Creativity is often portrayed as something almost magical. Inspiration doesn’t grow; it strikes. Ideas arrive fully-formed and completely different to anything that’s come before. The creative types who come up with these ideas are framed as geniuses, a group unlike the rest of us, born with a unique set of abilities. While mere mortals can only copy what came before, creating variations on a theme, a few geniuses in every generation are capable of producing something entirely new from the ether.
That’s the theory, and there’s something reassuring about it. If you believe that you’re either a genius or you’re not, then once you’ve accepted that you’re not, there’s nothing you can do. It’s like the moment you realize that you’ll never be tall enough to play for the Lakers. You might be able to watch and appreciate what others can do but you can blame your genes for not allowing you to do the same thing.
The problem is that creativity doesn’t work that way. It isn’t inborn. It’s the result of time and effort and focus, and above all, consumption. A novel, creative idea might be a force that builds a new path but first it has to know what’s on the paths that came before it. Being creative in any field requires a knowledge of previous attempts. Any creative person has to consume previous productions in there area if only to know what not to produce. Filmmakers have to watch movies. Musicians have to listen to music. Painters have to go to galleries and read about the history of art. Authors need to read at least as much as they write. Photographers need to know what Man Ray and Ansel Adams have done, and advertising executives need to know which ads had the greatest effect, generated the most discussion, and gave products the biggest boost.
Consumption shows us where a creative field has been, and it also gives us the technical skills to take it in new directions in the future. It builds mastery as well as knowledge. A period of consumption is an essential part of any creative endeavor.
10,000 Hours Is a Very Long Time
That period of consumption though can be very long and intensive. The best known exponent of the importance of consumption is Malcolm Gladwell, whose book Outliers: The Story of Success argued that to become an expert in any field requires 10,000 hours of practice. He cites violin students, Bill Gates, The Beatles, and a host of other high-achievers whose climb to complete mastery of their field took 10,000 hours.
It’s only after playing the violin for 10,000 hours that you have enough ability to tackle any composition put in front of you, and have the knowledge necessary to create new compositions or play them in a new way. It was only after performing together for 10,000 hours in Hamburg that The Beatles were enough of a unit to start thinking differently about the tracks they were writing and the songs they were performing—and write something like The White Album. It was only after he had spent 10,000 hours creating bugs that Bill Gates was ready to create a new operating system from scratch.
It sounds reasonable. Michelangelo might have been both a genius and one of the most creative people who ever lived but he didn’t pick up a hammer and chisel one day and carve David out a pile of rock. He was first apprenticed to Ghirlandaio at the age of thirteen and also worked for the sculptor Bertoldo Di Giovanni. He might have been only 29 when he finished the Statue of David, one of the greatest works of the Renaissance, but he had already been immersed in the arts for more than fifteen years. We don’t know exactly how many hours he put in before he started planning the statue but in creating David he built on the art that came before him, adding a Renaissance sensibility to the Greco-Roman forms that artists of his time so admired. His work required a deep knowledge of those earlier creations. All artists, all creatives—and everyone else for that matter—continue the work created by others. They need to know what those others made, how they made them and what they were trying to do.
Gladwell was talking about iteration rather than consumption, and his goal was mastery rather than creativity, but iteration is itself a form of consumption. A violinist who plays for 10,000 hours has to play something, and until he has mastered his art he can’t create something new—or at least nothing new that’s worth hearing. Similarly, a photographer might spend 10,000 hours taking photographs before she can claim to have mastered the craft but those hours will be spent shooting in styles and creating compositions first pioneered by previous photographers.
The first question to ask about Gladwell’s idea though is whether the figure is right. Do we really need to practice and consume something for 10,000 hours before we can claim mastery of it?
In fact, the idea and the number may be too simplistic. Anders Ericsson, whose own research on violin students was cited by Gladwell as evidence of the need for 10,000 hours of practice has called the assertion “a provocative generalization.” The violinists that he studied had put in an average of 7,400 hours. Half of the best violinists hadn’t come close to 10,000 hours.
It shouldn’t be too surprising that a round figure of 10,000 hours was always more about producing a catchy and memorable rule than about accurately measuring the real number of hours required to generate mastery. But “practice” is a broad term as well. Gladwell’s claim has been criticized for implying that anyone can achieve mastery if they’re just prepared to put in the hours. What happens during those hours is less important to him. For Gladwell, the amount of practice itself is everything.
