The more I research and contemplate creativity, the more I find that this basic concept is just as elusive and complex as the word “art”—an idea which took me several hundred pages to define in my dissertation. One of the essential components of creativity is related to the concept of heuristics—briefly defined as an experimental process of discovery requiring originality and invention. Heuristics can also be explained as a rule of thumb, or an educated guess. Most importantly, in my opinion, heuristics are a process of learning through trial and error. Heuristic, creative problem solving is unconstrained by having to be “right” because that implies that there is a single correct solution to a given question. Using a heuristic method can be incredibly freeing—our errors inform us as much as our successes and all contribute to the formation of knowledge.
Perhaps one of the greatest examples of a heuristic thinker is Thomas Alva Edison. According to the Smithsonian Institution’s web page, his process of inventing the light bulb required testing over 1600 different materials for the filament before finally discovering something that would work—carbonized bamboo. In an interview, when asked how it felt to fail 1000 times, he reportedly said, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 1,000 ways that won’t work.” (To be fair, there are numerous different versions of this quote and the original source is somewhat elusive.) But among the most interesting things I learned about Edison on the Smithsonian’s page was this:
The Menlo Park Laboratory was "equipped with 2,500 bottles of chemicals lining the wall and a pipe organ at the back, which was the focal point for after hours singing and beer drinking". Many times the various scientists and technicians would stay up all night inventing, working and munching on ham, crackers, beer, soda, and cheese. About midnight, Edison himself would sit down at the pipe organ and everyone would join in for a sing along. Many years later his employees would say that these were the happiest years of their lives.
And this from a man with significant hearing loss! We recognize Edison for his inventions—an improved telegraph, a telephone transmitter, the phonograph, motion pictures, batteries, among many other things--but I have to wonder about the connection between his incredible creativity, divergent thinking, and his evident musical talents. I don’t believe this to be coincidence but evidence of what the arts, specifically music in this case, can do to enhance and support creativity.
Sir Ken Robinson, in a 2006 address to the annual TED Conference, emphasized the need for schools to value creativity as much as they value literacy and to stop placing the various subjects in a hierarchical order with math at the top and the arts, especially theatre and dance, at the bottom. Creativity, says Robinson, is something all children are born with, but it is systematically educated out of them in our schools. We stigmatize mistakes, teaching children that they must always find “the” correct answer, they must sit still and listen, they must follow the rules. (It’s a great lecture, which I highly recommend viewing. )
Robinson quoted Pablo Picasso as saying, “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist as he grows up.” I have to say that I’ve seen this in my own children. When my oldest son was a little boy, he loved nothing better than to turn on the stereo and dance—freely, unselfconsciously, with all the physical joy of childhood. He also loved to draw, and in elementary school he created an amazing pastel drawing on black construction paper, featuring a jungle scene. It had all of the elements you’d want to see in a work of visual art: line, shape, color, form, balance, harmony, rhythm… Really, I was blown away by it. Today, as a young adult, he does not dance. Well, to be completely honest, his bride did make him dance with her—once—but to the best of my knowledge that’s the extent of his dancing for the past 20 years or so. He also does not make artworks. Art-making was an artifact of his public school art classes that he did not choose to pursue further. His educational experiences focused on academic learning over creative thinking and even in his theatre classes in high school, the emphasis on memorization, writing papers, and taking tests overshadowed the opportunities for performing and tarnished what might have been a wonderful creative outlet. The sheer bliss of creative expression he experienced as a preschooler dancing in the living room or creating beautiful drawings in elementary school art class is just not part of his adult life. I don’t honestly know if he ever even doodles any more. Frankly, I’m deeply saddened by that.
I fully agree with Robinson that our educational system vastly under-emphasizes creativity and the intelligences that can be found in the arts. When entire schools and their staffs are judged as either successful or failing based only on the percentage of correct answers their students have produced on standardized tests, we can’t afford any chance that students might answer incorrectly or we risk our livelihoods as educators. Even in the university, where high-stakes testing has not yet pervaded the system, we find ourselves teaching students who are the product of No Child Left Behind, who have had to learn to override their innate capacity for creative expression, and unlocking this submerged ability is sometimes a daunting task both for the student and for the professors. Students want to be told what to do and how to do it, fearing to make a mistake, believing that there is just one right answer or one correct way of doing something.
