most important
discoveries came when he was working at the Swiss
patent office. Google itself exemplifies
this idea. It is, perhaps, the most
successful business on the planet founded by two men who
are relatively complete outsiders to business and who,
therefore, structured and directed their company
in a very novel and creative fashion. I could go on and on and on with
this list, including many great artists. There are two important
reasons why outsiders generally have a creative
advantage. First, they are less steeped
in and burdened by the conventions of the field that
they are attacking. They ask a different
set of questions. They approach problems from
unconventional angles. And second, they are often
trained in totally unrelated fields, and so can make
interesting and creative connections between two very
different forms of thinking, like science and business, or
chemistry and medicine, or engineering and design. Now, we can't all consciously
follow such a path. But even within the careers that
we're pursuing, we can train ourselves to think like
outsiders and help loosen up the mind in the process. A great example of this would be
somebody that I interviewed and profiled in my book. A contemporary master, her
name is Yoky Matsuoka. Yoky was one of the original
heads of innovation for the Google X project. She is now the senior
vice-president in charge of technology at Nest Labs here
in Silicon Valley. She was trained as a electrical
engineer and roboticist. And early in her career she was
asked to help design the hand of a full scale robot that
was being developed at the MIT robotics lab where
she was getting her Ph.D. Now, in the past, all of our
fellow engineers basically attacked this idea of
designing such a hand in the same way. They would place in this hand
all sorts of very cleverly built motors that would
give the hand maximum grasping power. They would load most of these
motors in the palm, because that's where there was
the most space. But in packing the palm with
all of these motors, they would render it completely
inflexible and so this hand could not make even the most
simple grasping maneuvers. These hardware engineers would
then fob off their design to software engineers hoping that
they could program back in the flexibility that
they had lost. Hardware engineers are trained
to think in a certain way. They're trying to focus on the
mechanical and technical aspects of a problem and stay
within that circle. To speculate, to think of
something wider or larger, would be too unconventional
and would require too much work and effort. Well, Yoky decided on a much
different approach. Thinking like an outsider, she
asked the kinds of questions that other engineers ignored. She wondered about what made
the hand so dexterous and powerful in the first place. How did it evolved into
being so powerful. What is the role played by the
palm in grasping objects and how does it work in tandem
with the thumb. Asking these larger questions
made her extend her research to biology, neuroscience,
evolution, biomechanics, and so on. She decided to build an
elaborate model of the hand itself including all of the tiny
bones in the knuckles. In the process, she learned
the importance of having a rounded, flexible palm, and the
role that certain bones play in grasping objects. Now, all of your fellow
engineers scoffed at her method, and the apparent waste
of time that it represented. In the end, however, her
outsider approach led to many more creative decisions. For instance, she decided to
keep the palm rounded and flexible and place motors in
different parts, substituting flexibility for power. In this way, her hand later on
became the industry standard for prosthetics, one that was
infinitely more lifelike an effective for users
of this hand. Following this outsider
approach, Yoky was able to avoid the ABC syndrome and
that technical lock that stymied all of her
other engineers. To think like an outsider
requires basically two things. It basically means to take
advantage of any training that you have had in any unrelated
field which almost all of us have had. It also means to take advantage
of the incredible explosion of information that we
are now all have access to and to expand your searches on
any project to seemingly unrelated fields. By applying what you know from a
different field and by using this expanded research, you will
naturally absorbed and use different patterns
of thinking. This will make you ask a
different set of questions before you begin your project. And asking a different set of
questions is almost half of what it takes to be creative. The third exercise, use
active imagination, is deceptively simple. Often, what separates creative
from conventional thinkers is that they simply search wider. They use their minds to generate
possibilities that others don't think of, then they
work to verify what they came up with. We saw a classic example
of this with Pasteur. Another great example
is with Henry Ford. Early on in his career, in the
earliest years of what would later become the Ford Motor
Company, Ford was anxious to speed up production of cars. He saw the automobile as the
ultimate consumer product. But in order for it to become
that, he had to greatly increase production rate
in his factory. So he spent a couple days
looking at his employees on the factory floor and trying
to imagine how he could get them to move faster
from car to car. Suddenly, one day, he imagine something completely different. He imagined the men standing
still and the car's coming to them. He didn't know what that really
meant, but he decided to try it out, and lo and
behold, it increased productivity by such an
incredible exponential rate that it could now become the
consumer product that he envisioned. Things like antibodies or
assembly lines, they seem so obvious to us now, but they're
never obvious in the present and they involve an incredible
leap of what I call "active imagination." The difference
