David Bowie with Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight 1999
Do you know your purpose?
What’s your purpose? Should you even ask?
We are creating a new journal publishing authors’ writings on just this subject.
What would finding your purpose look like to you? Does it involve working on your mind, body, soul - or the love that dare not speak its name: money?
Is something missing?
As side order to his thoughts, he recommends watching John Cleese’s brilliant talk on how not to be creative on YouTube.
Hint: it’s a laughing matter.
I wrote this article a few years ago. I revisit it sometimes and when I do I always think: where did that come from? how did that spring from my brain, so fluidly and with such conviction? But then, that is exactly the message of the thing.
Reading it now I still agree with its take on the mysterious workings of innovation: the best sorts of actions involve more than our conscious thinking and will. The relevance of this, for me, lies in the fact that so many of us long to create our own worlds, to contribute positively while doing work that comes naturally, but often feel overwhelmed by the odds against it.
It’s also relevant to my own purpose, which looks something like helping people as stubbornly analytical as me learn how to relax and have good ideas that come from somewhere bigger than our little ego-minds.
The main update is that I am still working on really having no idea.
The illustration is from my book The Lazy Guru’s Guide to Life, and is the work of my friend Magali Charrier.
Here it is:
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Most of my ideas never see reality. My brain moves a thousand times faster than my body, burping out new concepts that seem brilliant to me all the time, but without any of the boring detail required to make them happen.
Bringing these projects to fruition requires patience and determination. Luckily I am blessed with a longing the size of Greater China to be creative — to pull stuff from inside me and put it out there into the world.
That’s my way of thinking about what creative people do when it’s going well: pulling stuff from the inside to the outside.
Not to say that what comes out is all about them — it seems to me that what a creative does is tap into something much bigger, something shared but invisible or unspoken — that’s floating around in everyone’s consciousness waiting to be said or seen, but that most people overlook.
This is what stand-up comedians do; brilliant strategists; good artists; genius physicists; even demagogues — they call something out that’s just on the edge of acceptability but not quite there yet — and that is energising; not necessarily good, but definitely mobilising. It gets things moving.
Anyone who puts anything new in the world is plucking a fruit from the invisible zeitgeist tree and putting it into the basket of ideas for us all to eat.
For a while it is challenging or controversial (Copernicus, Picasso, DH Lawrence); but eventually that raw, exciting kumquat becomes supermarket food and we all get used to it. We integrate it into our way of thinking and it becomes normal.
This is what happens to every new idea: it gets integrated into daily life and starts to become dense and old like everything else. But for a while it carries all the energy of the unknown. That’s what creativity is — it comes from somewhere else that we don’t know about. A place you can’t think your way to.
And I know this because when I sit at my desk trying to be creative, thinking about what to do next — I get more and more frustrated until I find myself in a tiny hole where everything is dark and I can hear my voice echoing off the sides of my empty tea cup saying “I’ll get there! I’ll get there!” and nothing else. It never does get anywhere. So instead I have to find ways to forget about myself, and then at some point, unpredictably, something good happens.
This paradox is what lies at the heart of all creative work, all innovation and all value that is ever created. At some point you have to accept that you have no idea. Then something may arrive.
This constraint isn’t limited to artists, inventors or innovators — it is something we all face. It’s what we need to get good at in order to create the better world that we all deserve to live in. But it can’t be faked or rushed. It’s like learning how to crawl again, when we’ve been pretending we can walk or even run for years.
Learning how to crawl is a good way of describing where I am personally in this journey: I am just starting to get it. I have these fleeting, vivid moments of insight that lead to creative action. But it’s a very different thing from what I normally experience as an ‘idea’. An idea is clearly a thought, whereas this other thing is more like a vision or sense of knowing that pops into my head.
When people talk about Sergey Brin waking up one day with his algorithm or Newton discovering gravity, I know they are talking about the same thing. At certain moments in the day I get a little inkling, a flash of what I want to do.
It happens when I am about to cook dinner. If I turn my mind to what to make and I think about the ingredients we have in the fridge, sometimes a little picture arrives in my head — an image of what I’d like to make. It isn’t complicated, and it is always clear. I know exactly what I want to do, with what bits and pieces and which herbs. This is based on absolutely no cookery competence — it’s something beyond myself.
