Picasso, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Paul Klee had to learn their craft. Pariser’s study of their juvenilia reveals that they struggled, as all children do, to translate concrete objects into recognizable and well-limned forms on paper or canvas.150 Similar patterns appear in poets. Gruber found the same rule in the development of Darwin’s work, and Gardner found it in the histories of eminent creators from seven major intelligences: Pablo Picasso (visual-spatial), Mahatma Gandhi (interpersonal), Albert Einstein (logical-mathematical), Sigmund Freud (intrapersonal), Martha Graham (bodily-kinesthetic), Igor Stravinsky (musical), and T.S. Eliot (linguistic).151
A major characteristic of world-class creators is that they engage in “deliberate practice.”152 Jazz musicians improvise so skillfully because their repertoire is full of formulas derived from imitating recordings.153 Concert pianists repeat, hour after hour, the scales and exercises that most of us would abandon as tedious and boring. Olympic ice skaters begin as early as three or four years of age and clock so many hours on the ice that they often resort to tutors or home schooling to steal practice time from what would otherwise be seven or eight hours in a conventional classroom.
John Lennon used to become irritated when people expressed amazement at the speed of the Beatles’ development. They didn’t know, he said, of the many years spent assembling the band, doing practice sessions, earning their dues in out-of-the-way dives. In his study of the Beatles’ creative development, Weisberg meticulously documents what all their fans know: that a long, hard apprenticeship preceded the first hit record. Weisberg estimates that between 1957 and 1962, the Beatles spent over two thousand hours on stage performing, including four hundred jobs besides their marathon sessions in Hamburg. The creativity of the Lennon-McCartney songwriting partnership also exemplifies the ten-year rule. Their most celebrated album was Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, recorded ten years after the formation of the original band, the Quarry Men. Their other greatest hits were composed in 1965-1966.154
2.Before beginning a session, cultivate the Flow State.
For centuries artists have been creating, often without knowing how. Paul McCartney says, “I’ve often felt it’s not me doing it really.”155 Isabel Allende reports a similar experience: “It is as if I have this terrible confidence that something beyond myself knows why I am writing this book.”156
These creators have contacted the “a-field,” the realm of all possibilities. Isabel Allende does a good job of describing the idea simply:
I think that we are all particles of some sort of universal spirit . . . It’s everywhere. You’re just a particle of something that’s beyond you. Then you understand the legends, the myths. You understand why so many people at a certain point do the same thing or dream the same thing or hope for the same thing or fear the same thing. Because you’re just part of the wholeness.157
Feeling “part of the wholeness” is what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi would define as the Flow State. During “flow” you are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that you will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.”158 Here are some of his thoughts about “flow”:
•It creates happiness.
•It is achieved by focusing your attention on some task and staying in the present, without regard for future rewards. You have learned “to focus attention at will, to be oblivious to distractions, to concentrate for as long as it takes to achieve a goal, and not longer.”159
The enjoyment created by “flow” occurs when
The activity should be challenging but not frustrating. You have the sense of operating at the peak of your powers. Abraham Maslow might say you are having a peak experience: a blissful, joyous moment in which you feel most alive.161
We enter flow when we are mindful: when we place our awareness squarely in the present, detached from past memories and future hopes, detached from the ego, that persistent yammering voice in the head. It is ego that makes us worry whether we are good enough, whether the work will be good enough, whether it will satisfy the gatekeepers in our field or even ourselves.
Eckhart Tolle has written a profound and delightful exposé of the ego’s machinations. One of its tricks is to resist the present moment:
To the ego, the present moment is, at best, only useful as a means to an end. It gets you to some future moment that is considered more important, even though the future never comes except as the present moment and is therefore never more than a thought in your head. In other words, you are never fully here because you are always busy trying to get elsewhere.162
For the creator, the ego is an irritant that interrupts the flow state with thoughts of me. Is my work good enough? Will the boss like it? Will the art gallery buy it? Will the publisher give me a contract?
Amabile’s research has shown that during complicated procedures, a focus on evaluation results in a less creative product for two reasons: it “can divert attention away from the task itself” and “make the individual reluctant to take risks.”163 The explanation is simple. When we are focused on ourselves, we cannot possibly be focused on the product. When we are focused on me, the separate and little I, we cannot possibly be focused on the universal field that is trying to help us shape the work. We must let go in order to create. We must identify with a voice and a flow that is bigger than ourselves.
But how?
One way is to practice mindfulness, or what Buddhist meditation calls “bare awareness.”164 Place yourself fully in the present. This may be the hardest thing for anyone to do. I once took a retreat with Ram Dass, and he had us do a walking meditation. I don’t recall how long it was, but I do know that it seemed light years longer than it was. The practice was simple. We had to walk with excruciating slowness, taking as much as a minute simply to put one foot down and being totally aware of the foot in its slow descent. It is one of the hardest things that I have ever been asked to do. But at the end of the meditation, I was totally there. I had no chattering ego asking me what was coming next, ruminating over what had just happened, connecting my mind with everything separate from the here and now. I was simply there. The only other time when I have had such an experience has been during engaged writing or deep meditation.
In
