Regression Therapy - How to Be Creative Parts 1 and 2 Recap

Transcript

Nobody give me sin for this That’s reason why I try both If all is gold I can see a thousand times of this Once upon a time there was a young girl called Vera who lived in Cologne, Germany. Vera loved jazz, but Cologne wasn’t exactly a destination for jazz scene-sters. Unperturbed, 18-year-old Vera took a punt and invited American virtuoso improvisational jazz pianist Keith Jarrah to come and perform in her jazz-deprived city. To her surprise and joy, he agreed. On the 24th of January 1975, after a long grueling drive and suffering from back pain, Jarrah arrived for his 11.30pm performance at the Cologne Opera House. He took a look at the crappy, broken-down, out-of-tune piano that the opera house had provided and walked out again, refusing to perform. Jarrah had asked for a Boesendorfer 290 Imperial Grand Piano. He was very particular about this. The opera house staff had interpreted that as some Boesendorfer piano or whatever and rolled out a dusty old practice piano that they found backstage. So basically Jarrah, somewhat understandably, pulled the whole how can I create under these conditions routine. Vera was in a tight spot and 1,400 German jazz fans were waiting expectantly in Cologne Opera House. This was a disaster. So Vera did what any self-respecting teenager would do in such conditions. She badgered him until she got what she wanted. Against all odds, Jarrah took pity on the wainsoaked. I’m imagining it was raining for dramatic effect, teenager, and agreed to play. He hadn’t even managed to eat much after his long drive and he was tired and in pain. By the time he re-entered the auditorium, the piano had been tuned, but a bunch of the keys weren’t working and it wasn’t nearly big enough to be heard across an auditorium of that size. Jarrah assumed he was about to give the worst performance of his career, but the German kids seemed so miserable and they’d already set up the recording equipment. So what the hell? The thing is, Jarrah was a genuinely prodigious pianist. He knew his way around the piano. The limitations of the offending piano forced him to be much more creative in his delivery, both in terms of his note choices, but he also had to hammer at the keys in a way that he wouldn’t usually, just so it could be heard. The resulting performance, which was recorded and can be tracked down easily on all the usual streaming platforms, is considered nothing short of legendary. One of the most revered, venerated, copied and best-selling jazz recordings of all time, it propelled Jarrah from being a preternaturally talented upstart to being a major force in modern jazz. In jazz terms, this most definitely counts as a fairy tale. What lessons are there to be learned from this story? I think there are a few. There’s probably quite a lot to be said for proper preparation if you want a quiet life and completely conversely, the oldswell that ends well. But it’s what this story and some others which I will touch upon tell us about creativity that I want to focus on. I’m actually going to spend a couple of episodes talking about the nature of creativity. Maybe more. Because I think it’s essential to understand the role that creativity plays in the therapeutic power of art and the creative process. As I’ve said before, if you can’t loosen up a bit, making art isn’t going to feel relaxing and fulfilling. It’s going to feel stressful. And relaxation, flow and creativity all come from the same source, the same spring of magical mystical unicorn juice. But the experience and understanding of creativity depends heavily on context and your place in the lifelong creative journey. Put simply, if you’re obsessed about doing things right, then you’ll always be doing something wrong and you’ll almost certainly end up doing the same thing over and over again. Music, and particularly jazz music, is a good place to start here because during improvisation creativity happens in real time and in full view. Now I should point out at this point that I’m no expert on jazz or even particularly a jazz fan. There just so happens to be a few characters and stories I’ve come across that help make the points that I need to make. And more generally, jazz, as opposed to say country music, puts quite a high premium on creativity. Take jazz saxophonist John Coltrane. He is considered one of the most important jazz musicians of all time, largely for his improvisational abilities. He reputedly practiced for 16 hours a day. He was good at his instrument. But he was also renowned for his creative approach to the saxophone and to jazz music, and indeed music in general. He was your archetypal innovator. John Coltrane changed the jazz genre. He was awarded the special Pulitzer Prize in 2007, citing his masterful improvisation, supreme musicianship and iconic centrality to the history of jazz. He was even made a saint by the African Orthodox Church. Does this suggest that you need to be a virtuoso to be able to improvise or innovate? If we think of innovators in other fields, they also seem to be crazy talented prodigies and or big brains. Think Einstein, Da Vinci, Bach, Bowie, Bill Gates, probably some sports people. I don’t pay any attention to sports. Ronnie O’Sullivan fits the bill, I guess. But there are plenty of virtuosos out there that neither improvise nor innovate. Top tier concert violinists, for example, may bring innovative flourishes to their renditions of others’ works. But