And if someone suggests another idea, I’m open to it, but underneath I already know what’s going to happen — the dinner I imagined is going to come into being: because it wants to make itself; because it’s already there.
This is what being creative means to me: to pick up on something that’s already ready to happen and help it to find a way. When it works it’s an effortless experience. It may sound philosophical, but in reality this is practical and real. It works with people as well as recipes: When I coach people or teams who are stuck on some problem, at some point the way forward wants to make itself known, and it arrives when they’re ready. It comes when they have moved beyond worrying or thinking about the problem and are enjoying playing around with ideas.
This experience has been given many names — it’s called the ‘unconscious’ by some, ‘group mind’ by others and ‘emergence’ by thinkers like Otto Scharmer. What’s important, though, is to begin to experience it for yourself, in real life.
The interesting thing is — I haven’t always been able to do this. It is a new skill; or rather, it seems like a new skill, maybe because I simply didn’t notice it before. Like the negative feelings of anger or fear experienced by a child and then suppressed into adulthood, our bodies and souls are full of submerged awareness; perceptions that are locked away until we start to notice them — for worse and for better.
Here are three things I’ve learned to do to invite those elusive creative breakthroughs (if you don’t like advice, please jump to the end):
The only way I’ve found that works consistently to generate an idea is to have no idea. This is harder than it sounds because we are so used to having a picture of what we are doing. In any given situation most people think they know what is happening and what they should and shouldn’t be doing (even if they don’t like it).
The result is stuckness, as they haven’t allowed enough space for a new idea. Remember — new ideas don’t come from you. The way around this is to stop, sit back and let your mind run idle. The brain is like a muscle — sometimes it needs to be relaxed.
If you can relax your brain from thinking, even if it’s for a few seconds, then you will immediately be opening it up for new possibilities.
To bring something new into the world, you have to strip away the things you use to distract yourself. We all have treats and stimulants we use to fire us up when we’re bored or tired (caffeine, adrenaline, chocolate) — or to fill space when we feel agitated or down (social media, shopping, TV). Over time I’ve softened my puritan attitude to coffee, partly because it like it too much, partly because the main culprit is not the substance, but the way it distracts us from having no idea.
Instead of going to a war with my indulgences, I do my best to experiment with ways of creating space for deeper thought - lying down to change my brain state, taking a walk to think something over, or fasting until lunchtime - and then assessing how it goes.
The guiding star of all dedicated creatives — don’t persist in doing stuff you are ‘not feeling’. How often have you convinced yourself to push through or finish a task you started, even when you’re feeling tense and stressed in your body?
What outcome might have been possible if I had stopped for a moment and opened up to another approach or solution?
Stopping is where it starts. It doesn’t mean you can’t return to the task, only that something in your attitude could open to let in more perspective. This has to be handled with discrimination - persistence is itself essential - but it’s a practice that is key to anyone whose bread and butter relies on them responding effectively in the moment, or collaborating closely with others. Which is basically everyone.
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When I read these suggestions again I realise they amount to the same thing, and it’s the simplest trick there is: making a bit of space to disrupt habitual thinking.
Why then is it so hard to implement? Why do people have to pay other people (coaches, gurus, apps, me…) to help them make space? I think because there is massive inertia in the other direction - culturally, psychologically and economically. We’ve been trained for so long to keep moving and producing that the idea of stopping and having no idea feels like something genuinely risky or transgressive: “What if I produce nothing of value?”
I am constantly fighting this battle with myself in my little world, in my little office.
Hence my job: Helping people to move from thinking they have all the answers to realising they have no idea and then to having an actual idea is more or less now my life’s work.
We all need to be creative so that we can make a world that’s fit to live in. So it feels a worthwhile thing to do.
Thank you for reading.
Laurence
Laurence Shorter supports leaders of quality as they step up to shape the world and their businesses. He has an MA in History from Cambridge University and an MBA from INSEAD. He was a consultant at McKinsey & Co, an investor at Advent International, a dot-com founder (b2build.com), a brand strategist (WPP, Figtree) and a stand up comedian.
