I think the study and practice of fundamental techniques is directly tied to training your creative side. But they're also independent skills, in a sense. I see far too many young artists who focus solely on technique, at the detriment of their creativity. Classical atelier programs can train an individual to create astonishingly life-like representations... but too often lacking entirely in any sort of creativity.
On the flip side, a lot of art schools have focused so much on creativity that they've lost their grounding in technique. So you get a lot of creatively profound but technically incompetent graduates.
Neither are great options. But training technique and creativity together seems like a good choice.
Only personal experience to share here, but I can comfortably say that as my technical skills increased, so too did my creativity. I was always worried as a kid that I wasn't "creative" enough to be a decent artist. But when I knew how to express ideas, for some reason I had an easier time coming up with those ideas in the first place.
> But when I knew how to express ideas, for some reason I had an easier time coming up with those ideas in the first place.
That's the rub, being creative is not worth much if you don't have the necessary skills and technique (practice practice practice!) to express yourself.
I think this is less true than you think especially after seeing documentaries inside the world of many high-profile artists.
In many real-world cases, creativity is closer to direction and composition than the nuts and bolts technique. This is especially true for works that grow in scale beyond a single practitioner. Modern artists have studios and contractors that actually do e.g. metal casting, modern musicians use engineers/producers to create the actual beats, a film score writer probably isn't a skilled trombonist etc.
IMHO creativity is about decision making - its closer to "taste" and doesn't require skill to be a unique and special talent in itself. Its a bit like the Jobs/Woz divide.
> IMHO creativity is about decision making - its closer to "taste" and doesn't require skill to be a unique and special talent in itself. Its a bit like the Jobs/Woz divide.
I think you're talking about something other than creativity. Architects are not bricklayers, that's the subject of the allographic/autographic distinction made by Nelson Goodman, but it really is orthogonal to creativity.
Creativity is generally understood to be about fluency, flexibility and originality of ideas. (The Wikipedia page is pretty extensive.) Skill and taste are different and certainly do each contribute to the value of works of art, but not necessarily in a creative way.
Like the work of a prolific artist in a busy studio full of assistants, cooking (for example) involves both skill and (literally) taste. Artists who work like that are actually precluded from certain types of creativity, by their own reputation and the expectations of their market, even if their work is selling well. Much like a chef. I think that's the problem with your notion of what creativity is. You are mistaking aesthetic productivity for originality and the other things that mark actual creativity.
I think the author of the article is describing a false dichotomy. The purpose of deliberate practice is to build the underlying knowledge that leads to the creativity and also unlock the intuitive sense that comes from mastery.
There's great creative power in not knowing what you don't know and trying out random things because you have yet to acquire the knowledge of how things are 'supposed' to be done. Knowledge is valuable but at the same time I am so over the mastery movement, which is as much about excluding people from the club by making them think they're never ready enough as it is about giving them to tools to succeed.
I started painting 3 months ago at age 45 while in the throes of a massive personal crisis, out of a purely selfish need to express myself emotionally rather than accommodate other people. Turns out that I'm good at it, have original ideas, and am already getting unlooked-for interest from other people in loaning or purchasing my artwork. It's not that I have some tremendous natural talent; I work hard at it and when I can't paint I study, plus I had years of self-development in other parts of the arts that allowed me to develop my own aesthetic philosophy. But frankly the most valuable factor underlying this unexpected productivity is an uncharacteristic Not Giving A Shit about other peoples' feelings. Giving myself permission to be a less nice person has been an enormous boon to creativity.
> There's great creative power in not knowing what you don't know and trying out random things because you have yet to acquire the knowledge of how things are 'supposed' to be done.
That's something people who don't want to learn how things are done like to say, but isn't really true and is most often simply an excuse to avoid having to learn anything; it's commonly heard from amateur musicians for example in an attempt to avoid learning anything labelled "theory". The reality is that what you're likely to do without looking at what other people have done isn't going to be very creative and is likely way way inside the box and simplistic.
