The Creative Curve by Allen Gannett

Author:Allen Gannett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2018-06-12T04:00:00+00:00

Building a Foundation

The reason the 20 percent principle is consistent among the creative artists I interviewed is that it provides the building blocks that are necessary for aha moments to flourish. This accumulation of prior knowledge fills up the brain with examples and concepts that artists then use to uncover non-obvious insights.

Bowden explained the importance of establishing prior knowledge. “I think one of the problems people have with the idea of insight is if they think it’s a magical process, they think that they shouldn’t have to work hard to have an insight; but what you need to do is you have to establish a certain level of knowledge. You can’t have insights about things you don’t know anything about.”

That line is worth repeating: “You can’t have insights about things you don’t know anything about.”

Aha moments tend to drive a lot of the mythology that’s been constructed around creativity. At the same time, there is some truth to both their power and their hype since, as we’ve seen, aha moments are generally more accurate than, and superior to, normal step-by-step logical processes.

But, as a normal cognitive function, they are also something we can enhance and practice.

Want to become a great writer? Start consuming all the books you can get your hands on. Need to write better dialogue in your scripts? Start listening to people talking at coffee shops (but don’t be creepy about it). Want to become a great television executive? Watch TV day and night. The 20 percent principle gives us the raw ingredients our brains need to generate aha moments. We need to have the memories and mental models for our right hemisphere to work with. Without these ingredients, we are shutting down our own potential.

This element of bulk consumption is widespread across all creative industries. Connor Franta spent years watching countless YouTube videos. Great entrepreneurs consume trade and industry material en route to identifying their next lucrative business. José Andrés visits food and restaurant conventions to observe and absorb new techniques and get introduced to the latest ingredients.

The 20 percent principle not only makes flashes of genius possible, by providing lots of exemplars, it also allows for creative people to gain insight into what will be familiar—through cultural awareness. Ted Sarandos’s experience working in a video store made it possible for him to understand what kinds of stories, formats, and structures his audience would perceive as similar to other movies they loved. By understanding where an idea would fall on the creative curve then and today, he was able to lead Netflix to incredible heights in original programming.

If your goal is to achieve mainstream success, your first step should be to immerse yourself in the field you’re interested in, exposing yourself to and consuming as much as possible. This will allow you to identify ideas that are familiar to previous successes.

But wait one second. Before you start consuming books, CDs, movies, or television shows, I need to point out one possible conundrum.

The fact is, many of us are already consuming massive amounts of material.

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