little in the way of raw creativity, much of which will have come from the composer. Walk into your local art gallery and you might find some supremely able painters, but how many of them are using that ability to pump out fairly pedestrian landscapes? Every field is jammed to the gills of also-rands that pump out solid work, but did little to really move the dial in their respective fields. No, Coltrane didn’t change jazz because he was a boss saxophonist. He had some other secret sauce. So what did Coltrane do that was so disruptive to the jazz genre? Well, strictly speaking, nothing, at least not alone. He was part of a movement that included another pioneering jazz legend, Miles Davis, which innovated a form of jazz known as modal jazz. The musical theory of what modal jazz actually is is somewhat brain-bending, so I’ll not attempt to characterise it here other than via a rudimentary description. I’ll put some links in the show notes for anyone masochistic enough to want to know more. Put simply, most music uses chord changes to drive the melody and the movements within the piece. Modal jazz instead uses modes, which are basically scales of the sort that you were forced to learn during those piano lessons that you did when you were a kid and that petered out because they were so dull. Often, modal jazz is performed as lengthy jams over a single chord, with melody and structure defined by changes in the modes used. I think, anyway, it’s all very confusing. Just go listen to it. Listen to Coltrane’s magnum opus, 1965’s A Love Supreme, and you’ll get a sense of it. It’s easier to just listen to it than to try and describe what’s actually going on. It represents a musical intersection of hyperminimalism and hypercomplexity. It’s the music of dichotomies and extremes. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but I’ve no interest in the conversation about whether this is style over substance, whether enjoyability or even listenability has been sacrificed in the name of technical prowess or the pursuit of pure, cold, artistic abstraction. Many people love this music. I’ve included a link in the show notes of a podcast where a couple of guys get something akin to sexually aroused listening to the aforementioned A Love Supreme. That whole episode’s worth a listen, as they state various views on the nature of art that are very much congruent with my own and therefore a good corollary to this and future episodes. As an aficionado of the most wonderful music form known as death metal, I have little time for views that, for example, assert that melody is an essential component for something wishing to be classified as music. That said, this particular debate is one that I’m going to come back to at some point, maybe as part of this series. I guess we’ll find out. Back to Coltrane. Far from being cold or aloofly technical, A Love Supreme is specifically and intentionally an act of worship, an act of love. It is the document of Coltrane’s reverence for both the transcendent powers of jazz music, but also of God, him, stroke, herself. And this is where we start to glimpse Coltrane’s secret source. For he was both obsessive and eclectic. He was a scholar and a spiritualist. Coltrane was a man of extremes, of contradictions. Race is a Christian. He largely considered himself a Christian and was by all accounts a true believer, a profoundly spiritual person. Yet he frequently integrated beliefs, doctories and practices from other diverse world religion into his own worldview. This included Kabbalah, Hinduism, Islam and Tibetan and Zen Buddhism. This inevitably found its way into his music. This compulsive culture and spiritual kleptomania was part of his core approach to music. Coltrane, in terms of techniques, approaches, themes and motifs from all over the world, including from African music and particularly India. Collaborating with legendary Beatles approved sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar, who by some accounts thought Coltrane was nuts. And all this might seem to imply that he did this alone. But Coltrane worked with some world class musicians. Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk and Duke Ellington are among the names that you’ve likely heard of. Each, no doubt, a melting pot of creative collaboration. But it’s with his long time bandmates, the Coltrane Quartet, where the magic really happened. When Coltrane, double bassist Jimmy Garrison, drummer Elvin Jones and pianist McCoy Tyner got in a room together, something really special happened. Coltrane’s compositions were sparse at best and offered little in the way of direction to fellow bandmates, instead relying on a shared understanding of each other’s style, audible and visual cues and a deep understanding of the jazz art form. What emerges is a semi-improvised melange of diverse music styles that lead to innovation in real time. He and his band were making creative leaps unconsciously as they recorded. For Coltrane, this was like prayer, or perhaps more accurately, meditation. He and his bandmates could achieve chance-like states of pure mindfulness. This is common among musicians, particularly while improvising. But these guys weren’t just in a world of their own, although sometimes it might sound like it. But they were in constant telepathy like communication, reacting to each other’s playing in real time in ways that are seamless to the rest of us. I’m not trying to sell you on free-form avant-garde jazz here. I’m very far