You're not really breaking the rules if you don't know the rules you're breaking; flailing around wildly in the dark isn't creative, it's just dumb luck if you happen to do something new. People who are truly creative, know exactly where the box is and ends and why they're breaking outside of it.
I guess you missed the bit where I mentioned that I considered study as important as practice, and that I've already got a lot of professional experience in other branches of the arts, so the notion of deliberate practice is fine with me. What I'm doing differently this time is giving my own taste equal priority with received knowledge instead of beating myself up for failing to meet some external standard. Accepting that many paintings will vary from their original goals as the price of enjoyable experimentation has proved to be a good bargain. I just got tired of being my own worst critic in hopes of pre-emptively avoiding possible disapproval.
I think that people who are creative have to know the history and repertoire in order for their brain to make the new connections to make the new thing, but I think that creative leap when your brain makes those new connections is not something an artist controls directly. It comes from experience and being "into something", and random accident from experimentation.
The artist doesn't necessarily know why something is new though, even if they have a lot of experience, it's just a primal response they get to a new piece of music they are working on for example, and then they can try to analyze it after the fact. Most artists I know aren't as methodical as the way you seem to describe, it's a lot more intuition and experimentation, and then because of their vast listening experience their brains are adjusted so that they aren't satisfied with existing stuff
I agree. I'm not saying they're methodical, I'm saying you have to know the rules before you can forget the rules and let your real creativity come out.
While I'm sure there is some of this mentality among unpolished artists, I think you're wrongly conflating reproducibility of quality with creativity itself. A creative solution is often arrived at by the ability to generate a large number of ideas, iterating upon each or combining them in a novel fashion. The simplicity or lack of inhibition in the approach of an amateur can allow for this volume, because the amateur is not limited by the constraints of a more formal practice. These purposely hem in what is possible in exchange for useful constraints that result in work of a reliable quality. Successful artists have to learn balance the pursuit of technique without being stifled by its preciousness, in the same way that amateurs have to balance novelty with reproducibility. Excess in either case tends to result in poor work.
Neither is the pro limited, understanding other's idioms is not a constraint; knowledge is not a handicap to creativity. People who complain about losing their creativity if they know too much are just uncreative people lying to themselves in order to explain their lack of creativity.
10k hours has a lot more to due with human lifespans than it does anything else. 4h a day 5 days a week 48 weeks a year for 60 years is only 57,600 hours. Sure, after someone has been doing something for 10 years they hit diminishing returns. But that's in context of a relatively low lifetime limit.
If people lived 1,000+ years people would be talking about 100,000 hours.
"...and also unlock the intuitive sense that comes from mastery."
To me, unlocking that aesthetic intuition is the essence of creativity. The other component -- which I recognize most people lack -- is an open-mindedness and willingness to experiment and find art in unexpected places. But even if you have that, you still need the mastery, at least in most disciplines.
If you create lots of sculpture, you'll encounter lots of "problems." And if you persevere, you'll discover lots of "solutions" -- whether they are intended results or happy accidents. Mastery in the arts is simply accumulating a sufficiently large library of problems/solutions, and encountering them often enough that they become mental muscle memory, so that you begin to see potential high-level solutions in the world around you. I believe the art we find most "creative" is, counterintuitively, the art that is discovered or stumbled upon by masters who have developed the skill to spot, excavate, and refine it. (Like Michelangelo seeing his sculpture "emerge" from the marble -- I don't think it was the mystical process it's often made out to be, but rather him recognizing the maximum potential of each quirk of the marble, and intuitively seeing how those potentials might combine into an image.) Contrast that with an artist's attempt to make something "from the ground up," based solely on the application of learned principles. The result may be beautiful or masterful, but probably won't have that true creative spark.
Great art often makes people think "I never would of thought to do that," which to me is kind of tragic, because they may get discouraged from pursuing art, without realizing that the artist never "thought to do that," either. The artist just had the open-mindedness to look around, the developed intuition to spot it, and the technical skill to build it out.