But, as Robinson said, “If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.” Howard Gardner, the Harvard professor who pioneered Multiple Intelligence theory, similarly wrote:
Individuals who enjoy taking risks, who are not afraid of failure, who are attracted by the unknown, who are uncomfortable with the status quo are the ones who are likely to make creative discoveries.
Edison’s take on trial and error is a perfect example of re-framing the notion of failure. His unsuccessful attempts to find the perfect filament were not failures at all—they were simply steps along the road toward his eventual invention. His inventions, or their successors, surround us today and have enriched our lives beyond imagining. [Without the phonograph, would we have the iPod? Without motion pictures, would we have streaming video or cable television?] Besides Edison’s obvious triumphs, though, he had numerous inventions that were not successful, he lost big money on investments, and he worked on some projects for many years and never saw them to fruition. His was definitely not a life of unmitigated success. I propose that Edison’s ability to see “failure” as a learning experience is one of the most remarkable things about him, just as much as the inventions he created that shaped so much of the 20th century.
Failure is certainly not something to be embraced, but neither should it be feared or demonized. To a creative thinker, seeing each failure as another bit of knowledge building towards a solution--“If that way didn’t work, maybe this way would…” Or, “What if…”—is a mindset that the conventional thinkers of the world would do well to emulate. We do need to bear in mind, however, that it is not enough to take risks or to be willing to fail if you just give up after one or two attempts. The willingness to be wrong must also be linked to a determination to succeed, a drive to keep trying as many times as it takes until the goal is reached, the puzzle is solved, or the question is answered.
We often promote creativity for its instrumental value, judging its worth in terms of the economic impact of its applications. But the personal value found in creativity is just as important, if not more so. In creativity—in creating—there is joy. I found this to be true when I became a photographer and my family noticed a marked upswing in my overall happiness. The employees at Pixar practically have to be forced to go home, they’re so happy at work, and this same attitude of extreme job satisfaction is a hallmark of those who are deeply engaged in creative work of many kinds. If we go back to Edison and his midnight sing-alongs around the pipe organ in his lab, it exemplifies the joyful spontaneity of those who are fully and actively engaged in collaborative creativity.
When we do something easy or routine, there is little sense of accomplishment and similarly little happiness as a result of our activity. But when we’ve been immersed in a creative process that has engaged our whole being—mentally, physically, and emotionally—and have then experienced that intense moment of victory and satisfaction when the project comes to fruition or the problem is solved, it is a delight like none other. In avoiding the possibility of failure, we also deprive ourselves of something very, very sweet—the joy of creativity.
Perhaps one of the greatest examples of a heuristic thinker is Thomas Alva Edison. According to the Smithsonian Institution’s web page, his process of inventing the light bulb required testing over 1600 different materials for the filament before finally discovering something that would work—carbonized bamboo. In an interview, when asked how it felt to fail 1000 times, he reportedly said, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 1,000 ways that won’t work.” (To be fair, there are numerous different versions of this quote and the original source is somewhat elusive.) But among the most interesting things I learned about Edison on the Smithsonian’s page was this:
The Menlo Park Laboratory was "equipped with 2,500 bottles of chemicals lining the wall and a pipe organ at the back, which was the focal point for after hours singing and beer drinking". Many times the various scientists and technicians would stay up all night inventing, working and munching on ham, crackers, beer, soda, and cheese. About midnight, Edison himself would sit down at the pipe organ and everyone would join in for a sing along. Many years later his employees would say that these were the happiest years of their lives.
And this from a man with significant hearing loss! We recognize Edison for his inventions—an improved telegraph, a telephone transmitter, the phonograph, motion pictures, batteries, among many other things--but I have to wonder about the connection between his incredible creativity, divergent thinking, and his evident musical talents. I don’t believe this to be coincidence but evidence of what the arts, specifically music in this case, can do to enhance and support creativity.