from being sold on it myself. It’s the sort of music that I want to like, but largely leaves me cold. But I can hear their passion and their focus. It’s hard to find another art form that makes the creative process this manifest. It’s hard to pass for us mere mortals for sure, and the theory of it is largely beyond me to understand, let alone explain. But as I’ve suggested, there’s something to be learned here about the process of creativity. So let me summarize some of the things that are going on here that seem to be driving creativity. One, ability or mastery within the medium. We’ll come back to this one a fair bit. I think this requirement is overstated, but a good understanding of the medium is essential. As Coltrane himself stated, you can play a shoestring if you’re sincere. Number two, conviction, or passion, or maybe authenticity. Although the latter is, as I’ve stated before, to my mind, overused and nebulous as a concept. What we really mean here is that sense that the artist really believes in what they’re doing, that they care deeply and approach it with zeal and enthusiasm. I’d rather spend time with a passionate trained spotter than a cynical or ingenuine classical composer. Number three, eclecticism, aka curiosity, an open mind. From my perspective, this is as important as conviction. Coltrane didn’t innovate by doing the same thing over and over. He bought influences from wherever he found it, and he searched far and wide. Part of the reason that some of his stylistic flourishes feel familiar now is because he seamlessly integrated them into his own style than everyone else copied him. Number four, input from and collaboration with others. Coltrane collaborated far and wide, as well as with his hardcore of regular bandmates. You can’t help but, if only by osmosis, absorb approaches and ideas from other people who you work with, and they in turn absorb from you. They take your ideas and expand on them based on their own experiences and interactions, and then when you work with them again, you absorb back your own ideas, but now expanded, mutated, and maybe even improved. Even if you collaborate with someone who you end up feeling is a complete waste of space, you still take some knowledge of how not to do things away from that experience. Number five, the zone. That mystical state of hyperfocus, more formally known as flow states, is where the magic of creativity really comes spilling out. That’s not to say you can’t be creative at any point. I’ve come up with new approaches before while doing mundane tasks like stretching canvases and then cocking it up. But as I’ve said earlier, this is where jazz shines as you can see innovation as it happens. With those five elements, we can go a very long way to explaining where creativity comes from. These are the attributes or perhaps conditions that need to be in place for creativity to occur. Not all of them need to be there for innovation to occur. For example, it’s perfectly possible for someone who never leaves a house or sees anyone else to be creative or innovative, but it’s a lot less likely. Conversely, putting all these things in place does not guarantee creativity. But there’s something missing here and it goes back to the story I started off with. It’s at work with Coltrane and his compatriots just in a more subtle and routine way. And that is randomness, chaos, unpredictability, luck. In the case of Jarrett, the luck was, on the surface at least, bad and apparent setback. Really, it was just an unexpected constraint which forced the pianist to think differently. In the case of Coltrane and Friends, chaos was their whole approach. Outside of some basic melodic and structural guidelines, each band member did not know what they were going to play, let alone what everyone else was going to. By going in somewhat blind, they were deliberately imposing constraints, the influence of which they were unable to predict, then trusting their own instincts and ability to not only account for these but to capitalise on them. So with my original list, mastery, conviction and open mind, collaboration and focus, you have a set of ingredients that can be put together in varying measures to cook up something different. But to really mix things up, you need a sprinkling of chaos. It’s like making your omelette with all the usual stuff, then picking up something random from the fridge or pantry to add in every time you make it to see what works. Sure, some omelettes will end up being choked down or just thrown in the bin, but once in a while you’ll create something magical. So chaos isn’t one of the core ingredients, it’s more like a method or seasoning. It can be applied to any or all of the ingredients at any point in the process, in any amount. It could be argued that as far as creativity is concerned, it is the magic unicorn juice. In 1637, French mathematician Pierre de Fermat scribbled the following in the margins of his copy of the ancient Greek mathematics tome Arithmetica. It is impossible to separate a cube into two cubes, or a fourth power into two fourth powers, or in general any higher power than the second into two like powers. I’ve discovered a truly marvellous proof of this which this margin is too narrow to contain. Pithy, eh? The thing is, it turned out he had a point. What he didn’t leave us with is the actual proof, which if it ever existed at all, he took to the grave with him. This became known as Fermat’s last theorem, or sometimes Fermat’s conjecture, and