The Key to Creativity…

Moonwalking with Einsten

A couple of weeks ago I did a magic lecture and was asked about how to me more creative. The first thing you need to realize is that you’ll have a ton of bad ideas, and to get over the fear of failure. Once you’ve done that you are ahead of 99% of people.

The thing that I think is the key to being creative is being able to connect two unrelated things. Whether it’s two tricks or a solution and a problem. This is something I didn’t k now I was doing until I read the book Moonwalking with Einstein. This is a book about memory, and having a decent memory helps you connect things.

The other ingredient to being able to connect two things is having two things in your brain to connect. I recently came across this quote:

“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.”

Steve Jobs

I 100% agree with Steve Jobs, you need to have experiences to connect.

How do you get those?

Simple, you go out and live. I’m always out doing things, seeing shows, having adventures and all of that goes into my brain and it gives me more things to connect. I’m also always reading magic books, that give me methods in my brain. I also try to reasonably work through everything I read in a magic book, that gives me a tactile experience in my brain to pull from.

So go out and live and be a lifelong student of whatever your artform is!

Memory = Creativity

One of the books I’m reading is Moonwalking With Einstein, which is a book about memory competitions. It’s a great book and really breaks down memory systems and why they work. It doesn’t really teach memory systems, but it’s a great overview of different techniques. In the book in there’s a mention of creativity and … Continue reading “Memory = Creativity”

One of the books I’m reading is Moonwalking With Einstein, which is a book about memory competitions. It’s a great book and really breaks down memory systems and why they work. It doesn’t really teach memory systems, but it’s a great overview of different techniques.

In the book in there’s a mention of creativity and how people with good memories tend to be more creative. Then it basically breaks down how creativity works in less than a sentence. I’m paraphrasing, but the book says, “creativity is to be able to connect two unrelated ideas”.

I totally agree with this. The better you are at connecting two ideas the more creative you are. That’s what makes a joke work, connecting a set up an punchline. That’s what makes a magic trick work, connecting a prop with an effect. Of course there’s also the craft part of it, where you turn the two ideas into a workable chunk of material.

The better your mental file cabinet is, the more ideas you’ll have.