Carolyn Jack
Editor and CEO, Geniocity.comA project of The Genius Group LLC
Creative Nerve
The creative dimension
Albert Einstein understood time and space.
No duh, you say. But I’m not talking about theoretical physics, at which Einstein was probably our most celebrated genius. I’m talking about another kind of genius he had: the twin gifts of understanding that time and space are valuable and of making sure he had plenty.
I’ve been reading the Walter Isaacson biography of Einstein, who was (I think few would argue) one of the most creative humans the planet has ever produced. What impresses me the most so far is that Einstein instinctively knew how to get what he needed and what he needed was opportunities to think.
How many do you have? Likely not enough.
Me, either. Our culture isn’t conducive to it, which means our culture isn’t conducive to creativity. We’re all frantically sending and answering e-mails and texts, updating our statuses (stati?), cruising the Web, downloading stuff, watching stuff, reading stuff, working, driving, dealing with each other. We really don’t have time to absorb information, slowly process it, experiment with it and invent big ideas from it.
Instead, most of us produce what feels like the mental equivalent of carbonation – a lot of little fizzy notions bubbling out of the turmoil in our heads, as if our skulls were constantly shaken cans of Coke. Those ideas seldom last long.
Einstein’s, on the other hand, seem likely to last eons. They were the result of years of concentrated thought, thought that was remarkably impervious to distractions from daily work, children, spouses and the state of the world, but that also demanded a great deal of time alone. He eventually arranged his life so that thinking was what he was paid to do, and the privacy to do it in was insured by indulgent universities and his motherly second wife, who had a separate bedroom and took care of all the day-to-day household business so his thoughts didn’t have to include laundry.
Most of us will never have gigs like that and are maybe even glad of it. The truth is, Isaacson explains, that Einstein was a person who never allowed his emotions to get too deeply embroiled in relationships or events; he cared, yes, but there was a kind of inner fence around his feelings, protecting him from investing too much psychic energy in things that didn’t ultimately matter to him as much as science. Probably most of us wouldn’t want to be like that, at least with our families and friends.
I wouldn’t. But I still envy him the long, uncluttered hours he had in which to create and I worry that my e-mail will become such a time pit that I’ll end up never getting to eat, shower or sleep, much less think. Maybe the hardest part of being creative, in the end, isn’t pushing our intellects to the limit, but finding the willpower to shut out the din of a world too in love with its own noise.
September 16th, 2009 at 5:10 am
Issacson’s biography is outstanding. You should also read his biography of Franklin, too, if you haven’t.
I do think that the creativity of the theoretician — after all, that’s what Einstein was — is the creativity of the lone artist. Einstein was more like an artist than a scientist in this regard: he was seeking ideas that were both completely explanatory while being beautiful, a way of seeing the universe in an altogether different but true way. Therefore he is more akin to his contemporaries like Picasso, Matisse, James Joyce.
He was just not scientific–he was artful.
Alas, breakthroughs from lone thinkers are going to become ever rarer in our world. In physics, some ideas, like string theory, are so convoluted and complex as to be untestable.
Truly creative breakthroughs in science are going to come from teams of individuals — in genomics, computer science, nanotechnology, robotics. Our understanding of the universe is not going to be dramatically advanced by one man with a pen and paper, but by thousands of scientists scrambling for time on the Hubble.
Great design of objects or goods are now also created by teams (see the firm IDEO) — cars, more efficient solar cells, windmills, high definition video. Great art objects — painting, sculpture, novels — will continue to be made by individuals, but won’t have the impact that, say, Picasso or Joyce did.
The most dramatic advances in creativity are going to come from groups, not the lone genius who lives a quirky, indeed, perhaps dysfunctional social life to live in his own mind, and disgorge its thinking from time to time.