between regular and active imagination is that the latter
is used consciously to reach very, very practical results. It's not imagination for coming
up with wild things, it's imagination used for
very practical results. Think of the active imagination
as a kind of creative muscle that
you're developing. First, within the loose
constraints of what you're working on, you open your
mind up, you give a complete free rein. You entertain almost every
possibility that you could imagine or visualize. You engage in what Charles
Darwin calls "fools experiments." this is the fun,
play part of serious play. You use notebooks, sketches,
diagrams, models, prototypes to help externalize the products
of your imagination. Once you have gone through this
you now enter the second, serious part of the process. First, you choose one or few
of the more promising possibilities that were
generated by your imagination. And now you actively work to
test, verify, or confirm it. This might entail launching a
beta version on the public. Once you have feedback, now go
back into the first part of the process in a shortened form,
using your imagination to perhaps take what you have
into an even better and higher form, circling constantly
through this process in shorter and shorter cycles until
you've got something that's both incredibly
imaginative and incredibly realistic and practical. By developing this, by going
through this over and over and over again, you will develop
your imagination into an incredibly powerful
creative muscle. OK. I'm nearing the end. The fourth and final exercise
may be the most important in some ways. It's called "subverting your
patterns of thinking." And it's based on the idea that our
minds tend to fall into certain habits, and patterns,
and grooves that severely limit what we consider
as possible. Well, creative people have the
ability to move against these patterns, to actively subvert
them and thereby expand what they consider. One pattern that we often fall
into, and we're very rarely aware of it, is our
tendency to always focus on the end result. The finished product. How to make that product
as perfect and powerful as possible. We live in a goal oriented
culture. To see a contrast, we would have
to look at Asian cultures in which thinking about process,
and structure, and how the parts relate to the
whole, are given much more emphasis and importance. In a goal oriented culture, when
there is a set back or a glitch, we naturally focus
on the end result. So if, for instance, I'm writing
a book and the book isn't coming out as I had
imagined, I will think about the ideas and my style of
writing and how I can improve these ideas and the
communication of them to give the book more wallop,
more effect. But often the source of the
problem is the structure of the damn book, the organization
of the chapters, how one idea is linked
to another. So many books start off well
but completely fall apart because of faulty,
faulty structure. We can say the same thing
about businesses. The problem is in how the
products are produced, how the personnel in the company is
structured and organized, the decision making, the chain
of command, et cetera. Napoleon Bonaparte affected
the greatest revolution in military history by thinking
deeply about the structure of his army and how to organize it
so it could be faster and more fluid in the attack. Thinking about structure,
process, organization, they're not natural to us. But in making ourselves do it we
will naturally expand what we consider giving ourselves
more possible creative associations and connections. Another habit we fall into is
our tendency to be mesmerized by patterns themselves, by
trends, by paradigms, and by how all the information that
we're looking at somehow fits into these patterns
and paradigms. Well, highly creative people
have the ability to look at what doesn't fit into patterns,
the anomalies that cannot be assimilated. An example of this is
very close to home. In the 1990s the prevailing
paradigm in internet searches was established by companies
such as Alta Vista, which ranked searches according to how
many times a subject was referred to in an article. Now this worked reasonably well,
but sometimes it would yield the most bizarre and
incredibly unhelpful results. Almost everyone at that time
thought that this was a temporary glitch that would
eventually be ironed out. Well, while at Stanford, not so
very long ago, Sergey Brin and Larry Page looked at these
anomalies themselves. And in pondering these anomalies
they came up with a much different form of search,
one that ranked according to links like citations in
a scientific journal. Thinking outside the prevailing
paradigm, they came up with a much more powerful and
creative form of search. Anomalies are incredibly
eloquent. They indicate new paths, trends,
ways of thinking, problems that should
not be ignored. Paying attention to anomalies
will naturally expand what we consider. Related to this pattern bias,
is our fixation on what is immediately present to
the eyes and minds. We focus on what has happened
in a set of circumstances as opposed to what didn't happen. Well, highly creative people
can think in an added dimension, that of the invisible
and the absent. An example of this way of
thinking, although in literature, is with
Sherlock Holmes. He was constantly thinking
like this. In the story Silver Blaze, for
instance, he figures out that the murder must have been
somebody that was very familiar to the victim because
the family dog did not bark in the presence of the murderer. Now, this way of thinking in the
real world led to one of the more radical
and interesting innovations in medicine. Prior to the 20th century,
doctors would only focus on germs and bacteria and dangerous
agents in the environment and how to protect
the body from them. Well, looking at the disease of
scurvy at the turn of the 20th century, the scientist
