Tenet 4: Learn Always

I am the most creative when I am learning. When I embrace a new technology or a new technique, I find myself leveraging it in combination with that which I already know in order to find new and innovative solutions. Being able to and ever interested in learning new things is an attitude that will lead you to more and more creative capabilities.

In my own life, I have hopped around a lot and do many different things. In the last 5 years I have:

• Held a full-time job in automation.
• Held a part time job designing precision aerospace R&D.
• Produced, wrote, performed and recorded an entire album with my band.
• Learned web development and
• started a full-time design firm (and too many blogs).
• Not to mention intense self-study in real estate (including successful investments) business, physics and, oh yeah,
• became a writer.

There are tradeoffs to everything that I have done. I am not world class (yet) in anything. But I am very good at learning new skills. I would recommend, if you have to master one skill, make it learning new skills. Then, and only then, can you master the secrets of the universe. But in reality, life is a resource management game. You have your time (most valuable), your physical (mind, body, emotional, energy), then real life assets, like cash.

The point is, exposing yourself to a plethora of new ideas, environments, people, problems allow you to build up a personal database of solutions. When I say solutions, I don’t want you to think that I mean solutions to problems like world hunger or how to terraform mars, though those certainly count. I mean solutions to my creative problems. This can be the problem of what your main character feels on a certain day or how to shade a portion of the painting you are working on. I try not to think categorically when I think of creativity. Like I said before. Businesspeople are creative too.

This is true because the businessman/woman has a vision (hopefully!) for the empire before it exists. They apply existing solutions to problems in unique combinations to bring their vision into existence. This, not art, is what creativity is. So categories aren’t important.

Learn Always

We have learned that a creative life is a curious one. A curious person experiments often. A creative person removes fear from the situation to great degree. Why must the creative mind strive to learn always? Learning is different than satisfied curiosity. You do satisfy some curiosity when you learn. Its true. But you can satisfy some other curiosity and even learn something and not accomplish what I mean. I mean learn new skills and technique. Seek academic knowledge. Curiosity plays a role, but curiosity is broader and can include personal searching and non-imperative, often trivial, Truths. These Truths are important, but non-academic.

I think that pushing yourself to learn specific skills and frameworks for a subject matter will help you push the boundaries of what you can be curious about. For example, before I can be curious about Quantum Mechanics in any meaningful way, I must learn about the atomic structure and role of the electron first. Life has prerequisites to knowledge and understanding, just like that RPG you’re playing.

If the goal is to cultivate a creative mind, and if we know that our creative output is a function of the things in our ‘database’, the focus of our lives should in part be on collecting new and interesting knowledge with which we can put to creative uses. Curiosity, as a general attitude, is a prerequisite of this quest. But we need more than curiosity. We will need specific skills and very specific knowledge if we are to get anywhere at all. A skill, like researching, will immensely support your ability to learn even more, for example.

There is another important reason to learn. Learning helps us build usable collections of solutions. But it is needed so that we have usable skills with which to create. Like the latter portion of this book will tell you, collection of ideas & knowledge without implementation, without creation of new works, is no worthwhile. You must learn to write if you want to transform your collection of other people’s ideas into new ideas. You must learn to see an to paint if your goal is to become a painter or artist. Learning serves both purposes and that is why you must learn always. It is the catalyst for curiosity and the foundation of your work.

I always find that I am particularly creative when I am first learning a new skill or specific technique. When I would learn a new chord on the guitar, I would find myself boldly trying any and all combinations of them – they were the newest solutions in my database and a world of untried combinations and permutations lay before me, freshly unlocked. This is an example of the combination of curiosity -> learning -> experimentation. If I were prudent enough to record my experiments (I almost always did) then I would have executed a vital next step in the creative synthesis. The new idea would take shape and form in a real way that existed outside of a single instant. To refine and re-record would take the concept to the next level of implementation and then to release the song into the world would be the final challenge of creation. This is the process (an example of) creative synthesis which stemmed from curiosity was only made possible by learning – the specific new chords, but all the pre-requisite learning before that – how to hold guitar, how to strum in time, how to sing along, how to, how to, how to.

Your creative process requires you to learn constantly. Learning is the foundation for your every creative output.

How to learn

Learning is two-fold. There is the choosing part- You have to want the new information. You have to seek it. This is the most important part. Then, there is the actualization part-you have to find the new information. The second part is often found to take care of itself if the first part is sufficiently strong.

Still, there are some tricks of the trade that you can leverage to maximize your efforts.