Creativity is much more than 10,000 hours of practice

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

It is believed that long-term practice in any business helps a person to master it and create something brilliant. Is this really so and can persistence replace talent? Let's understand this article.

Probably, many have heard that in order to achieve mastery in some business, you need to devote 10,000 hours to it. The 10,000 hour rule was described in a book by renowned author Malcolm Gladwell. He created it based on a study by psychologist Anders Ericsson, in which students from the Berlin Academy of Music participated. In the course of the research, it was found that the most promising and talented guys by the age of 20 had about 10,000 hours of violin playing.

In the book, psychologist Anders Erickson and journalist Robert Pool proposed the concept of mastering virtually any skill through deliberate practice. The deliberate practice described in their book consists of a whole set of techniques: setting goals, breaking down difficult tasks into parts, developing complex scenarios for possible developments, getting out of the comfort zone, and getting constant feedback.

But, as the authors note, all of these techniques are applicable to areas in which the rules were established a long time ago and passed on from generation to generation. For example, chess, sports and music.

The principles of deliberate practice will not be as effective for activities in which there is little or no competition, such as gardening or other hobbies, as well as in creative and many other modern professions: business manager, teacher, electrician, engineer, consultant.

When Repetition Fails

Intentional practice is really important, for example, in chess and symphonic music, because they are based on consistently reproducible actions repeated over and over again. However, for most creative fields of activity, goals and ways of achieving success are constantly changing, and repetitive behavior only hurts.

Writers cannot put out the same novel or short stories and expect audiences to be thrilled again.

Artists are under constant pressure not to repeat what they or anyone else has done before. And it is this pressure that makes them go ahead and create something original.

A work of art can quickly lose its ability to surprise. How many times has Lady Gaga put on her meat dress before people are tired of it? If we used the technique of deliberate practice to create meat clothes and wear them on every Halloween, who would appreciate its personality?

Creativity is more than expert opinion

While creativity is often based on deep knowledge, artwork is more than the result of the work of experts. Because creativity has to be original, meaningful and surprising.

Original in the sense that the creator is rewarded for abandoning conventional wisdom and going beyond standards.

Significant in the sense that the creator must satisfy some practical function or present a new interpretation. It constantly raises the bar on what is considered useful.

And finally, the result of creativity should be unexpected and surprising, and not only for the creator himself, but for everyone else.

Over the past 50 years, there have been many systematic studies that have examined the career paths of creative people, their character traits and life experiences. The findings contradict the fact that deliberate practice is the main or most significant part of creativity. Here are 12 factors that only confirm this.

1. Creativity is often blind

If creativity was based only on deliberate practice, we could simply train ourselves to gain recognition. But in reality this is impossible: the creator cannot know for sure whether his creation will turn out good. And sometimes society is not yet ready for such an idea - a creative product must correspond to the spirit of the times. With experience, creative people come to an intuitive understanding of what society likes at the moment, but still there will always be some degree of uncertainty in creativity.

Only someone with infinite wisdom can determine that now is the right time for an experiment, not a theory, to write a poem rather than a play, to paint a portrait rather than a landscape, or to compose a composition instead of an opera.

Dean Keith Simonton American researcher in the psychology of creativity

2. Creative people often work in chaos

While practice is consistent and consistent, creativity is characterized by a lot of trial and error. There are many examples when geniuses created masterpieces, and after them - completely unpopular things.

For example, Shakespeare wrote his most famous plays at the age of 38. Around this time, he created "Hamlet" - a real treasure of world literature. And soon after Hamlet he wrote the play Troilus and Cressida, which is much less popular.

If creativity were just a matter of practice, then with experience we would create more perfect creations. But if you look at the careers of many creative people, you see a very different picture: a lot of trial and error, peaks of fame in the middle of their careers, and not at the end, when they have the most experience.

3. Creative people rarely get useful feedback from the public

When a creator presents a new novel to the world, the reaction is usually one of two things: acceptance or rejection. And no helpful feedback.

Deliberate practice is good for well-structured tasks. And in creativity (in most cases) you work alone for a long time, for example, writing a novel or deriving a mathematical formula, and you have no feedback.

Even worse, critics often disagree and argue with each other, so it's difficult for the creator of the work to understand whose feedback is really useful to take into account, and whose dictated by stupidity or envy.

In addition, the standards for artistic and scientific products are constantly changing. What at one point in time is recognized as a breakthrough may seem like complete nonsense to the next generation. This can complicate your deliberate practice on the road to revolutionary discovery.

4. The ten-year rule is not really a rule

The idea that professionalism in any business takes 10 years of practice is not a rule. Dean Keith Simonton lives and works of 120 classical composers and found out a curious thing. Despite the fact that the composer needs about 10 years of practice before he can write the first major work, the deviations in this period are very large - about three decades. Someone needs more time, someone less. Creativity has no exact timeframe. It happens when it is about to happen.