Agreed. Ten years ago what could we achieve at say, a hackathon? What could we achieve in the same amount of time today? I don't think our creativity has increased, but our ability to express it probably has, and that's why deliberate practice is a component that expands the whole process.
I'm someone who fervently studied classical drawing, painting, and sculpture, against the advice of my friends and professors (they told me to stop studying so hard and to start an art career). The problem with over-practice is that you can get caught in mindless habit. It ruined art for me.
It's become very difficult for me to draw pictures that are interesting (if wrong) because I've trained so hard to draw them accurately. It's all by rote.
I've tried to fix it, to rewind. Now when I draw it's with my weak hand, and that has gotten me drawing interesting (if wrong) pictures again.
Another technique I've tried is using cheap materials. I usually get more interesting results from my 3 year olds acrylics than using professional oil paints.
That said, the love of art never came back. That's why, to the extreme confusion of my friends and family, I'm in tech now.
My karate teacher used to say: "Practice doesn't make perfect. Practice makes permanent. Perfect practice makes perfect."
It seems like if your goal is to draw correct and interesting faces, you should figure out what in your imperfect weak hand drawings is interesting and practice either keeping that while you perfect your weak hand, or introduce that to your practice with your strong hand.
It's a lack of control, which produces the happy accident. Accuracy is the problem to begin with. Either I'd learn to pretend to lack control, or I hope my left hand doesn't gain control.
That said, again, I no longer enjoy it so it's a moot point.
Good article, but straight from the big book of the very obvious.
Were this the case, children would have to spend months deliberately studying how to play.
As the author says, deliberate study is antithetical to creativity. Creativity is spontaneous, playful, imaginative - and none of those things come from grinding.
I have my best ideas usually while doing something totally unrelated.
That's output vs intent, however - you can be creative but not necessarily create physical things. Most artists create nothing themselves - they leave that to their artisans. Are they uncreative because they instruct rather than construct?
It's both, and it's a fine balance. That's why high quality art is a comparative rarity.
If you practice too much, you will just be an automaton. Able to make but not to express. Your work will be derivative, uninteresting. There are literally millions of artists who have fallen into this trap.
If you practice too little then all your creativity will be for naught as you lack the skill and ability to translate it into an expression. Michelangelo, for example, was apprenticed when he was only 13, and by the time he made the Pieta he had been studying and working for 10 years.
The important thing is to find the balance. To practice as a means to hone a skill that is at your command, rather than your master.
I make a youtube video every day as part of a do-a-thing-for-100-days project. I've learned a lot from it but one of the key takeaways was that I have much, much more creative energy than I thought (I was really worried I would run out of stories to tell at day 20 or something). The 12 points the author listed seemed accurate but they never really reached a meaningful conclusion. My advice for anyone considering undertaking a creative project: just do it.
> the techniques of deliberate practice are most applicable to "highly developed fields" such as chess, sports, and musical performance in which the rules of the domain are well established and passed on from generation to generation
Bummer. I was hoping to find some shortcuts to learning how to play the guitar. I've had one for 20 years now and still can't play it.
I started in 2000. I have a basic competence and can accompany myself and compose pop songs, but I somewhat regret not having put in the time up front in lessons and deliberate practice. I could have had 15 years of compound interest.
That said, I do play every day, or mostly, for love of the game. Life's too short to work or play without love.
Amen to that. My problem is that there are too many things that I do for love of the game. I want to spend more time reading, and drawing, and painting, and carving, and tinkering, and gaming, and gardening, and blacksmithing, and cycling, and motorcycling, and writing, and paddleboarding, and traveling, and catching up on TV, playing boardgames with my kids, going to movies with my wife, and cooking, and skating, and lifting weights, and playing softball, and walking my dog, and working on my house, and calligraphy, and on and on and on...
I had a year like that, 2014. I had four specific goals: write an album of music, create a video game, write a novel, and continue my chronological reread of Stephen King.
