Creative Operations

Creativity according to John Cleese is “A way of operating.” This smart 1991 YouTube talk, is full of lightbulb jokes and advice on creativity. How many socialists does it take to change a lightbulb?

The problem with creativity is that it seems difficult. It’s like running a 5K for someone who doesn’t run. Like, c’mon, I can’t do that. Cleese nips this complaint right away and offers two helpful pieces of advice.

First, is to be a designer, and we are all designers. We are all designers because designs influence actions. Some designs tightly constrain action, like this Mario 1-1 walkthrough on YouTube. Other designs constrain loosely.

To design for creativity requires two things: space and time. Set the phone to DND. Sit at the desk. As Steven Pressfield notes, put your ass where your heart wants to be. Like a chef ready for the dinner rush Cleese offers his next piece of advice: think.

Rather he says ‘to play’. That’s the second step. Creativity is the subconscious bubbling up and it’s the conscious shutting up.

“As a general rule, when people become absolutely certain that they know what they’re doing, their creativity plummets.” Jon Cleese

Without interruption, think widely.

This will be hard. Most people, says Cleese, don’t like it. It’s hard to just sit or walk or be. It’s hard to just think. Annie Duke faced this. When she coached poker players they wanted to act, to do, to play the hand. But a lot of poker is not playing. Duke’s challenge was to get players to feel like they were poker players while also making good decisions. So, she reframed the actions.

Rather than playing hands as the action, Duke explained that deciding was the action. Thinking through the hands, the outcomes, the pot odds, the base rates and the game-theory-optimal case was what good players did. That was the secret for being a good poker player. This is the secret too, according to Cleese, for operating creatively.

Creative people are comfortable with the lulls. They understand that the time of play is time working on the problem.

There aren’t good metrics for this. There’s no word count. There’s no investment return. There’s no miles or dollars or calls made. There’s nothing to count which means no numbers which means no comparison which implies no value.

Do not fall into this trip says Cleese. Trust that the moments of wide-open thought matter.
After the play it’s time for work.

How many socialists does it take? Five, but they don’t change it and instead insist that it works.