The Creativity Choice

Todd Henry [00:00:02]:
In the late 1980s, a grad student named Thomas Knoll was working on his PhD thesis at the University of Michigan. And he faced a simple but frustrating problem. A common problem. He needed a better way to display grayscale images on his monochrome computer screen. Kind of frustrating, right? So he made one. He wrote a program that solved his problem. And one day he just happened to show it to his brother John, who was working at Industrial Light and Magic, which was the special effects wing of Lucasfilm. John immediately saw much greater potential in Thomas code.

Todd Henry [00:00:37]:
And he suggested that maybe they should turn it into something even more substantial. A full fledged image editing program. Together they worked and they transformed this simple display tool into what would become one of the most revolutionary computer applications in history. Through countless iterations and refinements between 1987 and 1990, they developed their program into a sophisticated image editing tool that you could probably guess what it is. This software, which we now know as Photoshop, didn't just succeed because it automated art. It succeeded because it gave artists new ways to explore and express their creativity. The Knoll brothers creation fundamentally changed digital image editing, graphic design and photography, demonstrating how a simple solution to a specific problem can evolve into a transformative creative tool. This story of how the seed of an idea grew into something much, much more trans impactful demonstrates how real creativity often emerges from unexpected places.

Todd Henry [00:01:39]:
But it evolves through intentional choices and systematic development rather than just spontaneous inspiration. Ideas are easy. What you do with the idea is the most important part. The Knoll brothers didn't just have a good idea. They made deliberate choices to develop and refine the idea into something revolutionary. On today's show, we're going to explore the creativity choice, the decision to be creative rather than just to wait for inspiration to strike. This is Daily Creative, a show for creative professionals who want to be brave, focused and brilliant every day. My name is Todd Henry.

Todd Henry [00:02:18]:
Welcome to the show. So, in today's hyper paced world, creativity often gets reduced to spontaneous bursts of inspiration or quick fix solutions. Quick. We need the solution to this. But truly meaningful creative problem solving work requires a deliberate and intentional approach. And the best ideas don't just happen, they're developed. Steven Johnson called them slow hunches. It's not about waiting for inspiration to strike.

Todd Henry [00:02:53]:
It's about developing systematic practices that allow us to be sustainably creative, to work on ideas, to develop them, and to make them into what they're capable of being. There are a couple of things that we have to do as professionals and as leaders in order to make The Creativity Choice. The first is we have to create space for what one of our former guests, Cal Newport, calls deep work. One of the fundamental principles that I've long advocated. I've talked about this, I've taught this at many conferences to many companies when I've trained them, particularly in my book Die Empty. This is something I wrote about a lot in the book Die Empty is the importance of creating dedicated space for focused, creative problem solving work. This isn't just about physical space, it's about mental and temporal space. When we protect our creative problem solving time and we treat it as sacred, we send a signal to our brain that this work matters.

Todd Henry [00:03:47]:
And we allow ourselves to get fully into the mode of solving problems rather than waiting for ideas to happen in the cracks and crevices of our life. Talented, ambitious, mature creative professionals need to establish what I call creative rhythm consistent periods where they can engage in deep, focused work without interruption. This might mean blocking off specific hours of the day, but it more than likely means just ensuring that you have the time dedicated to coming up with ideas, to generating ideas, to thinking about the problems you're trying to solve, to playing around with ideas, to again, back to Steven Johnson, as he calls it, to exploring the adjacent possible, the area directly around a problem, playing with combinations and seeing what clicks. Most of the brilliant breakthrough ideas that you will have will not come in a flash while you're on a walk, will not come in a flash while you're in the shower. Often the sparks come in those moments. But the real valuable creative solutions that you will generate will come from sitting and intentionally focusing on the problem, working on the problem, playing with the problem, trying things out and seeing what works. So we have to create the space for those ideas to emerge. We have to create space for again, what Cal Newport calls deep work.

Todd Henry [00:05:06]:
The second thing is we have to manage creative energy. Okay, so listen, this isn't just about time management. We're great at managing our time. We have more tools at our disposal than at any point in human history for managing time. What we're terrible at is managing energy. Creative problem solving work requires energy management. We have to manage what Lewis Hyde calls emotional labor, our ability to put part of ourself into the work that we're doing. Without that, without managing our energy, it's very likely that we'll stack meeting after meeting after meeting, obligation after obligation.

