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Creativity Is Much More Than 10k Hours of Deliberate Practice

blogs.scientificamerican.com

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Re: Creativity Is Much More Than 10k Hours of Deliberate Practice

#31

Post by crpatino »

jezclaremurugan wrote: post #26
magice wrote: post #14

sigh Yet-another-worshipper-of-god-given-creativity. I lost all respect for the article the moment the author drew difference between chess/music/sport and writing/drawing/teaching/"creativity". Frankly, the way I read it, this is just another hero-worshipping article by consultants whose main contribution to the economy involves destroying R&D and shipping jobs oversea. And it truly saddens me that Hacker News keeps…

Not saying you are entirely wrong, but maybe that article isn't totally off either. For ex. > You know who built Google? People who weren't working in Yahoo or AltaVista. > Who built Microsoft? Again outsiders out of the Unix or IBM world. Further, while basketball matches are not same, the skill part - shooting/dribbling/tackling etc. is definitely same. I am not arguing against expertise though - I know how critica…

> You know who built Google? People who weren't working in Yahoo or AltaVista.

It was not people trying random shit either. It was a pair of PhD students, who were already experts in how information is indexed in libraries, and who understood how citations work in academia, who applied this knowledge to the novel domain of crawling the WWW.

If you look at the biographies of really creative people, you will see a pattern emerging. Practically all the grand masters of the Reinassense specialized in a single art, but dabbled with 2 or 3 more (i.e. Michel Angelo's magna opus is the Sistine Chappel, but he was a master sculptor and a moderately competent architect). Many fiction writers do start their careers as journaists. Great hackers have a tendency to pick up hobbies that have little or nothing to do with computers.

Maybe the problem with the 10-thousand hours is not that it kills creativity, but that people gets obsessed about a single topic and do not try their hand at enough different things for their creativity to flourish.

Re: Creativity Is Much More Than 10k Hours of Deliberate Practice

#32

Post by 6stringmerc »

Not sure why the author chooses to use music as some kind of arbitrary reference point about how 'uncreative' it is due to having a rather large canon of "technique" involved. The reason there aren't a lot of stories about somebody just randomly picking up a guitar, tuning it to whatever and banging away something of creative beauty is because...well...the instrument kind of doesn't allow it. I've basically run under the assumption of the following:

"It really helps to know what rules you're breaking and why when doing something new."

Re: Creativity Is Much More Than 10k Hours of Deliberate Practice

#33

Post by rangibaby »

noahbradley wrote: post #20

I think the study and practice of fundamental techniques is directly tied to training your creative side. But they're also independent skills, in a sense. I see far too many young artists who focus solely on technique, at the detriment of their creativity. Classical atelier programs can train an individual to create astonishingly life-like representations... but too often lacking entirely in any sort of creativity. O…

> But when I knew how to express ideas, for some reason I had an easier time coming up with those ideas in the first place.

That's the rub, being creative is not worth much if you don't have the necessary skills and technique (practice practice practice!) to express yourself.

Re: Creativity Is Much More Than 10k Hours of Deliberate Practice

#34

Post by rangibaby »

6stringmerc wrote: post #32

Not sure why the author chooses to use music as some kind of arbitrary reference point about how 'uncreative' it is due to having a rather large canon of "technique" involved. The reason there aren't a lot of stories about somebody just randomly picking up a guitar, tuning it to whatever and banging away something of creative beauty is because...well...the instrument kind of doesn't allow it. I've basically run under…

It's why Thelonious Monk is such a polarizing figure in jazz. He breaks every rule in the book, yet it works because he knew exactly what he was doing.