Sir Ken Robinson, in a 2006 address to the annual TED Conference, emphasized the need for schools to value creativity as much as they value literacy and to stop placing the various subjects in a hierarchical order with math at the top and the arts, especially theatre and dance, at the bottom. Creativity, says Robinson, is something all children are born with, but it is systematically educated out of them in our schools. We stigmatize mistakes, teaching children that they must always find “the” correct answer, they must sit still and listen, they must follow the rules. (It’s a great lecture, which I highly recommend viewing. )
Robinson quoted Pablo Picasso as saying, “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist as he grows up.” I have to say that I’ve seen this in my own children. When my oldest son was a little boy, he loved nothing better than to turn on the stereo and dance—freely, unselfconsciously, with all the physical joy of childhood. He also loved to draw, and in elementary school he created an amazing pastel drawing on black construction paper, featuring a jungle scene. It had all of the elements you’d want to see in a work of visual art: line, shape, color, form, balance, harmony, rhythm… Really, I was blown away by it. Today, as a young adult, he does not dance. Well, to be completely honest, his bride did make him dance with her—once—but to the best of my knowledge that’s the extent of his dancing for the past 20 years or so. He also does not make artworks. Art-making was an artifact of his public school art classes that he did not choose to pursue further. His educational experiences focused on academic learning over creative thinking and even in his theatre classes in high school, the emphasis on memorization, writing papers, and taking tests overshadowed the opportunities for performing and tarnished what might have been a wonderful creative outlet. The sheer bliss of creative expression he experienced as a preschooler dancing in the living room or creating beautiful drawings in elementary school art class is just not part of his adult life. I don’t honestly know if he ever even doodles any more. Frankly, I’m deeply saddened by that.
I fully agree with Robinson that our educational system vastly under-emphasizes creativity and the intelligences that can be found in the arts. When entire schools and their staffs are judged as either successful or failing based only on the percentage of correct answers their students have produced on standardized tests, we can’t afford any chance that students might answer incorrectly or we risk our livelihoods as educators. Even in the university, where high-stakes testing has not yet pervaded the system, we find ourselves teaching students who are the product of No Child Left Behind, who have had to learn to override their innate capacity for creative expression, and unlocking this submerged ability is sometimes a daunting task both for the student and for the professors. Students want to be told what to do and how to do it, fearing to make a mistake, believing that there is just one right answer or one correct way of doing something.
But, as Robinson said, “If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.” Howard Gardner, the Harvard professor who pioneered Multiple Intelligence theory, similarly wrote:
Individuals who enjoy taking risks, who are not afraid of failure, who are attracted by the unknown, who are uncomfortable with the status quo are the ones who are likely to make creative discoveries.
Edison’s take on trial and error is a perfect example of re-framing the notion of failure. His unsuccessful attempts to find the perfect filament were not failures at all—they were simply steps along the road toward his eventual invention. His inventions, or their successors, surround us today and have enriched our lives beyond imagining. [Without the phonograph, would we have the iPod? Without motion pictures, would we have streaming video or cable television?] Besides Edison’s obvious triumphs, though, he had numerous inventions that were not successful, he lost big money on investments, and he worked on some projects for many years and never saw them to fruition. His was definitely not a life of unmitigated success. I propose that Edison’s ability to see “failure” as a learning experience is one of the most remarkable things about him, just as much as the inventions he created that shaped so much of the 20th century.
Failure is certainly not something to be embraced, but neither should it be feared or demonized. To a creative thinker, seeing each failure as another bit of knowledge building towards a solution--“If that way didn’t work, maybe this way would…” Or, “What if…”—is a mindset that the conventional thinkers of the world would do well to emulate. We do need to bear in mind, however, that it is not enough to take risks or to be willing to fail if you just give up after one or two attempts. The willingness to be wrong must also be linked to a determination to succeed, a drive to keep trying as many times as it takes until the goal is reached, the puzzle is solved, or the question is answered.
We often promote creativity for its instrumental value, judging its worth in terms of the economic impact of its applications. But the personal value found in creativity is just as important, if not more so. In creativity—in creating—there is joy. I found this to be true when I became a photographer and my family noticed a marked upswing in my overall happiness. The employees at Pixar practically have to be forced to go home, they’re so happy at work, and this same attitude of extreme job satisfaction is a hallmark of those who are deeply engaged in creative work of many kinds. If we go back to Edison and his midnight sing-alongs around the pipe organ in his lab, it exemplifies the joyful spontaneity of those who are fully and actively engaged in collaborative creativity.
When we do something easy or routine, there is little sense of accomplishment and similarly little happiness as a result of our activity. But when we’ve been immersed in a creative process that has engaged our whole being—mentally, physically, and emotionally—and have then experienced that intense moment of victory and satisfaction when the project comes to fruition or the problem is solved, it is a delight like none other. In avoiding the possibility of failure, we also deprive ourselves of something very, very sweet—the joy of creativity.