Creativity for Non-Geniuses
Not everybody has the capacity to be "creative." As in, to make something out of nothing. To invent something that wasn't here before. And that's ok. Because not everybody is a pro athlete either, or a machine-minded chess player, or a captivating orator. We all have our strengths and weaknesses.
Some people in the world seem to get ideas out of nowhere. Brilliant, world-shifting ideas, seemingly from nowhere.
I am not one of those people. Almost no one is one of those people. They do exist, but they're extremely rare.
But there are ways to become more creative if you are creative, or to at least venture into the arena of creativity if you've never been there before.
And it's really simple: spend time dancing around with information. Spend time immersed in an ecosystem of other people’s good ideas. Absorb as much information as you can, and connections will make themselves. In your head.
Dancing
If you're a guitarist and you've never once written a song, maybe it's not because you completely lack creativity. Maybe it's because you don't spend enough time with your guitar.
I’ve found cute little chord combinations and interesting little series of notes on my guitar before. And who knows, maybe they are catchy enough to turn into a song. I’ve never done it, but maybe I could if I put in the work.
But these ideas never came on some random night when I hadn’t touched my guitar in a week. It was always when I was spending hours and hours a week playing my guitar. That’s no coincidence.
If you spent 3 hours a day playing notes and chords and licks up and down the neck, it's more or less inevitable that you'd eventually find something unique. A chord that sounded good with that other chord you played a few minutes ago. Or a series of notes that is begging to be turned into a full, mature melody. And then you keep playing around with it until you find what comes next.
Anyone can do that.
Legendary songwriter Paul Simon gave an interview one time (a rare occasion for Mr. Simon), and was describing to host Dick Cavett how he wrote his songs. He was explaining, with the help of his guitar, how he hit a snag on one song in particular. He got stuck in the process of writing.
Cavett asked him why. And his response was "well, everywhere I went led me where I didn't wanna be. So I was stuck." And of course the audience laughed because that response, that creative outlook, was jarring. It was deceptively simple. As are most good things in life.
Paul Simon wrote songs in a way that could be imitated by anyone. He sat with his instrument and played with other people’s ideas and little tiny ideas of his own, until new, bigger ideas made themselves known to him. Anyone can do that.
Traders are often considered creative people. And I find that to be largely true. All of the great traders I know have one thing in common: they do not wake up every day and scour the market for every little trade idea they can find. They do not wake up every day and desperately look for reasons to trade a particular stock or a particular currency. That's not what good traders do. It’s not a desperate process, and it’s not a process of scouring.
What do good traders do? They happily pay attention to the market. That's it. That's the entire scope of what they do. Their goal every day is to wake up and absorb as much information as possible from an ecosystem of endless information.
What they're doing is calmly filing away new knowledge into the library of everything they already know... and waiting for signals. Waiting for either patterns to appear, or dislocations to appear.
They’re waiting to see that something is out of place. Looking for places where something doesn't quite look right against what they've seen in the past. Looking for places where some new piece of information doesn't match what would be expected given the circumstances.
Or... looking for places where something they're seeing now does match an opportunity they've seen in the past, and that they know was profitable.
What traders do every day, much like a songwriter, is research. Just research. Just watch and listen. Good trade ideas don't come because you want to find them; they come because you were paying attention and you earned the sight with which to see them.
Digging
Stephen King, in his essential memoir On Writing, compared being a writer to being an archaeologist.
When I'm writing a good, honest story, he said, it's not quite like creating something. That’s not really how it feels. It's not quite like inventing something that didn't exist.
It's more like finding something that already did exist, and being as careful as I can to preserve it in its most natural and honest form.
Writing a good story, he said, is almost like digging up a fossil. It's there, waiting to be found. All you have to do is put in the work to dig it up. And you have to remember that the thing is fragile — you must use gentle tools. You must not break it with the blunt instrument of vanity. You must not bastardize or contaminate it with ego and grandeur. Don't inject what you selfishly want into it... let the fossil tell you what it is. Discover it curiously. Dig it up honestly and present your findings.
And sometimes what you’re digging up may surprise you. What you end up with may not even be remotely what you were aiming at. In fact, one could even argue that’s the entire point of writing. To be surprised by what you yourself know. To find what patterns and bits of meaning are already there inside your head, waiting to be translated into words. And then you get to tell other people, and find out that they already knew it too — and just didn’t have the words for it. You found the words for them. And that holds true with any art form.
I find that to be true with my own writing. When I try to sound poetic and beautiful, it sounds like garbage. Completely uninteresting. It sounds like I'm a big phony who just wants a medal for his exquisite and tasteful use of language. That’s a blunt instrument. That’s ego and vanity, not a gentle brush. I’m trying to force the piece to be something that it’s not. A dishonest message is always a worse message. Always.
It's better when I'm just patiently letting the words reveal themselves to me. When they come, I type them. When they don’t, I think and read and dance a bit more.
I find that a lot of creative people are just archaeologists, like Stephen King. They don't insist on creating something to satisfy their own desires or their egos. They live in service to their craft, not the other way around. They wake up every day, and they dig. Even if they don't find something, they dig anyway. Because if you dig long enough, you'll find something. And then you get to show it not only to yourself, but to the world. How satisfying. To present some cool little thing to the world that wasn’t here last week.
That’s why being a writer is so enjoyable. I get to teach people what they already knew, by digging for language they needed but hadn’t found yet.
Paul Simon did end up finding his melody. He borrowed an early part of the melody from an old Bach piece. And then he added in some gospel chord progressions, as he happened to have been listening to some gospel at that time. But he still didn’t have his chorus.
And then he found that too. He brought it all together with part of a lyric he heard from some random singer he didn’t even know. That song that Paul Simon pieced together so slowly ended up becoming Bridge Over Troubled Water, one of the most globally recognizable songs ever written.
The lesson I learned from that interview was that Paul Simon, one of the world's greatest songwriters, wrote songs in the simplest and most intuitive way possible. In the same way any of us would. By absorbing information from his guitar and from others in his craft until something new made itself known to him. Something that hadn’t happened before.
I mean, look at this piece. I didn’t sit down and write this as some unexpected work of creative novelty. It came together from a book I read, an interview I saw, and a pattern I see in my everyday life. It’s just matching ideas from over here with ideas from over there and finding some overlaps worth discussing. It’s looking for patterns and meaning, and then translating them for an audience.
And that’s why they say writers should read all the time. Because words and stories are the ecosystem a writer must live in. They are his nourishment. They are my nourishment.
Creativity doesn’t have to be a work of genius, and it doesn’t have to be sudden. It just requires dancing around for a while with other people’s good ideas and seeing what happens.
Drink water but only if it’s going to be commercially profitable,
JDR
“I never made one of my discoveries through the process of rational thinking.” - Albert Einstein