In fact, the quality of the practice matters too. It’s how the consumption—or its iteration—takes place that’s crucial. Other researchers have found that deliberate practice predicts 26% of the skill variation in games like chess, 21% in music, and 18% in sports. It’s not enough to just wave a bow about, scrawl some pictures, or craft some sentences. You have to actually think about what you’re doing, identify what you’re doing wrong, and understand what others have done when they went through the same process.
It’s notable too that that even careful practice only affects little more than a quarter of the skill, at most, that someone builds up through practice. The rest does rely on a certain amount of genetics, on background, on resources, on environment, and on personal psychology as well. Consumption is vital to achieve mastery, and mastery is essential for creativity, but more is required to master a subject than simply 10,000 hours of practice.
Does Mastery Lead to Creativity?
The second question, though, is whether mastery always leads to creativity. Consumption and practice might be necessary to become a master of a field—and mastery of that field is necessary to be creative in that field—but masters of a field aren’t always creative in it. Or at least their creativity may take a limited form.
Yo Yo Ma, for example, is one of the most skilled cellists in the world. He’s certainly put more than 10,000 hours into playing his instrument. He’s capable of playing each of Bach’s six cello suites one after the other, faultlessly, and without seeing the notes. But despite his deep knowledge of music, and his mastery of the cello, he hasn’t written his own cello suites. His creativity is limited to his interpretation of them and the way he performs them. He leaves the composition to other musicians. They may have less mastery of their instrument, but they do have a better understanding of how to write music, if not how to play it.
In his book The Creative Curve: How to Develop the Right Idea at the Right Time, Allen Gannett tells the story of Ted, a clerk at Arizona Video Cassettes West. Ted’s family was chaotic. He had four siblings, and they all lived in a small house in Phoenix. He would often escape by visiting his grandmother where he would watch movies and television. Ted eventually found work in a local video store, where he told himself that he would watch every single movie on the shelves.
The result of all that consumption was that Ted became what Gannett described as a “human recommendation” machine. Instead of browsing the shelves on a Saturday afternoon looking for something to watch, customers would line up to talk to Ted. He would ask them what movies they liked and make accurate recommendations. Someone who had enjoyed a Woody Allen movie would be introduced to Albert Brooks. Someone who enjoyed Arnold Schwarzenegger movies might also like Dolph Lundgren films.
But while Ted had watched hundreds or thousands of movies and understood how to categorize them, and could make creative suggestions about what other should watch, he wasn’t a movie maker. He had never made a movie of his own. Just as Yo Yo Ma will have listened to hours and hours of music and played for thousands of hours too, but never written his own composition, so Ted had put in the consumption hours without ever putting the benefits of that consumption into creation. He became a master of movie-watching but not a master of movie-making.
Consumption is Just the Beginning
For Allen Gannett, consumption is a necessary part of creativity but it’s only one element of what he calls the “creative curve.” As well as consuming vast amounts of the works in your field—whether that’s movies, music, or anything else—creative types also have to imitate. They have to create what came before them so that they can understand where the field has been. Just as The Beatles had to play a lot of 1950s rock music in German nightclubs before they could create Sergeant Pepper’s so anyone who wants to do something new first has to be able to do what’s already old. They have to consume and then they have to practice. Yo Yo Ma has consumed written music and practiced playing but he hasn’t practiced writing music.
Gannett also says that creativity relies on creative communities. Creative types feed off each other. Writing circles help authors to see where they’re going wrong and which aspects of their work are having the strongest effect. Comedians at comedy clubs discuss which jokes work best and share smart ways to handle hecklers. A community is an essential element in a creative process because all creativity is eventually judged by an audience. The community is the first focus group in place of that audience.
Finally, Gannett talks about iteration, changing slightly the thing you’re imitating so that it becomes something new.
It’s really at that point that creativity is born and where new things begin. The 10,000 hours of practice that Malcolm Gladwell describes might not actually be 10,000 hours, and it might not even be practice. It might lead to mastery but without adding imitation, community support and iteration to the mix, it doesn’t lead to creativity.
None of this is to say that artists who perform the works of others aren’t engaging in acts of creativity. It takes both skill and innovation to bring something new to a performance of Bach or Shakespeare. But if you want to write like Bach or Shakespeare, or even just create ads or marketing copy that do things that other commercials haven’t done, you do need to consume what came before then put in thousands of hours of practice—and accept that even those thousands of hours of practice are just the start.
Creativity isn’t a spark, and new ideas don’t just come out of nowhere. They’re the result of years of consumption, thousand of hours of practice, and a process of iteration that takes something old and builds something new.
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