Todd Henry [00:05:40]:
We'll get to the end of the day and we have nothing left to give. So with regard to managing energy, we have to ensure that we're routinely PRUNING good but not great things out of our life so that we have the energy that we need to be able to focus on the work that matters. And the third and final thing is we have to build creative infrastructure. So the systems, the habits, the practices that support our work are essential. If you want anything done, it requires infrastructure. You have to have infrastructure to support your ambitions. This includes regular idea capture methods, review processes, checkpoints, feedback mechanisms that help refine and improve our work. It's not enough to just have good ideas.

Todd Henry [00:06:22]:
We need to have systematic ways to capture, to develop and to implement them. And this might mean maintaining an idea journal, setting up regular review sessions, or establishing collaborative feedback loops with trusted peers where we bounce new ideas off of them and we collaborate and we build on one another's ideas. But if you have ambitions, you need to support those ambitions with infrastructure, with practices that help you stay focused, help you stay engaged, and help you stay energized. Intentional creatives don't leave these elements to chance. They build systems that support their process and make it sustainable over the long term. So listen, being intentional Making the creativity choice isn't about stifling spontaneity. It's about creating the conditions where creativity can flourish consistently. By focusing on three key areas.

Todd Henry [00:07:10]:
Creating space for deep work, managing your energy so you can put emotional labor into your work, and building supporting infrastructure and rhythms, you can develop a more sustainable and productive practice. You will produce the best work of your life if you are intentional, if you carve the space necessary to make it happen. When we approach our work with intention, we move beyond the myth of the inspired genius and into the reality of a sustainable practice. This is how we create work that matters day after day, month after month, year after year. All right, in a moment we're going to be back with Zorana Ivchevich Pringle. She's a researcher and the author of a brand new book called the Creativity Choice and we're going to hear all about it in just a minute. Stick around.

Todd Henry [00:08:02]:
Foreign well, we are going to discuss one of my absolute favorite topics in the world today. And we have one of the best people in the world here to discuss it. We are going to be talking with Zorana Ivcevic Pringle, who is the author of the new book called the Creativity Choice, the Science of Making Decisions to Turn Ideas into Action. Zorana, welcome to the Daily Creative Podcast.

Zorana Ivcevic Pringle [00:08:32]:
Thank you for having me.

Todd Henry [00:08:33]:
So this topic of creativity is obviously something that we talk about a lot on the show, something I've Been working on, researching, writing about for a number of years. And I love having experts on the show to share with us their perspective on this word, that this concept that can be very slippery. Creativity can be very. A very slippery concept. So before we jump into the book, which I can't wait to talk about, tell us a little bit about your background, your history, your research, and how you came to the point of writing this book.

Zorana Ivcevic Pringle [00:09:05]:
So I'm a senior research scientist at the Yale center for Emotional Intelligence and I've been thinking about creativity and studying creativity for now, going to date myself 25 years. And I am really interested in everything about creativity. Way back when I was an undergrad and just thinking of my interests that were evolving, I really knew very viscerally I wanted to study what I called interesting people. Now the question is, how do you define interesting people? And of course in science you cannot just use vague words like that. And I have landed and I very much agree with my judgment that the interesting people really is the creative people. And that's where I stayed since my whole career.

Todd Henry [00:09:54]:
I have to. I'm sorry, I wasn't planning on asking this question, but I have to ask you, how do you identify that? How do you identify those interesting people or the people that you consider to.

Zorana Ivcevic Pringle [00:10:04]:
Be the interesting people? Was really just a little bit of a joke of me trying to figure out what I was, truly what I was, where I really wanted to go with my research once upon a time. And creativity has lot of the difficulty around it. And I like the challenge. I like that creative individuals embody what seem to be contradictions in them. And I wanted to know how that could be and what are the consequences of that. So in the same time, these people are. Can be at times very extroverted, but at times almost withdrawn as situation requires or as work requires. They can be very playful, but also very serious.

Zorana Ivcevic Pringle [00:10:51]:
And the list goes on. There are some vulnerabilities, psychological vulnerabilities, such as susceptibility to stress or anxiety that they often have, but at the same time, lots of psychological strengths that can help them counteract those, those vulnerabilities, which is a hallmark of resilience. And so all of these things were very intriguing to me. And then as I started studying creativity and the whole process, how it unfolds, I became intrigued by something else. So in the history of creativity research and in the popular imagination, we almost equate creativity with thinking. Think outside the box, think differently. There are all these phrases, but I thought that's not the whole story. And there is a very disregarded or neglected emotional aspect to the creative process and a roller coaster that is emotional.

Zorana Ivcevic Pringle [00:12:00]:
And I wanted to study that.

