In today’s day and age, we are often found grappling with information overload. How often have you thought “My brain needs to shut down for a while. I can’t take this anymore.”? People who are into creative work often feel stressed by the lack of ideas, the “block”.
A writer sits down to compile a report and feels bogged down by the research needed to put together a reasonable-length article. An artist stares at a blank canvas waiting for a creative spark. For me, I get swamped by the open-access research papers released every day. People are working rapidly and creating ideas but at the current rate it feels impossible for an individual to sift through all of it, internalize it and be able to recall it when needed in the future. In my area of research, it would be fair to say an arXiv.cs.CV paper from May 2019 would be considered stale knowledge today. For those who might not know what arXiv is, it is an open-access archive in physics, mathematics, computer science and other fields. It is a system of distribution which promotes rapid dissemination of ideas compared to the traditional journal peer-review system. To give you some numbers, there are 63 new entries in cs.CV today which is a sub-sub-category.
For someone without any strategies, he/she has to sift through 63 titles today and decide which might be relevant to his/her interests – maybe 5? Then read and understand 5 of them, but distill the most useful ideas – maybe 1 paper? But doing that every day for 5 years of your PhD? That’s a strategy bound to fail. Fortunately, people have been actively thinking about these problems and some solutions which provide you with basic strategies exist.
Now what about your own approach. Every day I try to navigate in this potpourri of information, I try to think of better strategies to control the information flow and calm your brain down. Last week, I listened to the The Building a Second Brain Podcast from hosts Tiago Forte and David Perell which talks about 10 strategies to save your ideas, organize your learning, and dramatically expand your creative output with digital note-taking. Because I connected with the ideas in this podcast, I thought of adding a bit of my own experiences into the mix and write about it. In each article I will try to summarize one strategy. I hope some of these come in handy in your work spheres.
Borrowed Creativity
We are taught in school – every assignment, homework and answer must be original. Copying from others is not permitted. But borrowing is notably different from plagiarism. Creativity doesn’t come out of nothing. Before starting creative work, it is beneficial to spend a lot of time gathering and noting down your ideas and the ideas of others. The creative flow comes easily when you are surrounded by all these ideas and you start organizing, collecting and distilling them into your own words.
“Our creativity comes from without, not from within. We are not self-made. We are dependent on one another, and admitting this to ourselves isn’t an embrace of mediocrity and derivativeness. It’s a liberation from our misconceptions, and it’s an incentive to not expect so much from ourselves and to simply begin.” says Kirby Ferguson in his TED Talk.
Examples of borrowed creativity exist in all forms of art.
Ferguson talks about Bob Dylan borrowing his melodies and lines from folk songs.
As the Nobel Prize winning poet T. S. Eliot wrote in one of this essays “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.”
But you might be wondering – won’t I be called out for stealing? The lesson here is that to be a thief you can’t ignore the part “make it into something better, or at least something different.” or as once someone said “the height of originality is skill in concealing origins”.
Allow me draw an example from film here.
The Odessa Steps sequence is one of the easily recognizable sequences in film. It’s first on-screen portrayal was by Sergei Eisenstein in the 1925 silent film Battleship Potemkin which portrays an incident from the First Russian Revolution. A hair-raising part of that sequence involves a baby in a stroller falling down the steps.
And this is a stairway scene from the 1987 crime drama The Untouchables directed by Brian de Palma (director of Scarface starring Al Pacino, Mission: Impossible among others.)
Do you think this is stealing? Or borrowed creativity? Both are revered pieces of filmmaking. Let me know in your comments.
The Auspices of the Court
In this world of copyrights and patents, there also exists a feeling of protecting what we think is ours. Steve Jobs famously said in 1996: “Picasso had a saying — ‘good artists copy; great artists steal’ — and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.” Fast forward a few years to 2010 when Jobs told his biographer Walter Isaacson “I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong. I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this.”
In the modern world where protecting one’s ideas is backed by law – not what the core guiding principle of the law was (US Patent Act of 1970 calls itself – “An Act to promote the progress of useful Arts”) – it might seem a measure to stymie creativity. We must not stop borrowing but get better at doing something different with what inspires us.
References:
- https://www.creativelive.com/blog/why-stealing-is-creative/
- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13099738-steal-like-an-artist
- https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/531831-immature-poets-imitate-mature-poets-steal-bad-poets-deface-what
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._S._Eliot
- https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/06/01/creative/
- https://www.cnet.com/news/what-steve-jobs-really-meant-when-he-said-good-artists-copy-great-artists-steal/
- https://www.amazon.com/Patent-Laws-Promote-Progress-Heretofore/dp/1333191073
- https://qz.com/quartzy/1185479/sergei-eisenstein-google-honors-the-director-of-battleship-potemkin-and-its-influential-odessa-steps-montage/
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