Why Crowded Cities Provide the Space for Creativity

One reason that women migrate into cities is because they are more free to create their own lifestyle. At the extreme, you can think of the girl raised in a Taliban village who would be free to choose whether to wear a veil or jeans and t-shirt if she moved into the anonymity of a big city in the West. To a lesser extent, even moving from a small rural area where people don't just know you but also know your grandparents will make it easier for a young girl raised Amish, say, to pursue a career and buy a BMW without accusation of being pretentious.

Curiously, this freedom leads to innovation, both technological and social. It's not just personal lives that get invented within the anonymity of a city: a handful of cities generate more patents than the rest of the country combined. 

20 cities generate 63% of all patents in the US.

The research universities that are within these regions help to provoke a great deal of the innovation. They also tend to cultivate a spirit of openness and tolerance for new ideas and dis-respect for authority that fosters innovation. People in these innovative cities are more likely to be individualistic and are less family oriented than folks in less innovative cities. Innovation isn't something that gets neatly contained to work.

When you socialize with folks you know well -and who know you well - you are less likely to encounter new ideas. Job leads tend to come from folks outside of your immediate circle of friends. More than that, loose acquaintances are people with whom we're free to try on new ideas and new ways of being. Someone from a  small town who knows that you get your half grin from your grandpa are less likely to let you become someone new than an acquaintance in a city who barely knows you. This freedom not only lets the Amish girl wear lipstick but it lets the inventor explore new ideas The more varied our interactions, the more potential for novelty.

I have spent considerable time in 6 of the top 10 cities in the list above. They are characterized by what I'd call personality. Santa Cruz, Boulder, and Austin share a very similar vibe and the folks living there certainly don't match the description conservatives would give of capitalists. These are places that aren't merely tolerant of diversity: they celebrate it. The 6 cities I know lean left - to a considerable degree. They are places that are more likely to support people than judge them, less likely to require drug testing for welfare recipients than to legalize pot. It is in these milieus from which creativity emerges. It's not just that conservatives have very little support among creative types in the arts; conservative cities and rural areas have very little patent activity. When I lived in Santa Cruz in the early 1980s, it was the only city in the US with an openly gay, communist mayor. Austin has a campaign to "Keep Austin Weird." Yesterday I ate in Native Foods in Boulder, a place that more traditional communities might chuckle at for its unabashed embrace of organic, vegan food. It's little wonder that these communities are cradles to new ideas. It is, to me, no coincidence that 3 of the top ten cities in this list are in California's Bay Area, a place where people seemingly feel little compunction about conformity - whether in thought, dress, or lifestyle - a home to the Free Speech Movement that helped to usher in "the 60s." 

All cities - and some more than others - provide space for the individual to step outside of tradition. Unsurprisingly, being open to novelty is a package deal: whether you first open the door to social invention or technological invention, the disrespect for tradition is likely to spill into all walks of life. 

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Graphs are from a Brookings report here. Claims about how people in different cities poll on topics like family or individualistic tendencies come from p. 143 of Bill Bishop's The Big Sort.

The Least Confessed - Most Often Pursued - Resolution

“The purpose of life is to fart around. Don’t let anyone tell you different.”

-          Kurt Vonnegut

I like the idea of new year's resolutions. I love the idea of using any excuse for a fresh start, for renewing or creating a new goal or way of being. I'm not a cynic about goals or resolutions, but I do find it curious that what appears to be most valued is least mentioned.

Left to our own devices, we will play. We will stare at monitors, out windows, and at wallpaper. We will engage ourselves in such meaningless tasks that should someone ask us, "What'd you do?" the only honest response would be, "Haven't a clue."

And yet no one says, "This year, I resolve to give myself, guilt free, hours each week to dabble, putz, and fool around," in spite of the fact that our actions would seem to suggest that this is something we value.

If it is guilt that keeps you from admitting to your love for idle time, it seems to me that there are at least a couple of socially redeeming justifications for such behavior - justifications beyond the simple enough justification of "it makes me happy."

Idling gives you more energy to sprint when you need to. I find that the more time I spend trying to be productive, the less productive I can be. If you are trying to be productive 26.2 miles a day, you'll go at a much slower pace than if you are trying to be productive for 100 yards. Some tasks are more performance than productive; you have to be "on" for 15 minutes or an hour. If idling into that surge of adrenalin and engagement makes you more powerful in that moment, idling might be the smartest thing you can do.