Todd Henry [00:12:03]:
How does that emotional part of the creative process play out in the creative process? Because you're right, you always hear people talking about creativity as this highly cognitive thing. Right. I'm evaluating options, refining those options. I'm winnowing them down to some selective option. I, I intuitively follow this. But we make it a very cognitive thing. How does the emotional part of it play out?

Zorana Ivcevic Pringle [00:12:26]:
And that's what's very, what was very interesting to me. Because we know both in cognitive science, we know in affective science that emotion and thinking coexist. You cannot have just thinking with no influence of emotion, and emotion influences thinking. So you know that there's going to some connection. So I was intrigued about this connection. And of course, scientists, you know how scientists start with anything, they start by reading previous scientists. So I started reading existing research and I got frustrated with it because the question that was being asked was what emotion states, what you are feeling in the moment, how it helps or hurts creative thinking, especially coming up with new ideas. And I was frustrated in multiple ways because coming up with ideas is not the only part of creativity.

Zorana Ivcevic Pringle [00:13:26]:
So this doesn't seem to be telling us the whole, the really full, giving us a full picture. And also the idea that there will be just one kind of feeling that is uniquely good or bad for creativity did not seem to pass a smell test to me. So if you set up experiments in a particular way that scientists like experimental control. So you set a science experiment that you induce a mood in people, so you put them in a particular mood on purpose, and then you give them very short, like three or four minutes creative thinking tasks. Then it turns out very reliably that positive energized moods help you think creatively in these quick bursts. But we don't think in quick bursts. Only when we do, when we are writing a book, I just finished that. Or when we are developing a new product or anything else.

Zorana Ivcevic Pringle [00:14:27]:
So something was missing. And what I thought was missing is not just what you are feeling, but once you are feeling something, what you.

Todd Henry [00:14:36]:
Do with it, what you do with what you're feeling, you're saying, yeah, makes sense. That is very intriguing. Yes. And so what does that mean? What are the implications of that?

Zorana Ivcevic Pringle [00:14:47]:
Yeah, so this is, it's oftentimes in the popular imagination in our daily culture, we are thinking of emotion as something that happens to us almost we are being manipulated like a puppet Something happens, you are triggered. Emotion is there without you almost participating in it. But it turns out that's not really what is the case with emotions. That's not how emotions really happen. We have a lot of agency in our emotional experience. We are not necessarily aware of it. And if you take the stance of an emotion scientist, you start seeing things that you go, oh, I never thought of it that way. To give you an example, emotion scientists define emotions as information.

Zorana Ivcevic Pringle [00:15:41]:
Now, that sounds very abstract and very what in the world do you mean? I know, but essentially emotions are telling us what is going on in our mind and what is going on in the world around us. They are telling us something. Now, they're not necessarily telling us if we don't identify them properly or precisely, but if we take a moment and consider what is really going on, what is a very specific feeling? Not I'm feeling fine or I'm feeling stressed, which is a catch all. But if you say, okay, you're feeling stressed, but what flavor of stress? Are you disappointed? Are you frustrated? Are you anxious? All of these things are telling you something different. If you say, okay, I'm feeling frustrated, there is a lot of information contained in there. Frustration means that you have encountered a block, you ran into a wall, and now you can use that information in different ways. So it's already giving you a hint. You have to do something different.

Zorana Ivcevic Pringle [00:16:50]:
There is no point really in continuing the way that you have been doing it. It's not that you need to work harder. You have to do something different. It could also be a piece of inspiration. I am very often inspired by frustration because it points to where there is a problem. And where there is a problem, there often is an opportunity.

Todd Henry [00:17:13]:
Okay. This is fascinating because I think that when the people that I work with, the clients I work with, the places where they find blocks in their work are often sourced in emotional issues that they're experiencing. Whether they be collaborative issues or uncertainty and fear related to the work and the uncertain nature of the work that they're doing, the results that they might get. And so it's interesting to hear you say that identifying not just what they're feeling, but which is important, but also the specific flavor of what they're feeling, what it means, what the information is that's embedded in that feeling can help us begin to identify how to surmount those blocks and get to the actual work that we're trying to do.

Zorana Ivcevic Pringle [00:17:58]:
Yeah, and especially when you are, when you're mentioning creative blocks, what happens? I did a study a few years ago Where I had a large group of creative professionals, many of which you're mentioning and you're working with. They were artists, they were design writers, you name it. It was a very diverse group. And I asked them what happens when you experience a creative block? First do experience the creative block. And it was a written study, but you could almost feel the chuckle. Yes, of course that happens.

Todd Henry [00:18:31]:
Yes.