5. Talent is also important for creative achievement

If talent is defined as the speed with which a person acquires experience, then it is undoubtedly important for creativity.

Simonton discovered in the course of his work that the most popular composers are those who spent less time acquiring the necessary knowledge in their field. In other words, the most talented.

6. Individuality matters

It is not only the speed of obtaining deep knowledge that is important, but also a number of other signs. People differ from one another on many different factors, including general and special cognitive abilities (IQ, spatial reasoning, verbal reasoning), personality traits, interests, and values.

One of them showed that creative people have a great tendency to non-conformism, non-traditionalism, independence, are open to experiments, with a strong ego, a tendency to take risks and even mild forms of psychopathy.

This cannot be explained by deliberate practice. Of course, every creative activity requires a certain set of abilities and qualities. For example, you need a higher IQ to be successful in physics than you do in the visual arts. However, there are commonalities for creativity in any field.

7. The influence of genes

Modern behavioral genetics has found that every single psychological trait, including inclination and willingness to practice, depends on genetic prerequisites. This does not mean that genes completely determine our behavior, but certainly influence it.

Simonton theorized that somewhere around a quarter or a third of all behavioral differences could be due to genetic factors. How strong are external factors then?

8. The environment means a lot too

Darwin's cousin Sir Francis Galton, known for his work on the hereditary nature of genius, also showed that the most prominent scientists tend to be firstborns in the family.

It was later found that creativity is influenced by other experiences gained from the environment, including the socio-cultural, political and economic conditions in which the child grew up. This is likely to have an even greater impact than heredity.

Another environmental factor of great importance to creativity is the availability of role models in childhood and adolescence.

9. Creative people have a wide range of interests

While deliberate practice involves focusing on one highly specialized task, and techniques for achieving goals are designed to improve in a specific area, creative individuals have a wide range of interests and are diversified in contrast to their less creative colleagues.

If creativity only depends on intentional practice, it is best for an opera composer to choose one kind of opera and improve at it. Dean Keith Simonton, however, examined 911 operas by 59 composers and found the exact opposite. The most famous operatic compositions, as a rule, belong to the synthetic genre.

The importance of such mixing for creativity has also been confirmed. Essentially, creative scientists have many artistic hobbies and interests. For example, an analysis of Galileo's life revealed that he was fond of art, literature and music. As psychologist Howard Gruber has shown, instead of relentlessly researching one question, most creative scientists throughout history have worked on many loosely coupled projects.

10. Very deep knowledge can be bad for creativity

The intentional practice approach assumes that performance is directly related to practice. And while this may be true for most well-defined areas of human activity, it is not suitable for creativity.

The relationship between knowledge and creativity is best characterized by an inverted U-curve. Some knowledge is good, but too much knowledge kills flexibility. In fact, in some fields of activity, such as writing, there is an optimal amount of formal knowledge, after which further education only reduces the possibility of creating something unusual.

11. Outsiders often have a creative edge

If the essence of creativity was practice, outsiders with their lack of knowledge and experience would not be able to create something creative. But many innovators have been lagging behind in their field.

As Professor David Henry Feldman, an expert on child development at Tufts University, notes, the divergence of such people from their environment forces them to take a critical look at what that environment has to offer.

Many marginalized people throughout history, including immigrants, have come up with highly creative ideas, not in spite of their outsider experience, but because of it.

An example of this is the composer Irving Berlin, the director Ang Lee and the first US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. These people did not practice, following a certain path, they created their own. And that brings us to the final key point.

12. Sometimes a creator has to create a new path so that others can follow it

The practice approach proposes to concentrate on problem solving in order to study the existing rules within a specific area.

However, creative people are good at not only solving problems, but also finding them. Galileo's research is an excellent example.

After much trial and error in an attempt to create a new instrument for studying the night sky, Galileo revolutionized astronomy. He didn't just practice to make his discoveries. In fact, his research did not have a foundation in any science that existed at that time. Almost everything he observed did not correspond to Ptolemaic astronomy or Aristotelian cosmology.

Most experts at the time did not accept Galileo's ideas. The most rewarding experience for him was exercises in the visual arts. The chiaroscuro in his drawings helped him to correctly interpret what others had missed.

No one in his time could have imagined that Galileo's artistic experience could influence one of the most important discoveries of mankind. And of course, if he had just practiced in the existing space sciences, he would never have made his discoveries.

So creators aren't just experts. Creativity is based on deep knowledge, and intentional practice is also important, but creativity is much more than just practice.

Creative people aren't necessarily the most productive, but their chaotic minds and chaotic work often allow them to see things that no one else has noticed before. And create a new path that a new generation will follow.