The 7 (un)habits of highly creative people

“Habits … reduce man to the status of a conditioned automaton. The creative act, by connecting previously unrelated dimensions of experience, enables him to attain a higher level of mental evolution. It is an act of liberation … the defeat of habit by originality”

Arthur Koestler (1964) The Act of Creation

Whether consciously or not, highly creative people are experts at habit breaking - and adopting new (un)habits - enabling them to make new connections, spot new opportunities and create new and original solutions. But how do they do this? And how can you become a conscious habit-breaker and a master of the (un)habit to boost your creative skills?

Here are seven ways I’ve identified to achieve this – it’s not a scientific study, but is based on my own observations, experience and reading. I hope you find these tips helpful for your own creative endeavours:

1. The Last-Minute Merchant (Purposeful Procrastination)

People who are naturally task-oriented start work as soon as they get a new brief, hoping to complete the challenge as efficiently as possible so that they can move onto the next thing on their do-list. Procrastinators are different - they absorb the brief, then move onto other things until the task can’t be ignored any longer, at which point they appear to panic, then work furiously up until the final deadline. This behaviour drives their task-oriented colleagues to distraction, but actually increases the creative’s chances of getting to better solutions by leaving the possibilities for new ideas and further inspiration open until it’s absolutely necessary to commit themselves to a final idea.

Tip: Plan for procrastination, and keep your mind open to new stimuli for as long as possible.

2. Chewing the Cud (Relaxed Rumination)

Every study on the creative process I’ve seen describes the same basic steps to developing creative solutions: 1. Define the brief; 2. Explore a breadth of creative stimulus; 3. Allow time for stimuli to percolate and for the sub-conscious to make fresh connections; 4. Deliver great ideas. By and large, this is the process that most formalised idea generation processes follow … except for the crucial third stage. I call this the ‘Rumination’ stage – it’s the time away from the logical, linear thought processes that precede and follow it which allow the subconscious brain to work its magic, playing with the stimuli and turning these over like a Rubic’s Cube to see them from fresh perspectives. Sometimes when I’m running a creative workshop I send teams out to do a completely un-related task for an hour – they come back energised and bursting with fresh ideas.

Tip: Take time out from the task to let the sub-conscious mind work its magic.

3. The Magpie Tendency (Conscious Collecting)

Paul Smith takes a small camera everywhere, obsessively snapping things that catch his eye. Artists and sculptors pick up random objects they find on a country walk or an urban ramble. In Renaissance Europe, gentlemen kept a ‘cabinet of curiosities’ from their travels. When creative people have a challenge to work on they go back to their trove of random finds and observe, analyse, compare and force out new connections to help them solve their challenge.

Tip: Become a magpie and build a random collection of interesting finds then use them to boost your creative thinking. 

4. Colouring Outside the Lines (Deliberate Rule-Breaking)

The trouble with habits is that they are deeply linked to our pleasure and reward triggers – when we repeat a habit it positively reinforces itself and becomes harder to break (just try to give up smoking!). Creative people have to retrain their pleasure receptors to get a bigger reward from disrupting their habits than from succumbing to them. Obviously this can’t apply to every habit we have, but it’s particularly relevant to the ones that can inhibit our creativity. We have to make a super-human effort to break our habits if we want to get different results.

Tip: Deliberately seek out disruptive ideas, until it becomes second nature.

5. Skimming The Surface (The Eternal Amateur)

There’s something reassuring about the specialists - people who dedicate their lives to the studying and refining one area of expertise, but this tends to be more of a creativity killer than an enabler. Highly creative people are eternal amateurs, butterflies who flit from one new interest or pastime to another, seemingly unable to settle at any one thing for very long, but in the process building up a wide experience of many different skills. This ‘skimming’ approach makes them less constricted by the ‘proper’ way to do things and frees up the possibilities for rule-breaking – rather than learning the rules then breaking them, it’s better to never have learnt them in the first place!

Tip: Take up a new hobby, learn a new skill … then move on and don’t worry about mastering it.

6. Leap Before You Look (Artful Improvisation)

Best practice says ‘start with the goal in sight’, but the creative mind says ‘jump in with both feet, work it out as you go along and embrace happy accidents along the way’. Instead of having a pre-formed idea of what the solution should look like and working to make it a reality, highly creative people start with a brief, a broad sense of what the constraints might be, and a fuzzy vision of the destination. Then they use the journey to explore and develop their solution, embracing both the fruitful diversions and the fruitless rabbit-holes they encounter along the way and using all of these to bring the vision into focus.

Tip: Embrace ambiguity and be comfortable with not knowing where you’re going to end up.

7. The Power Of The Pencil (SketchBook, not MacBook)

Highly creative people tend to operate two zones in their studios, offices, labs or sheds: one space is for thinking, playing, exploring, and working out initial ideas; and the computer space is for executing their ideas. Whilst this may seem counter-intuitive, the reason is simple – with a computer, the tension between creating and editing is too great and offers too many possibilities for changing, manipulating and refining in the moment. By starting by hand, the creative is forced to commit to their ideas in the moment – and editing can come later. Whilst this may seem long-winded, in the long run the process is more decisive and quicker, leading to better quality thinking and execution.

Tip: Unshackle yourself from your laptop and re-discover the joys of pen and paper.

Finally, forget all notions of achieving a ‘perfect’ solution. It’s very rare for artists, writers, musicians, programmers or any other highly creative people to feel that their work is even totally finished. More typically they run out of time or money, or get distracted by their next challenge, so ‘good enough’ has to be good enough.