Plus, this is a complicated and confusing world which requires us to learn and change, something that play makes easier. Covey used to make the distinction between efficient ("he was fast up that ladder") and effective ("oops - his ladder was leaning against the wrong wall!"). The person who has his head down the whole time, working to be productive, has less opportunity to explore other possibilities, to contemplate other ways to be. Children play all the time and no adult learns as much or changes as much as a child. Play - or fiddling about - gives a child a safe space to experiment with other personalities, goals, and roles. Play is personal experimentation and facilitates development.

Perhaps this is the year to stop pretending that you don't like to pretend, to play, to daydream, and to fart around. Perhaps this year it is worth leaving your self some elbow room to develop, muse, and unfold in unexpected directions.

The Argument Against Living Your Life Fully

“The purpose of life is to fart around. Don’t let anyone tell you different.”
- Kurt Vonnegut

We've embraced the notion of living a full life. Well, at least in public. I'm working 24-7, we brag to anyone who will listen. And of course, this is a lie and that is just one of the things wrong with the whole notion of living life fully.

Rather than 24-7, it might make more sense to live life from peak to peak. This suggests a life punctuated by bouts of love making rather than hours and hours of hand holding, or a mad sprint in a race of seconds rather than a stroll that goes on and on and on for hours. Peaks are not only wonderful - they demand recovery time that looks suspiciously slack jawed and glazed eyed.

And the more we scale these peaks, the more readily we can repeat the trick of finding those peak moments that distort time, cause us to lose self consciousness, and let only the task at hand command our attention, finding our perfect balance between challenge and skill. It is through these peak experiences that we are actualized. And it is from these peak experiences that we need to recover.

For one thing, post-peak order is the opposite of post-traumatic disorder. Peak experiences are hard to attain and impossible to maintain, but once we've had them, we feel more alive, more sure about our life's direction and purpose. Peak experiences lend clarity to life that would be lacking in an "every day is the same" kind of life.

The creative cycle includes peak moments and time that seems, on the surface, wildly unproductive. Aha! moments are preceded by incubation (which is preceded by immersion in a topic and problem set). The Aha! is a peak moment when things click to take shape, but incubation looks about as productive as a chicken sitting on eggs. And yet without this incubation time, its rare that anything pops out of the "ain't there" ether into the plane of existence, that miracle of creativity.

Lest the reader think that I'm just making all this up, offering this odd notion that one's life is best spent in a state other than flat-line exertion, allow me to quote from Warren Buffet, who, last I heard, is worth about $35 billion, a net worth that usually suffices as an attention-getting device in this world.

Think of yourself as you go through life as standing at the plate and people throwing you pitches. It is a very special baseball game. There is no one calling the balls and strikes and you can stand there forever. You have got all these people in the bleachers saying, "Hey, swing you bum!" on every second pitch. You just have to learn to ignore them and when a pitch comes along and it is straight but it is a little high inside, you let it pass. Another one comes along and it is a little low outside. Every once in a while a pitch comes along that looks like the sweetest, juiciest, fattest pitch you are ever going to see. And when it does, you swing from your heels on it. You come out of your shoes on it. That is how you go through life. And you are only going to get about ten swings like that, maybe five swings. That is what you wait for. Too many people go through life batting at every other pitch. So just wait for your opportunities and when they come you swing from your heels.

Don't live your life fully. Don't swing at every pitch so that you're exhausted when that juicy pitch finally comes across the plate. Instead, go from peak to peak and shamelessly savor the valleys in between.

Creativity & Inspiration

Somedays it clicks. Somedays it clunks.

Darwin & The Incalculable Productivity of Creativity

I was in some meetings with two heads of a health care company’s new business division who are obese. From what I could glean, they didn’t take the time for exercise largely because they worked so many hours. They’ve compromised their own health as they are busily pursuing business solutions to health problems.

The boundary between work and home has disappeared along with the wires we once needed for phones and computers. Work hours are steadily creeping upwards.

For me, the worst thing about this is that it overlooks what research into the mysteries of the mind has repeatedly proven: gestation is a necessary component in creativity. When people are continually rushed to translate problems and information into solutions, the solutions they arrive at are almost invariably clichéd, predictable, and of little value. Research indicates that people need time after immersion in a problem to let it gestate before expecting a breakthrough.

My work with dozens and dozens of organizations has convinced me of this: there is no shortage that creativity cannot overcome. Whether the organization is short of customers, cash, or talented employees, the shortage can be overcome by creativity. Creativity, however, has trouble overcoming a shortage of time. And as organizations become less creative, they feel compelled to work longer hours, which further reduces the level of creativity.

Lest you think this hypothetical, you may be interested to know that Darwin worked only two to four hours a day. Last I heard, his insights had led to research and products worth hundreds of billions - perhaps trillions of dollars by now. You can't calculate the productivity of creativity any more than you can calculate the number of apples in an apple seed.