Here’s a secret about creativity. Those famed light-bulb-above-the-head Aha! moments? Rare and storied, almost canon in the field of creativity?

Eh.

They’re about … oh, maybe 0.4% of the creative process. Maybe less. Probably less.

What is an Aha! moment?

Inexplicable, sudden, magical. Aha! moments are those life-changing bursts of creativity or insight that move the needle, your world, or the world. It’s how Newton invented gravity, right? Instantly, you know when they’ve arrived — often in the shower, strolling in nature, while writing in your journal, falling asleep or waking up, or focusing on anything other than the task at hand. These otherworldly flashes of insight, problem-solving or genius seemingly appear out of nowhere.

‘Ooh!’ she said with a fun little wiggle that ran down from her brain into her soul and through her heart, telling her to pick up a pen. ‘I should add this keychain to my list!’

Oprah loves them. So, in fact, does the Mutual of Omaha insurance company. (Which is why they tried to duke it out over who got to copyright the phrase.)

I am a keychain. Remember me, and I will bestow upon you the magic of creativity.

So, why am I so down on them?

The first 99.6% of creativity

I will go to my grave saying this: The creative process is far, far less sexy than we think. Yes, Aha! moments move the needle, but 99.6% of that needle’s movement happened long ago and below the surface — through trial and error, hard work, openness to new experience, imagination, et al.

But there’s one more way we move the needle below the surface I’ve noticed, and we don’t even have a word for yet. And those, I call — you guessed it — keychain moments.

Define ‘keychain moments.’ … Wait, scratch that: First, how do you discover keychain moments?

Because the concept of keychain moments doesn’t exist yet, I have to explain how to find them first. You’ll understand why in a minute.

When my house caught on fire in 2012, I had to throw away my asbestos- and smoke-damaged journals I’d kept since I was 10 years old. I couldn’t bring myself to just toss them, so I read through them first. And took, ahem, a few notes. (Three hundred pages and counting.)

Here’s what started to emerge. All those times I thought fate was speaking to me? That I had experienced some earth-shattering shift, met The One (all 27 of them), finally found the meaning of life? After reading 30+ years of journals and thousands of pages of my thoughts and experiences, the Aha! moments were striking at the time, of course, but didn’t end up leading to much. But I started finding these other things — wonderings, noticements, statements, proto-insights — and it was those that shaped my creativity … and my life, really.

Around the same time, a writing coaching client of mine was working on their Mathematics of Joy list. She got stuck, as almost everyone does, and got frustrated and dropped the exercise for a few days. Until one day she went to work, came home, threw her keys on the counter. And looked a little more closely at the keys. And then at the keychain. Which was a gift from her sister, and read something like, ‘World’s Best Sister’. Instantly, the love, the shared tumultuous history, the bond the two shared popped into her head.

‘Ooh!’ my client said with a little thought-wiggle that ran straight from her brain to her heart to her soul, telling her to pick up a pen. ‘I should add this keychain to my list!’

The wiggle of a keychain moment

A keychain moment is a near-imperceptible thought-wiggle that might or might not grow into an Aha! moment. But a keychain moment opens a door to the second layer*, and, as the students of the Third Layer know, that second layer is where we find the insight and perspective that opens up the third layer of our creativity.

It might not even be an insight at first, or at all. It might not be a fork in the road, it might just be a pebble that looks a little out of place, is a different color than all of the rest, or like it wasn’t there the day before. Doesn’t matter.

Maybe they lead to Aha! moments. Maybe they don’t. I truly don’t give a crap. They’re just a sticky wiggle (yes, feel free to use this as the name for your next punk band) in your brain.

But here’s what I do care about: if you want to develop your creativity, you should notice the ever-living stuffing out of these sticky wiggle keychain moments.

Keychain moments have a sound, but the sound isn’t ‘Aha!’

‘Ooooh,’ ‘Hmmmm,’ ‘Awwww!’ or ‘Huh’ (or sometimes — sorry! — ‘Ouch!’), usually followed by a full sentence: ‘I’ve never thought of that this way!’ ‘Hey, that makes me think!’ ‘I just realized!’ or ‘That’s really interesting; thanks, brain.’

Examples of keychain moments:

Feeling really good; i.e., realizing something brings you enough joy that it belongs on your Mathematics of Joy list (‘This cherry is delicious and it makes me think of summer and baking fruit crisps and my favorite farmers mar—; ooh, I should add ‘cherries’ to my list! And, heck, farmers markets, too!’)
Feeling really bad; i.e., emotions — often, unfortunately, negative emotions — can be your body’s way of shouting KEYCHAIN MOMENT! (‘Hmmmm, I don’t like this; what is uncomfortable about this situation and why?’)
Seeing a problem, issue, or truth from a different perspective for the first time (‘Huh, I finally realized why X annoys me so much …)

The banality of keychain moments

Why they haven’t become as big as Aha! moments is because they blend into the background without your knowledge. As I like to shout from the rooftops, our creativity starts with our preferences, our passions, our senses and our beliefs, which we don’t often dwell on.

And, well, this client and I accidentally invented them, and I’m just writing them about them for the first time now. (Thanks to … you know who you are!) Plus, within days, weeks or months, they disappear and get absorbed into your consciousness. (Or even milliseconds, especially for the positive keychain moments, unfortunately.) Unless you read through 30 years of journals. (Side note: Trust me, do this at your own risk, especially the ages between 12 and 27.)

Unless — and herein lies why I am dedicating the rest of my life to teaching creativity through writing — we write them down.

So, write them down

Google will give you 438,000,000 results on the benefits of writing things down. But, here’s the One Magic Trick: we can write them down in a way where we ruminate, or we grow.

Replace Aha! moments with ‘keychain’ moments

Creativity = Chaos, Order, and the Salience Network

Gravity problems vs tangible and intangible issues