Gowland Hopkins suddenly turned this around. Instead of thinking of the
germs that might be responsible for scurvy, he
looked at what was absent from the picture. What the body was not producing,
namely, vitamin C. Thinking in this way led to
a total revolution in our concept of health. It lead to vitamins and
preventive medicine. Thinking about what is absent,
what didn't happen, is a highly creative form
of thinking. Well, I've loaded you up, like
pack mules, with far too much information. I'm sorry about that. The good news is that almost
all of this information and even more, if you're a
masochist, is available in chapter five of my book,
"Mastery." I'm going to leave you with one final idea that
I believe encapsulates and conceptualize all of
this tonnage of material I've given you. And the idea is the following. Think of creativity as the
ultimate synthesis of the child and the adult
within you. We carry both of these
within us. The child being the remnant of
our earliest years, when we were more imaginative and
exploratory and fluid. Now, normally, we keep the adult
and the child within us rigidly separated. We let the child out in our free
time, when we socialize, or go to parties, or watch
a movie, or play games or sports, or go on vacation. This is also when our minds are
freer, more fluid, maybe a little bit less productive,
but they're freer and more fluid. The adult dominates our work
world and our careers. This is also when our minds
become a lot tighter, as we try to fit into the narrow
role of business person, engineer, writer of self
help books, et cetera. By keeping the adult and the
child rigidly separated, we completely dry up any
creative potential that we want to have. The goal is to find a way to
distill and incorporate that playful, exploratory, fluid
spirit of the child into our disciplined, experienced,
work. It is not that we alternate
sometimes between the child here or the adult there, but
that we fuse the two together into one inseparable whole, that
whole being the creative individual. That's it. Thank you very much. Thank you for your patience. And I'll entertain any questions
that you might have. [APPLAUSE] AUDIENCE: I have a question
with regards to emotional intelligence and how that's
related to creativity. I would think that the negative
capability is related to the capability of the person
to avoid the emotional part that tends to focus you
on solving the immediate problem, coming from your
emotional attachment [INAUDIBLE]. ROBERT GREENE: Well, I was
limited to however long I have for this talk, but I do have a
whole thing in there about emotional intelligence and
the role that it plays in creativity, a whole section in
chapter five in the book. So for instance I talk about the
emotions that tend to get clogged and kind of tighten
us up so that we can't become creative. One of them being, for
instance, curiosity. We lose our sense of wonder and
curiosity as we get older. We tend to have the feeling
that we know everything. And this is extremely
dangerous. And it severely limits
what we consider. And negative capability is
basically very much related to that childlike feeling
of wonder. Children don't sit there going
around at the age of 6 feeling like, I know what that
cloud up there means. They don't. And they open themselves up to
all kinds of possibilities. So I go through a range of other
emotions that tend to attack us as we get older and
that severely tighten and limit the mind. And believe me, I cover
emotional intelligence. Yes, sorry. AUDIENCE: This question may
be more relevant to your [INAUDIBLE]. So one thing I've noticed is
that a lot of these historical examples [INAUDIBLE] modern innovators [INAUDIBLE] a group of people working
together that are all very creative and they all have a
bunch of different ideas of things we should varying, but
there's not [INAUDIBLE]. So what's your advice on
convincing a group that [INAUDIBLE]? ROBERT GREENE: Who are you
trying to convince, people within or without? AUDIENCE: Usually other people
within the same organization. ROBERT GREENE: So you're not
asking about-- he's asking about working in a group, like
most people do, and coming up with creative answers and trying
to convince others that your group has somehow
come up-- AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] --what
do you do when you have too many creative ideas and there's
not enough bandwidth to even experiment
with all of them? ROBERT GREENE: Well, normally,
I talk in the war book, "33 Strategies of War," of the
dangers of group think. So hopefully in your
brainstorming sessions you're not getting the dangerous thing
known as group think. And what group think means is
that people tend to funnel their ideas into what they think
the heads of the company want to hear for political
reasons. Creativity is unconventional,
it's iconoclastic, it doesn't recognize rules or limits, so
hopefully you're not doing what I just mentioned. If that's the case, you need an
adult, you need somebody in there who's doing for the
funneling process. It's like when I talked about
active imagination and it's as if you never went into the
second part of the process and you were only doing the first
part, which is imagining every possibility and never getting
to the point of testing and verifying it. The point of that testing and
verifying thing, I call it in the book it's like a cycle-- I can't even remember-- a
current, that's slowly winnowing down your idea into
something practical. You need an adult or a person
within the group-- I'm not meaning the
adult literally-- but you need somebody in there
who's sort of directing this, and who can sort of make the
decisions between, this is not a reasonable idea, we need to
winnow this down and take three or four or five of
the most realistic of all of your ideas. If it's just every one for
themselves I don't know how you can necessarily
get around it. It's a structural problem. [APPLAUSE]
