Be willing to get squiggly

While the aha! or light-bulb moments get all the credit, creativity actually happens in messy, complicated, rollercoaster-y, up-and-down, backwards-and-forwards layers. One step forward, 3 1/2 back, 17c to the right, samba, ginger cookie, kneecap, 6.34i upside down. I absolutely believe that creativity depends upon this messiness to thrive.

But messiness is … messy. I have many photos from teenagehood that can prove my point. I’ll try to learn computer-y stuff enough to draw this, but imagine a chart with a line going from bottom left to upper right. (You know the ones.) That’s how we want creativity to go, but it’s really more like a giant piles of squiggles that start and stop all over the place.

If I had one mantra for creativity it would be this: Be willing to get squiggly.

Perhaps you were expecting me to say: Be willing to look stupid, or dumb, or even silly. In fact, so was I. But it’s 2021, and we know to make better choices with our words now. Like squiggly. So instead: Be willing to be squiggly, look squiggly, think squiggly, work squiggly.

What feels like random threads or tangents on that squiggly line can often lead to the next great idea. A straight point-to-point line is the death of innovation or creativity. And a huge part of creativity and collaboration is understanding that everyone around us is as squiggly as we are.

For example, I have an advisory board. (Hi, board!) I had the idea to create one last year. I had no idea what I wanted, but I knew I had several friends, colleagues and former students who had brilliant ideas and insights about creativity and human nature.

But I’m terrible at asking for support. So, for this year, I did it anyways, without having fuck-all idea of what I was creating or where it might lead. I asked — kinda, sorta — for help, even though I was terrified. I trusted my board members to understand it might take me a while to figure out what I was actually doing, but I needed to create the board to know why I was creating the board. In that chart graph I’m going to figure out how to draw one day, I needed to start drawing the line — to literally get the board up on the board — before I knew why.

It took nine months of messy, inelegant squiggles, but I’m now ready to do the thing I started doing nine months ago. But if I would have sat on the idea until it was fully formed, a) I might never have started, b) I wouldn’t have learned what I’ve learned, and c) I wouldn’t have gained all of the gains I’ve made in the past nine months. This is what I mean in the creativity pyramid about creativity bravery: the knowledge that your squiggles might not be elegant or organized, but you need to go ahead and put them on the board anyways. Squiggles are sticky little buggers with all sorts of hooks and tails. You never know what they’ll pick up.