By the end of the year, I had written 60 pages and read one of the Stephen King books.
In 2015 I doubled down on music, and recorded 10 songs.
I really want to. Sometimes I do, for a month or two, then I don't touch it for 8 months. I've taken weekly lessons two different times, once for 6 months and once for 3 months. I even bought a guitar that I keep in my office at work. My coworkers come in and play it far more than I do.
I just have too many things that I want to do. If I could afford to retire, I could easily keep busy the rest of my life doing all the things I wish I could do right now.
Five minutes is something you can afford to spend even if you are very busy. Don't give me any more excuses. Instead of replying to this comment, spend the two minutes it would take to get off hacker news and play a few notes.
So I just spent 5 minutes playing a few scales. While I was doing that, I wasn't reading the book I'm almost finished, or writing in my journal, or thinking about side project I have going on, or emailing a friend that I haven't spoken to in a few months, or taking a short walk, or making a cup of tea, or making lunch plans with my wife, or sketching, or desoldering a bad relay in my espresso machine, or generally making 5 minutes of progress on any other hobby or project I have.
Now I probably won't touch my guitar again for another 3 months because the 5 minutes I can spare tomorrow will be spent reading or coloring a sketch I made or some other thing that I enjoy working on. You might point out that I'm wasting my time reading HN, but I get a great deal of enjoyment out of the things I find on HN.
Not sure why the author chooses to use music as some kind of arbitrary reference point about how 'uncreative' it is due to having a rather large canon of "technique" involved. The reason there aren't a lot of stories about somebody just randomly picking up a guitar, tuning it to whatever and banging away something of creative beauty is because...well...the instrument kind of doesn't allow it. I've basically run under the assumption of the following:
"It really helps to know what rules you're breaking and why when doing something new."
It's why Thelonious Monk is such a polarizing figure in jazz. He breaks every rule in the book, yet it works because he knew exactly what he was doing.
I lost all respect for the article the moment the author drew difference between chess/music/sport and writing/drawing/teaching/"creativity". Frankly, the way I read it, this is just another hero-worshipping article by consultants whose main contribution to the economy involves destroying R&D and shipping jobs oversea. And it truly saddens me that Hacker News keeps this on my front page.
Why did the difference irk me?
First, find me, seriously, find me 2 basketball matches that are exactly the same. Or 2 golf days that are exactly the same. Or 2 music performances that are exactly the same. Or 2 chess matches that are exactly the same. It's ridiculous to claim that somehow chess and music playing and sports are not creative.
Second, if a person claims that somehow long period of deliberate practices do not matter on engineering, my personal opinion is that all engineers should spit at that person. Such insult! True, each engineering situation has different challenges. However, the principles of engineering (applied sciences, basically) are finite. Same things for writing or drawing. The materials & techniques (even styles!) are finite. Creativity refers to the adroitness of solving the infinite (problem space) with the finite (tools and principles). Without an intimate understanding of the finite (tools and principles), how can one bring it to bear on the infinite?
Third, most of new works are old. Let's take Shakespeare. His works are lovely and creative, no? But consider this: most of his plots are derivative (similar motifs, if not outright fully-formed plots, already existed and popular); most of his language already formed. Shakespeare created at most 10% of his language. He must gain expertise of the other 90% to show case these 10%. Similarly, think of any art or design or product or whatever creative result. Most of such art/design/whatever already follows some popular styles and employs existing and popular techniques. Creativity is only the little extra. Sure, the extra sets it apart. But without the expertise of the 90%, such "extra" can't exist.
Finally, creativity is very inefficient without deep expertise. Many people say things like "I am most creative when xyz" (popular xyz: in shower, on a walk, relaxed, reading, etc.). However, this actually means is that people come up with the 10% (see above) extra during this time. Since the person must create the other 90% to top off the little newness, without expertise, 10% will remain fantasy.