it’s a problem that many of history’s best mathematicians spent the next few centuries attempting to solve. The slightly more concise but equally vexing form of the conjecture is usually stated as such. No three positive integers, A, B and C, satisfy the equation A to the power of n plus B to the power of n equals C to the power of n for any integer value of n greater than 2. Basically, if you take two sugar cubes and glued them to three other sugar cubes, no amount of manipulating them short of crushing them up and reforming the resulting pile of sugar will produce a bigger cube. The conjecture states that as long as A and B are different, no amount of cubes will create that mega cube. This then extrapolates into n-dimensional spaces. No value of n will achieve this either, and we get into some seriously mind-bending territory. Simple, right? Okay, maybe not. Just formulating those sentences made my head hurt. I’m no mathematician, but I understand from reading books on the internet that the maths people thought this was a pretty important problem to solve, in maths terms, to find a proof for. Some thought it impossible. Possible or not, whoever came up with said proof would not do so with sugar cubes, except maybe to put in their coffee, which they would need a lot of. Oxford mathematics professor Andrew Wiles had been fascinated by this problem since he was a kid. In 1986, he decided he was going to try and solve it. For the next seven years, Wiles basically shut himself away from the world and attempted, in secrecy, to find the proof, only letting his wife in on the plan. In 1993, Wiles thought he finally had it and unveiled his secret quest and his groundbreaking proof to the maths world. His proof pulled in diverse, seemingly unrelated areas of mathematics into a highly original and elegant proof. Hurrah! But within months, it was pointed out by others in the maths community that there were errors in his proof. Not just little ones either. Well, the errors are actually quite small, but their implications threaten to render Wiles’ proof worthless. Wiles was devastated, but unperturbed, he returned to his desk and with the help of fellow mathematician Richard Taylor, he attempted to fix the problem, only to fail again. In 1994, Wiles was about to give up on the whole damn sorry business, but decided to give his work one final full-on look. Sitting at his desk, he had a sudden flash of inspiration, seemingly out of nowhere, that the answer lay in the fact that his final approach didn’t work meant that one of his early approaches from three years prior would work. He later said, Yay for Andy! Wiles published his final proof, which was again put through its paces by the maths community, and this time found to contain no errors. And thus he has proved Fermat’s Last Theorem, 358 years after it was conjectured. Wiles became pretty famous after this. Many books have been written about his epic quest at his desk with a pen and a pad, and probably a blackboard. Mathematicians love a blackboard, don’t they? Why am I talking about maths? Well, I decided this is going to be a maths podcast from now on, so suck it up. Only joking. I did study maths for a bit, and I need some maths for my job, but I find it punishingly hard, and the road to mastery seemed impossibly long. You see, as Wiles proved, along with Fermat’s conjecture, you can be creative with maths. Actually, it’s an inherently creative field, but you need a certain type of brain and a lot of study to get to the point where you can actually be creative. There’s a couple of themes I want to pull from this story. One, the idea of creativity as problem-solving, and two, creativity and mastery. The latter I’m going to cover in the next episode of this series, and I’ll no doubt return to Wiles’ story at least a little. But in this episode, I’m going to talk about problem-solving because I think it’s one of the most important aspects of creativity. In part one of this series, I talked about the core facets of creativity. Mastery, conviction, an open mind, collaboration and focus, with a sprinkling of chaos for good measure. These are things that need to be in place for creativity to occur. But what exactly is creativity? What things do we actually do when we’re being creative? If we look at the example of Wiles, you might conclude that it is a flash of divine inspiration, either that or the act of locking yourself away for seven years. But throughout that seven years, he made countless creative leaps. Wiles’ contribution wasn’t that one inspired idea. That was just the last inspired idea required to get from A to B. Wiles’ genius was pulling lots of seemingly unrelated areas of math together to make something new and to solve a problem many thought unsolvable. Wiles’ solitary journey was really a string of intuitive leaps, a blanket of lily pads on upon the size of the universe. He simply chose the right ones to leap to. This is creativity. You pick a destination and you figure out how to get there. More specifically, you pick a problem and you solve that problem one challenge at a time. The destination may or may not be important. You might not arrive at the destination that you originally intended, but that’s not a problem. As I’ve said countless times on this podcast, it’s a journey that matters. And this journey is pretty much always about problem solving. So how do we get from solving tough or for that matter easy math problems to the ephemeral, mercurial, mystical practice