Zorana Ivcevic Pringle [00:18:32]:
And then I asked them what happens emotionally. And when I looked at words they were using, almost everybody used the word frustrated. But then it was different flavors of frustration too. So some were tinged with anxiety somewhere, tinged with being overwhelmed, others with disappointment, some with anger. And that really comes back to what's the source of potential blocks and little bit of our personality too.

Todd Henry [00:19:06]:
So the book is called the Creativity Choice. I assume that's a very specific choice that you made to call it the creativity Choice. What is the creativity Choice? What do you mean by that phrase? Because just to contextualize my question, I think a lot of people think who aren't familiar with the science or aren't familiar with creative work, they think creativity is just this enrapturous feeling that we have. And we have this aha moment and it just comes upon us and overwhelms us and then we make something or we create something or we solve a problem or whatever. But your title implies that's not the case. What is the Creativity Choice?

Zorana Ivcevic Pringle [00:19:39]:
I wanted to be playful a little bit, and I didn't want to deny, probably I wanted to be a little bit provocative too. Just teeny bit provocative. My intention is not to say that enrapture does not happen. And that does happen. So it certainly happens. It's not the only way it happens. And when you only talk about those magical parts, I, in my mind and in my personal experience, I experience it as magic and I use that word and it happens. It happened to me today, that cliche of taking a shower and having a breakthrough without thinking of it.

Zorana Ivcevic Pringle [00:20:22]:
It happens. It's real. Actually, according to some analysis, There was about 30% of cases when you are experiencing creative blocks, you actually have a breakthrough in the shower for real. So those things happen. And my intention is not to say that don't, but to also point your attention to something else, that it's not the only way it happens. And that again, we have that agency that there are things that we can do to make creativity more likely. And those moments of enrapture do not happen on a daily basis. And we should be making progress on a pretty much daily basis.

Zorana Ivcevic Pringle [00:21:05]:
And so what do we do when those moment of moments of magic are not happening that are not flowing? There's lot turns out there's a lot we can do.

Todd Henry [00:21:16]:
What are some examples of your favorite findings? What are some of the things that we can do? I know that right now everyone is on the edge of their seat because that's what the people who are listening to this, to this show do for a living. They have to solve problems. There are people right now probably who are deferring, working on something very important so that they can hear your advice. What are some of the things we can do to help us have those ideas more consistently?

Zorana Ivcevic Pringle [00:21:40]:
So to, to, to stay with the word choice, the title of the book is the Creativity Choice. So it might seem like you make a choice and then you have made the choice so you are done. But it's not really. It is a constant process of making choices. In a way, choosing creativity as a continuous might be a better way of even putting it. You are making choices and there's a creativity choice with every action you're making. So I think there is that important piece there to remember. It's not just say yes and then you are done.

Zorana Ivcevic Pringle [00:22:19]:
And we can use a lot of scientific findings to make better choices that are making it more likely we are going to make better progress. My favorite piece of research is on what to do when to maximize your progress. Sometimes people say productivity. I like to think of it in terms of progress because progress begets more progress and it rolls from one day to another. And again it comes back to this. We have agency with our emotions and there is a connection between thinking and feeling and knowing what those connections are. You can make informed choices that then are creating the cycle, virtuous cycle. So to give you an example, different emotions are related to different kinds of thinking and make different kinds of thinking more successful.

Zorana Ivcevic Pringle [00:23:21]:
So when we are feeling happy and energized, we are better at quick bursts of playful, spontaneous idea generation. We can be broad in our thinking and even silly and unconventional. We are not going to self censor. Sometimes we need that, right? Creative people sometimes need that. And then other kinds of other feelings, such as being little bit downcast, maybe little bit in a mood that is critical or pessimistic. What are you better at those times is critical thinking? It is finding everything that is wrong with what you have done before. And we know that creative people have to do that too. And knowing sometimes we have daily rhythms of how we are feeling.

Zorana Ivcevic Pringle [00:24:14]:
Some people more so more pronounced than others. I have a very strong daily rhythm that I'm not a morning person. I am really not a morning person. So I get up and I am in a pretty non positive mood, let's put it like that. It grumpy and. But that is a superpower for certain things. And I can use it. I can say okay, how do, can I use it? How can I make a choice that is the best choice considering what's going on.

Zorana Ivcevic Pringle [00:24:48]:
And what I do is I take what I have written the day before and edit it. And in this mood I can find everything that is potentially not clear or not beautiful or not the best example and I can take it apart and then I can make it better.

