What our choices reveal

Or, do you want to be more creative? For real

Last week, The New York Times Well section ran a 5-day creativity challenge. The basic premise of the series was that creativity can be learned and that it can be practiced. Small acts of creativity can prime us to think in more creative ways in our everyday and professional lives.

Creativity skills can indeed be learned. We have studies analyzing the collective scientific literature and the evidence is reliable.

Whether small acts of everyday creativity, like exercises in this challenge really boost creativity in other activities, like solving everyday problems, enhancing our relationships, or making us more creative in our jobs has not been explicitly studied. I think it is a valid hypothesis to test, but it still remains to be done.

Personally, I think that creative thinking exercises can enhance our creativity in other aspects of life if we use them as a reminder that many situations without a single correct answer can be approached with a creative mindset. This is what my husband often does by explicitly saying, “How can we do this creatively?”

The challenge started with a warm-up activity – doodling. The task of the day was to complete 10 drawings, each starting with a circle. Creativity scholars call this a divergent thinking task. These kinds of exercises can take different forms, from asking for drawings to thinking of different uses for common everyday objects (e.g., a tin can) to thinking of consequences of wild and unlikely events (e.g., what would happen if people could become invisible at will). They all have in common having multiple possible responses.

Day 2 of the challenge focused on constraints (and featured The Creativity Choice). Counterintuitively, creativity can benefit from constraints. It does not seem like it subjectively because hearing that we have to follow rules that limit our choice tends to feels frustrating. The daily challenge was to compose a poem using only the words provided.

Recent research shows that approximately 70% of people (in six different countries!) believe that creativity is the greatest when we have full freedom of action. But without being given any guides or guardrails, the mind tends to go to the most common (and therefore not very original) ideas. Constraints can direct thinking into more creative directions. If you are asked to think of uses for a knife and told to list only uses in gardening, you will not start with something so commonplace as cutting food or spreading butter.

Day 3 of the challenge was about daydreaming. Our culture is obsessed with productivity, maximizing and optimizing just about everything. And mind-wandering is defined as mental time not on task. By definition, we are not optimizing productivity and this can feel like a waste of time. But this is not so when it comes to creativity. Research shows one in five new ideas arriving when the mind wanders. And this is particularly true when we experience an impasse or a creative block.

Letting our thoughts wander allows them to go into new directions. Which in turn can help us connect concepts or ideas in new ways.

Day 4 challenged us to put more effort into coming up with ideas. When researchers compared people’s expectations of which ideas would be most creative to objective measures of which ideas were most creative, a striking thing happened – reality was the exact opposite of intuition. People expected the first ideas to be the best, perhaps because our culture celebrates the sparks of inspiration that seemingly come out of thin air. In reality, with more time and effort, people come up with more creative ideas.

The final day of the challenge asked people to try a new experience, with lots of fun suggestions, from joining a community walk to adding pickled onions to different recipes to listening an audiobook with an ensemble cast. Openness to experience is the best predictor of creativity, no matter what people do. Being open to experiences means being curious, enjoying playing with ideas and new perspectives. Because those who are open to experiences do not stay narrowly focused on a single interest, but sample from different fields, they are able to make connections that others do not.

I followed this challenge on Instagram and noticed something curious. The daydreaming post had most likes by far, more than 5 times as many as other posts. The post with the fewest likes was the one asking people to boost their creativity by putting in more effort.

In the words of ChatGPT, the daydreaming post is calm, reflective, and gentle. It describes the difficulty of the challenge as low to perhaps moderate because some people might find it tricky to intentionally daydream. On the other hand, it describes the sentiment behind the 10% more effort post as motivational, urging effort and persistence, and of high difficulty because it requires pushing mental effort beyond what people consider comfortable.

As I reflected on engagement with this challenge, I wondered what it says about our desire for creativity. We say we want it, but do we want it even if it is hard? Are we willing to put the time, effort, and learning into it? Or do we prefer to find comfort in the thought that daydreaming can be good for creative thinking? The caveat to daydreaming, just like to serendipity and what we usually call luck is that they happen and are helpful only when we have a prepared mind. Daydreaming or mind-wandering are particularly helpful when people are experiencing a creative block. These are times when we tried, but failed. And usually we react by trying harder and spending more time on the problem or task.

The truth is that there is no way around it – creativity that is not limited to fantasy or flights of fancy, but solves problems, develops performances, or products, is hard.

So, do you really want to be creative?

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Your answer is yes, I really want to be more creative. The Creativity Choice brings science of creativity answers to help bridge the gap between having ideas and making them happen.