we call art? It’s simple. Artists are problem solvers just like mathematicians. You dream up an idea of something you want to create, but that’s just where the job of being a creator starts. The real job, the 99% of perspiration, to quote Thomas Edison, is problem solving. What problems are you solving? How am I going to represent this beautiful landscape I have in front of me? How am I going to represent this picture of a human? How am I going to capture the essence of what I’m looking at? How am I going to take this idea of a story in my head and turn it into a book or a play or a movie? How am I going to photograph this tree and really capture the essence and the mood and the character of the tree? How do I get my latest collection of artworks in front of some punters so I can sell some and therefore afford to do more artworks? And I struggle to think of any creative enterprise that isn’t mostly about problem solving. And I would argue that if you are not put in a position of having to solve a problem, you’re probably not being creative. You’re likely being fairly derivative. Even then, it’s still about solving problems. Take those caricature artists that sit on Montmartre in Paris or on Leicester Square in London doing caricatures of tourists. It’s all very formulaic. I’m not knocking their skills. These folks are really amazing at what they do, but it doesn’t seem particularly creative. But every time someone turns up, they have to solve the problem of how to characterise them in a way that is humorous yet complementary but not insulting before risking a punch in the face from some doting and muscular dad. This is no mean feat, especially when you consider the bizarre effect that those cities seem to have on people’s brains. But for anyone attempting to push boundaries, either their own or those of their medium, then problem solving constitutes the bulk of the effort since ideas tend to come quickly. It might take you a while to develop them, but as we saw with Wiles, that’s just part of the problem solving process. So take something it usually takes a long time to develop, like a novel, perhaps a long one or a series. The arc of the thing, or at least the starting point or the ending point or the meaning you’re trying to convey, tend to arrive fairly effortlessly. Maybe you had an idea many years before and are just getting around to drafting it. You’ve probably been developing that idea on and off for the intervening time. Much of it might change when you get stuck into it, but you’re going in with a pretty good sense of what’s what. That’s the impetus to start fleshing out characters, figuring out problems with the plot, world building, all that fun stuff. And what are you doing? You’re problem solving. The problem of how to make your characters relatable so that the reader cares what happens to them, how to make the setting believable while also leaving the possibility for something out of the ordinary to happen, some drama. Figuring out how to structure it to get the reader emoting at the right places for the right reasons. All of this before you start solving the problem of which words to use. Then you solve that problem one word at a time. And when you do a second draft, you solve the problem of the words you chose in the first draft being the wrong ones and the fact that your main character is detestable twat. Oops. In between drafts, maybe you find yourself on a hilltop in the Lake District admiring a staggering view. You want to capture it with the watercolour paints you handily brought with you. Maybe this is the cover for your new book. But you still need to think about how you’re going to render it, what colours you’re going to use, what colour intensity, how you’re going to mix them to get the right hues to capture that ethereal light, the brush you’re going to use, where you’re going to put each blob of paint. And since you’ve only got a portable watercolour set with you and the light is rapidly changing as the weather takes a typical English turn for the dreary, you now have to solve the problem of how to do it all in the time you have left with the materials you have at your disposal, as well as getting back to your car before you and your artwork become a soggy mess. I don’t think people tend to think about the creative process in this way, perhaps because framing it all as problem solving feels a bit mechanical, a bit unromantic, lacking magic and wonder. And for those who don’t practice creativity but just consume it, that’s fine and perhaps to the best. The shrouded methods a magician uses to create that spectacular illusion is always mechanical and rightly kept secret. But if you look behind the curtain, the magic is lost. You’re just left with something that’s clever, which is no fun at all, and a sense it’s been had. But from a creator’s perspective I don’t see this process as mechanical or prosaic at all. The problem solving bit is where the magic really happens, where the fun is to be found. This might be a problem with nomenclature, maybe if instead of boring old problem solving we think of it as path finding, questing, adventuring, conquering, we’d better capture the wonder and delight of it all. But it is all of these things too. It’s just that when you boil it down to its rudiments, it is what it is, solving one problem after another. The corollary to the inspiration fallacy is the misconception that you have an idea, then you bust out your instruments or your materials or your laptop, and