Tenet 5: Consumption Breeds Creation

Creation requires a database of available solutions. Where do you find these? How do you acquire more? An important way to do this is to consume. Consumption of material (content) is crucial way to build your database. This is why the concept of God is so powerful and prominent in humanity – god created everything with no prior database. God is the ultimate source of creativity.

Be careful what you consume. It surely influences what you use in your own creations.

Consumption breeds creation
We have talked a good bit about our mental models of creativity. How it works as a behind-the-scenes algorithm that combines and compares existing ideas with other existing ideas in order to find possibilities- the spark that you feel when you have that next great idea. A fresh creative thought. This algorithm is heavily subconscious and is like a muscle you can train to be more active behind the scenes.

What is the key to ongoing operation of your creation algorithm? Like any other engine, it needs fuel. And the fuel is inspiration – or at least what we think of as inspiration. It is really just other ideas. Precursors. It’s hard to put a limit on what the ideas can be or where they come from. I don’t believe you can. Ideas are ephemeral. They exist as both fictions and non-fictions. Fleeting about in space. Some as information, some as real objects or even as projections on a screen. They are all around you, if you look. We live in a sea of ideas.

What you have to do to let any idea be useful, is to train your neural pathways to be flexible enough, to overlap in ways such that any particular category of thought or idea is allowed to be compared and combined with others. Make your mind a low-barrier zone. This is not your default state, likely. Not most people’s. most humans have a tendency to label and categorize everything in their paths. And that’s okay and can be useful. I like categorization, generally speaking. But you have to be mindful and careful not to let categorization build walls up in your mind between different types of ideas. When you eliminate the walls, you have effectively opened up thousands of new cross-categorical combinations of ideas that can be born. Maybe an example will serve us here.

If I, as an engineer, think of building a program. I might have a naturally labeled group of electronics pulses flowing through my neural circuitry that are an established set. Let’s call these ideas programming ideas, or engineering ideas. Now, somewhere else in my brain, I have a collection of concepts related to another specific topic, say visual art. I can go about my business, keeping the two clouds of information separate as is natural, and design my program, maybe get paid and then go about my day.

That is scenario 1. Scenario 2 is different, and more fun. What if we cross-pollinate. What if we remove all the labels associated with the ideas in either category, engineering and visual art, and give our combinatorial algorithm operators permission to combine anything from either pile? What happens? We will get a huge amount of possibilities that emerge. Far more than were output before. And creativity, like much else, can be reduced to a numbers game. Some of you will hate that statement, will loathe the idea of something as special and unique as your creativity being reduced to math. But stick with it, we can be friends still, I promise. The more possibilities you have sitting in front of you, the higher the likelihood that any one of them will be useful, new and interesting. If you start with a larger pool, your odds are better. There’s a still much more work to be done, and your creative intuition and your good execution habits have to be aligned yet, but the spark is going to be there- it’s a start!

We’ve painted a picture here, but we still haven’t stated plainly what we are after. Removing the restraints in your mind is only one facet of the equation. That gives you creative access to what’s already there. But where does the stuff that’s in there come from? Where do you get inspiration? From what you consume.

Just like your diet, as the old saying goes “you are what you eat.” This sentiment is true of the media and content that you consume as well. If you spend all your time reading fantasy fiction, when you go to write your own novel, would you be surprised if fantasy fiction was the basis of what you wrote? Probably not. The work you have consumed has deeply influenced you. It’s really not possible to consume something without it influencing you. At least in some way. You may not realize it happening at all, but it is. It’s likely subconscious much of the shaping of the deep mind takes place there. What does this mean for the creative mind?

There is an upside and a downside. The upside is astronomical. If you want to make music like Nujabes, all you have to do is listen to that artist with great intent. Consume actively and passively. Study the work and figure out what makes it work for that artist. In doing so, you will unlock ways to do similar work. You will have added Nujabes solutions to artistic problems to your database. This is fantastic! It’s just like the matrix- you can download any skill if you learn the ways of doing and practice them.

Then there is the downside. I don’t want to be too negative about it, but more challenge you to be cautious about what you consume. Because everything we consume affects us. We must have a certain level of protective skin about is. The way to do this is not necessarily to not consume any particular thing. But to be active. Don’t just blindly reel in content without running it through you filters. Be critical as you consume, and this will in fact help you build up your creative intuition. Identify why it is precisely that you dislike a thing.