Now, I am not saying "expertise/practice is everything!" Expertise and practice are foundation of the creativity house. Even when you have solid foundation, you don't have a roof yet, and rain will still wet you. However, without foundation, you simply can't build a house. Expertise and practice are a requirement, but alone are probably not enough.
Parting words: people love stories of outsiders winning. However, why don't we talk about outsiders losing? There are vastly more of those. Let's take a simple field: web programming (1. it's appropriate here; 2. outsiders seem to look down on it). You know who built Google? Graduate students from prestige schools. You know who built Microsoft? Students with years of programming experience. You know what outsiders build? The millions of badly written websites, ready to be SQL injected or attacked by a already-patched bugs. That's outsiders' works.
> You know who built Google? People who weren't working in Yahoo or AltaVista.
It was not people trying random shit either. It was a pair of PhD students, who were already experts in how information is indexed in libraries, and who understood how citations work in academia, who applied this knowledge to the novel domain of crawling the WWW.
If you look at the biographies of really creative people, you will see a pattern emerging. Practically all the grand masters of the Reinassense specialized in a single art, but dabbled with 2 or 3 more (i.e. Michel Angelo's magna opus is the Sistine Chappel, but he was a master sculptor and a moderately competent architect). Many fiction writers do start their careers as journaists. Great hackers have a tendency to pick up hobbies that have little or nothing to do with computers.
Maybe the problem with the 10-thousand hours is not that it kills creativity, but that people gets obsessed about a single topic and do not try their hand at enough different things for their creativity to flourish.
One of the most damaging notions of creativity is that of the lone genius, as portrayed and developed by the Romantics.
To be creative you have to situate yourself in a tradition (it could be furthering the tradition, or rebelling against it).
The difference is that kids have creativity and use all skills in a not conforming way to express is. If you are grownup you think you have to e.g. paint good in way X too be successful. Nobody have to master creativity but the most people say famous artists are so much creative.
The author seems to be conflating success with creativity. Of course the things that catch on are stochastic, but this doesn't negate the need to practice, nor does it imply that the chances of a creators work do not increase with practice.
We're more familiar with drew, but apparently drawed is a thing. [0]
On another note: who claimed that 10,000 hours of practice leads to creativity? The author says that
>This wealth of research on creativity contradicts the notion that deliberate practice is the sole-- or even the most important-- aspect of creativity.
but this is the first time I've heard of anyone having this idea.
Later down the piece we see
>I have immense respect for Ericsson's body of work on deliberate practice, and do believe that deliberate practice can help you get better in virtually any skill. However, I also believe that an accurate understanding of creativity is important for how we recognize, nurture, value, and ultimately, reward it, across all sectors of society.
But again, it doesn't seem like the author is disagreeing with Ericsson. Am I missing something, is there something in Ericsson's book that would make it clear that Kaufman is not simply attacking a straw-man? Maybe it is from Gladwell using creative people and groups as examples in Outliers?
Yeah, it's Gladwell's conflation, I think. (And the writer's conflation of Gladwell's assertions with Ericsson's.)
If you're interested in this type of thing, I'd recommend ":59 Seconds" for a somewhat more down-to-earth and research-based approach. Amongst many of the more interesting findings is that just having actual physical plants around[1] helps improve creativity and that brainstorming in groups (as opposed to separately and then comparing results later) is counterproductive.
(Of course that's also provisional, so some of the research referenced therein may have been refuted, so... Such is that Way of Science.)
[1] Interestingly, pictures of plants/nature don't work.
On the flip side, a lot of art schools have focused so much on creativity that they've lost their grounding in technique. So you get a lot of creatively profound but technically incompetent graduates.
Neither are great options. But training technique and creativity together seems like a good choice.
Only personal experience to share here, but I can comfortably say that as my technical skills increased, so too did my creativity. I was always worried as a kid that I wasn't "creative" enough to be a decent artist. But when I knew how to express ideas, for some reason I had an easier time coming up with those ideas in the first place.