you make that thing appear, like you plug a USB lead into your ear and a stunning sculpture is delivered via your 3D printer. As I say, I’m going to come back to the subject of mastery as a supposed prerequisite for creativity. But for the purposes of this conversation, people seem to assume that we’re always at the level of mastery needed to achieve our musings and that we just flip a switch and the creation appears. Most folks seem to forget the sometimes long, often wonderful, sometimes painful and usually massively rewarding bit that happens in the middle. But the act of creation isn’t rewarding if there’s not some challenge involved. And if there’s some challenge, then by definition, your existing mastery needs some work to get to where you’re trying to get to. And that journey might include many false starts and failed attempts that ended up in the bin. Yes, pumping out another workman-like landscape may be mindful and relaxing and a reason to go and sit on a hill with a baguette and a hip flask, but it’s not the magic bit. That’s just a bit where you leave your poor overworked brain alone for a bit to simmer down. And without that challenge, we never progress. If you want to be able to lift really heavy weights, then you need to start by lifting much lighter weights and gradually work your way up as your muscles build. Every time you add another kilo, you’re challenging yourself, your muscles, your resolve. It’s the same with creation. It’s like a muscle. Use it or lose it. The more you use it, the more powerful it gets. And how do you know if you’ve progressed? Well, the next thing you do is better than the last. Things take less time. Your endeavor starts to feel less like a toil, less forced and more like a labor of love, a celebration. And I think the consumer of your work can tell when you’ve really challenged yourself. It’s not necessarily by mastery of your materials or perfection in rendering your subject. Challenging works have an aura, a certain quality. They have the opposite feel to a Bob Ross knock it out in 30-minute landscape by numbers. The opposite of elaborate but soulless hodgepodge quickly rustles together using mid-journey or Dali. And I know I keep banging on about Gen AI, but it really does bring into focus many facets of real creativity. I’m all for using language models or AI image generation as part of the creative process to take the legwork out of outlining a script or to create a mock-up for the painting you want to make. There are many ways in which AI can improve and enrich the creative process and help us more quickly solve some of these problems. But if the creativity isn’t coming from within, if you aren’t focused on solving those really interesting problems to bring in really delicious ideas into reality, then all these models will do is accelerate you to a soulless and flat creation. And worse, you might feel compelled to let the AI do most of the work, which in my mind is skipping past all the fun stuff, all the stuff that really matters. Perhaps the most important job for an artist is connecting with other humans via their medium. Art is communication, a conversation with other humans via the shared understanding of culture. If you expose your voice in a lazy, artificial way, people will hear that lack of care and passion and turn their backs. You can’t connect with the world if you don’t have something compelling or at least vaguely interesting to say, and then affecting and engaging means to do that. And you can’t create something compelling and engaging before having figured out the problem of having to do so. And doing so is where the good stuff is. It’s the part that involves meaningful work. It’s the part that involves challenge and growth. It’s the part where you find mindfulness and flow. It’s the part that involves the sense of fulfillment and achievement. You don’t need to be a creative to feel the truth in that last point. If an activity didn’t take a certain amount of mental or physical effort or a certain amount of time to produce, the results are never going to be that fulfilling. Fulfillment comes from overcoming obstacles. Achievement can only occur where there is a challenge. That feeling that you’ve pushed your abilities that bit further. You’ve created something really interesting and unique and special. Think back to when you started your last project. Recall the fact that you started with a blank canvas, an empty page, a formless slab of clay, thinking, how do I realize this idea? How do I convey this emotion? How do I tell this story so it’s compelling and engaging? How do I make something that people can connect with emotionally? It’s not something you get right every time, but that’s why it’s fulfilling because it’s challenging. Any type of work you partake in has to have some level of challenge to be fulfilling. And I think that if you enjoy your work by definition, it’s challenging. You are, by definition, spending your time solving problems. Far from being the most prosaic or mechanical part of it, of the creation process, it’s the whole thing. It’s where the dopamine is, it’s where the excitement comes from, and it’s where we get our focus and flow from. These are the things that are really important if creativity is going to help you keep your sanity. Coming up with great ideas in itself isn’t that fulfilling if you don’t see them through to inception, because that’s the bit where you really feel good, because that bit’s where the fun really happens.