the sailboat principle

why the most creative people aren't doing what you think

Richard Feynman saw nothing fundamentally unusual about his work as a physicist:

The average person is not so far away from a scientist. He may be far away from an artist or poet or something, but I doubt that too. I think in the normal common sense of everyday life that there is a lot of the kind of thinking that scientists do.

In other words, we’re all curious. If you consider “the kind of thinking that scientists do,” you’ll realize you spend most of your time figuring things out, testing ideas, and solving problems. That makes all of us creative in the qualitative sense. If that’s the case, why was it Feynman who won that Nobel Prize?

Really all [scientists] do is a hell of a lot more of one particular kind of thing [emphasis mine] that is normal and ordinary! People do have imagination, they just don’t work on it as long. Creativity is done by everybody, it’s just that scientists do more of it. What isn’t ordinary is to do it so intensively that all this experience is piled up for all these years on the same limited subject.

Time, effort, and focus. “Creativity is done by everybody,” but most of us are creative everywhere and all the time, too. We shine with creative effort throughout the day as we navigate life, a diffuse glow. When a scientist—or artist, or poet—settles on a lens, a “limited subject,” and directs creative effort through that lens for an extended period of time, ants start sizzling.

The confusing bit for many writers can be defining the nature of this required effort. Feynman compares scientists to bodybuilders who have big muscles because they “they work and they work and they work on it.” It would be easy to conclude that the path to a great book involves many hours spent at a desk. It does! But creative effort involves much more than heavy lifting alone.

Feynman would be the first to agree that half the work, more than half, comes down to observation. Looking, listening, thinking, and, for any writer, lots of reading. (I shouldn’t have to say this, but the contents of my slush pile suggest I should: read each day for at least as long as you plan to spend writing.)

“Sensitivity is the gauge,” Eddie Murphy says, “not how much talent you have. The most sensitive one will be the artist that’s most in tune [emphasis mine].”

Reading about the most creative people, comparisons to antennae come up again and again. They’re receptive. Open. Sure, they “work and they work and they work on it,” but from the outside that effort always seems directed from within, like a release of pressure built up from everything they’ve absorbed. Not something squeezed out like toothpaste from a tube.

“I don’t force anything,” Murphy continues. “I’m not rowing a boat. It’s not a rowboat. It’s a sailboat…Let me catch this breeze and go this way. I’m not trying to be or trying to get to. I just am.”

Great work demands hard work, but remember to spend half your time up in the rigging. If all you do is pull an oar, you might miss the next breeze, which can come from anywhere. As novelist Haruki Murakami says:

Every time I write fiction, I go into another world — maybe you can call it subconsciousness — and anything can happen in that world … I see so many things there, then I come back to this real world and I write it down.

In other words, he goes away before he comes back with more words.

If you’re disappointed by the results of your creative efforts, keep putting in those hours, but consider shipping the oars and listening to the wind for a while. Stop trying to be or get to. Just be.