5 Principles of Creativity - Why it Works - Part 3: Effort

This is the next post looking at why the 5 principles of creativity work as they do. This post examines the concept of learning the rules before you break them.

What this section of the post is actually talking about is effort.  Achieving a creative breakthrough is almost always the result of a lot of effort. History abounds with examples of creative individuals who put significant time and effort into an area to achieve a breakthrough.

Thomas Edison's workshop, when assigned a problem to solve, would spend considerable time and effort to go out and learn everything that they could about the problem area that they had been assigned before they attempted a solution. The reason that this is effective are:

1. it reduces the chance of simply attempting something that has already been tried before. In the modern world, there is a significant amount of prior history in most fields. For those new to a field or discipline, the chances that they could attempt to repeat something that has already been done are high.
2. unless you know the basic disciplines of a filed you won't know what is appropriate to break. For example if you were looking to innovate in the field of avionics, there is a required safety threshold (as well as regulatory expectations) that you would be required to meet. Ideas that breached these rules would have little value.
3. understanding a discipline ensures that you can best leverage any creative insights. The world is full of highly educated professionals and often the difference between good and great is less than 5%. If you know a field well, you will be able to understand if a creative idea is going to make that difference.

The issue of effort is often under-rated because hindsight makes ideas seem simpler to come up with than they really are. Given the busy nature of modern work environments, getting time for the deep and original thinking required to generate great creative ideas is a big ask.