Re: Creativity Is Much More Than 10k Hours of Deliberate Practice

#36

Post by gnaritas »

alphonsegaston wrote: post #30
gnaritas wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's great creative power in not knowing what you don't know and trying out random things because you have yet to acquire the knowledge of how things are 'supposed' to be done. That's something people who don't want to learn how things are done like to say, but isn't really true and is most often simply an excuse to avoid having to learn anything; it's commonly heard from amateur musicians for example in an atte…

While I'm sure there is some of this mentality among unpolished artists, I think you're wrongly conflating reproducibility of quality with creativity itself. A creative solution is often arrived at by the ability to generate a large number of ideas, iterating upon each or combining them in a novel fashion. The simplicity or lack of inhibition in the approach of an amateur can allow for this volume, because the amateu…

Neither is the pro limited, understanding other's idioms is not a constraint; knowledge is not a handicap to creativity. People who complain about losing their creativity if they know too much are just uncreative people lying to themselves in order to explain their lack of creativity.

Re: Creativity Is Much More Than 10k Hours of Deliberate Practice

#37

Post by bgilroy26 »

kris-s wrote: post #13

I make a youtube video every day as part of a do-a-thing-for-100-days project. I've learned a lot from it but one of the key takeaways was that I have much, much more creative energy than I thought (I was really worried I would run out of stories to tell at day 20 or something). The 12 points the author listed seemed accurate but they never really reached a meaningful conclusion. My advice for anyone considering unde…

Thank you for sharing your videos, they are a lot of fun!

Re: Creativity Is Much More Than 10k Hours of Deliberate Practice

#38

Post by gnaritas »

walod wrote: post #29
gnaritas wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's great creative power in not knowing what you don't know and trying out random things because you have yet to acquire the knowledge of how things are 'supposed' to be done. That's something people who don't want to learn how things are done like to say, but isn't really true and is most often simply an excuse to avoid having to learn anything; it's commonly heard from amateur musicians for example in an atte…

I think that people who are creative have to know the history and repertoire in order for their brain to make the new connections to make the new thing, but I think that creative leap when your brain makes those new connections is not something an artist controls directly. It comes from experience and being "into something", and random accident from experimentation. The artist doesn't necessarily know why something i…

I agree. I'm not saying they're methodical, I'm saying you have to know the rules before you can forget the rules and let your real creativity come out.

Re: Creativity Is Much More Than 10k Hours of Deliberate Practice

#39

Post by anigbrowl »

gnaritas wrote: post #21
anigbrowl wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's great creative power in not knowing what you don't know and trying out random things because you have yet to acquire the knowledge of how things are 'supposed' to be done. Knowledge is valuable but at the same time I am so over the mastery movement, which is as much about excluding people from the club by making them think they're never ready enough as it is about giving them to tools to succeed. I started pa…

> There's great creative power in not knowing what you don't know and trying out random things because you have yet to acquire the knowledge of how things are 'supposed' to be done. That's something people who don't want to learn how things are done like to say, but isn't really true and is most often simply an excuse to avoid having to learn anything; it's commonly heard from amateur musicians for example in an atte…

I guess you missed the bit where I mentioned that I considered study as important as practice, and that I've already got a lot of professional experience in other branches of the arts, so the notion of deliberate practice is fine with me. What I'm doing differently this time is giving my own taste equal priority with received knowledge instead of beating myself up for failing to meet some external standard. Accepting that many paintings will vary from their original goals as the price of enjoyable experimentation has proved to be a good bargain. I just got tired of being my own worst critic in hopes of pre-emptively avoiding possible disapproval.

Re: Creativity Is Much More Than 10k Hours of Deliberate Practice

#40

Post by InclinedPlane »

madaxe_again wrote: post #4

Good article, but straight from the big book of the very obvious. Were this the case, children would have to spend months deliberately studying how to play. As the author says, deliberate study is antithetical to creativity. Creativity is spontaneous, playful, imaginative - and none of those things come from grinding. I have my best ideas usually while doing something totally unrelated.

It's both, and it's a fine balance. That's why high quality art is a comparative rarity.

If you practice too much, you will just be an automaton. Able to make but not to express. Your work will be derivative, uninteresting. There are literally millions of artists who have fallen into this trap.

If you practice too little then all your creativity will be for naught as you lack the skill and ability to translate it into an expression. Michelangelo, for example, was apprenticed when he was only 13, and by the time he made the Pieta he had been studying and working for 10 years.

The important thing is to find the balance. To practice as a means to hone a skill that is at your command, rather than your master.

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