Todd Henry [00:25:10]:
That's. I've. In all of my years of working in this field, I've never heard that take on creative productivity or making progress. As you said. I've never heard someone articulate that you should pay attention to how you feel or the emotions that you're feeling and use those as cues for the kind of creative work that you should be focusing on during that period of time. It's a very unique perspective. I think it's gonna be very valuable to people listening because I do think that to your point, we have different rhythms throughout the course of the day. And it might be that one person is going to do their best blue sky creative thinking from 9 to 11am Somebody else needs to just be sitting down and doing maybe doing their editing work as you mentioned, or maybe strategic thinking or planning or things like that, and then save their more blue sky creative thinking for 3 to 5pm because that's when they tend to be in that kind of a mood.

Todd Henry [00:26:08]:
That's a fascinating take.

Zorana Ivcevic Pringle [00:26:10]:
And that is why those popular pieces of advice you need this kind of morning routine or that kind of morning routine. It's not that they don't work for anybody. They work for some people very well. But if you try to tell me that I need to start writing at 5, it's simply not possible. I am physiologically not built for that. So it's also giving ourselves permission to say not everything that is out there is going to work for you. And that is okay.

Todd Henry [00:26:42]:
Yeah. Yeah. So I have to ask you a question about artificial intelligence because so many people right now are their antenna are up, they're paying attention to what's going on. Most people are using generative AI in some form or fashion in their work. Now, we've all been using AI for a while. We just maybe didn't realize we were using AI because it was embedded in other tools. We were using, but now we're more specifically and purposefully using it. What is the interplay between generative AI specifically and human creativity? And how do you see those two forces evolving alongside each other over the coming years?

Zorana Ivcevic Pringle [00:27:21]:
I love this question because it is one of those difficult questions that don't have straightforward answer, and I love those. I like to think in terms of analogies oftentimes and I find it helpful. And especially when we are. I've been talking a lot about feeling and when we have these feelings of maybe being overwhelmed or being scared, trying to find analogies can be helpful. And I think of one with other kinds of technologies from the past, and in particular one that I find personally meaningful is the advent of photography. At the time there was a lot of talk about how photography is going to make art, visual art, obsolete. There will not be any more visual art because now we have this technology that can make perfect renditions of landscapes or portraits. That did not happen quite to the contrary.

Zorana Ivcevic Pringle [00:28:29]:
New forms of art were started, created, imagined in quite a few sense. So in that sense I am, I'm an optimist, that this is not the end of human creativity. But also as a scientist, I have a very specific take on this issue in what generative AI can do at this time. Of course, we don't know what it's going to be able to do 10 years from now, 20 years of now, I'm a Trekkie. Two centuries from now. We don't know. So that uncertainty aside, but what it's doing right now is it's being able to produce something that sometimes looks creative, and it's being able to solve some problems, some kinds of problems, and some kinds of problems really solve well. But creativity scientists don't think that solving problems is the biggest part of creativity.

Zorana Ivcevic Pringle [00:29:36]:
Creativity scientists think that, and based on 70 years of research now, that the most crucial part of the creative process is something that we call problem finding. Problem finding is not just that initial, okay, here is my problem and I'm going to work with it and I'm going to solve it. It is also asking questions, asking many questions, asking questions in different ways. Once you have a topic of something you are working on, reframing that question, looking at the different perspectives. And AI at this time at least cannot do that kind of thing. And you see that very viscerally with how we work with AI, right? We do not just ask a question and then it says something. And we never ask any other question. Problem is solved.

Zorana Ivcevic Pringle [00:30:34]:
We ask questions in different ways. We are engineering our prompts. We are following up. We are using the production of the AI as a starting point, oftentimes not as the ending point. And all of those things are part of human creativity. So yeah, AI is going to make some kinds of tasks obsolete on the human part, but not human creativity per se.

Todd Henry [00:31:06]:
Zorana Ivcepich Pringle's new book is called the Creativity Choice and it's available now wherever books are sold. I encourage you to check it out. It's very, very good.

Zorana Ivcevic Pringle [00:31:16]:
It.

Todd Henry [00:31:18]:
Regardless of what your ambitions are, make sure that you're being intentional about how you approach your creative process. Don't leave it to chance. Don't expect ideas to happen in the.

Todd Henry [00:31:27]:
Cracks and crevices of your life.

Todd Henry [00:31:30]:
Make the Creativity Choice hey, thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to receive weekly articles straight to your inbox, you can do so@bravefocused brilliant.com that's my weekly email where you can learn about my books, my teaching, my speaking, and much more@toddhenry.com until next time. May you be brave, focused, and brilliant.