Tenet 6: Hone Your Critical Senses

Creativity Requires Vision. But to think that vision is the only way to be creative is missing out on other very powerful methodologies. I often like to take a more secondary approach to creative work. Instead of dictating a visionary scene, I try and listen to what the work is trying to tell me that it is. One famous proponent of this method is the animator/auteur Hayao Miyazaki. When he and studio Ghibli make a film, you may have noticed that the result can sometimes have a rambling and unfocused quality that results in exceedingly charming experiences. Miyazaki listens to what his characters are saying, what they are wanting to do in a given situation. Sometimes, all creativity requires is for one to listen.

Creativity requires you to access your full range of emotions. This seems obvious for the artistically inclined, perhaps. But for creativity to truly be instilled in your life, regardless of your work, you must be able to grapple with how it is that you feel about a given thing. You must be able to understand and analyze your emotions and act on them when it is appropriate to do so. This is called emotional intelligence.

You must be totally aware of your emotions and identify what it is that you like and what it is that you dislike. Often, we are placed under the impression that anger or sadness are negative emotions. You must not think this way. All emotions are empowering. You feel angry towards a fact of life because of some particular reason. Hunt that reason down and identify it. Label it. Think on it. Ask yourself what could be different so that the anger would be removed. Likewise, ask yourself what must remain for the goodness of a certain thing to stay intact.

Your affinity for an aspect of a subject, or lack thereof, are powerful indicators of what you can do differently. Play to the strengths of that which you like and do all you can to subtract what you do not. You must balance all of the likes and dislikes against the myriad other likes and dislikes.

An example. As an engineer, I dislike inefficiencies in a design. Right alongside these inefficiencies, I dislike the idea of a design never coming into existence because of cost prohibitive features. So I must reconcile my understanding of the costs (real life financial implications) and design inefficiencies so that the design may eventually exist in real life. It takes and understanding of my emotions – why do I dislike inefficiencies? And it takes careful thoughtful analysis of the existence and extent to which the inefficiencies play a role in the design for me as the designer to come up with something that actually works.

Develop a sensitivity. Hone your Senses.

Developing your Vision

Think about what comedians do. They criticize the world around them. They really are just funny writers who have practiced their verbal delivery. More important though, they have strong senses of dislike. This is the core of their craft. For your creative work, that is for all creative work, we must instill within ourselves sensibilities and refine a process that we use to turn our raw perception data from the world around us into new work.

This process relies on sensibilities. A creative intuition. It boils down to a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ when your creative-comparison algorithm is rifling through the thousands of possible solutions. A yes or no that you hone. What determines the yes or no? your likes and dislikes for certain aspects of the world and its inner workings. The whole thing is like an assembly line.

Picture your most minute solutions on one conveyor, deep in your subconscious. You are barely aware that so many exist. They move towards an assembly robot, but first, they must pass a series of tests. As the ideas or solutions are combined with other solutions to find a working match, there is a quality engineer of sorts who looks at his clipboard, studies the specs that you have decided are the threshold levels of acceptable quality you must achieve for the combined solution to be permanently assembled. The quality guy picks one combination up. Studies it. For a bit, then tosses it back on the line behind him. The reject line. Most go this way, but after a while, a few get through.

This clipboard and the checker holding it are what determines if a combination is good enough to use. The clipboard has on it the entirety of your creative tastes. What you like or don’t like applied to infinite contexts. As you grow and learn what you like and don’t like even more and how your tastes work well and how they fail you, you will update them- the clipboard gets updated. It is a living document.

You may have different levels of intensity with which your quality engineer inspects the ideas during earlier process of a project. For example, maybe you are writing and in the drafting phase of the project, you need a much lower threshold for what is acceptable just to get the content out of your head and onto the page.

A creative intuition is one of the most important things to develop. You have to be able to sift through piles of possibility and determine what works together. The most granular level of this is the like or dislike choice. Keep or reject. Asking why you like or dislike something is good practice. It can help you identify even lower level reasoning that you may have tucked into your subconscious. Becoming aware of these sensibilities is vital. Your intuition is the mechanism with which you modify the raw materials of your perceptions- the results of your curiosity, learning, and experiments- and turn them into something that changes the world in some way, big or small.

Being in touch with your intuition is important too. It can keep you from wasting hours trying to find a ‘perfect’ solution without knowing what you are even looking for. At least knowing why you don’t like a certain trait will point you in the right direction. Also, there is the fact that at some point, no matter how introverted you are, you will have to interact with other people. Often you will have to justify to those other people your design and explain your creative vision in terms other than the medium you built it in. you must be able to defend the work and your intuitions and by understanding them deeply, you can better relay the appropriate information.

How then, does one become more in-tune with their intuition? I wish I could say that simply mediating an hour a day does the trick. Surely mediation can only help matters, but in my experience the best way to know your own intuition is to test it constantly. Test it in varying contexts. Perform experiments and record the results in your mind. If you do this, and are aware of the reactions that you have, ask yourself constantly ‘why’, then you will get to know the nature of your choosing-algorithm.