Why People Waste So Much & How Creative People-Create

This episode explores the significant issues around waste in our environment and dives into the nature of creativity and how creative individuals foster their creative processes.

1. Our society's consumption patterns contribute to unprecedented levels of waste, affecting the environment and human health.
2. Creative practices are essential, involving discipline and habitual engagement in creative activities to prevent skills from stagnating.
3. Induction cooking and other technological innovations offer practical solutions to reduce energy waste and improve health.
4. Addressing waste effectively requires both individual action and systemic changes, including better product design and corporate responsibility.
5. Creativity is deeply personal and varies greatly among individuals, influenced by a combination of intrinsic motivation and external factors.

1: The Problem of Waste

Edward Humes highlights the critical issue of waste in modern society, emphasizing the environmental and health impacts of plastics. He advocates for systemic changes to reduce waste and improve recycling efforts. Edward Humes: "We literally live in the most wasteful civilization in history."

2: Creative Processes

Anna Abraham discusses the nature of creativity, the conditions that foster it, and the personal habits that can enhance creative output. Anna Abraham: "All creative artists...emphasize discipline, they emphasize ritual, setting time apart to write, to paint."

1. Reduce Single-Use Plastics: Opt for reusable materials whenever possible to minimize waste.
2. Embrace Technological Solutions: Consider switching to energy-efficient appliances like induction stovetops.
3. Foster Daily Creativity: Set aside regular time for creative activities to maintain and improve your skills.
4. Support Systemic Changes: Advocate for policies and practices that reduce waste and improve recycling processes.
5. Engage in Creative Communities: Surround yourself with creative individuals to stimulate your own creative endeavors.

Whenever I fly, I see people on the plane who look like they are doing important work on their laptops. That may actually be a really bad idea because it is hard to do high quality work at 30,000 feet. Listen as I explain why. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-22357419

We have become a pretty wasteful world. We waste a lot of food, we create a lot of packaging that goes to waste and despite our best efforts we only recycle a fraction of all the things we could. There is likely no one big solution to any of this but there are some interesting things being done you should hear about that are making a difference. Here to explain these solutions and reveal the magnitude of the waste problem is Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Edward Humes. He is author of over two dozen books. His latest is Total Garbage: How We Can Fix Our Waste and Heal Our World (https://amzn.to/3K3tXvx).

Creativity sounds so magical – like it is some mystical gift some people were given that allows them to create the most wonderful things. However, creativity has been studied and the science of it is less magical and more practical. Being more creative and accomplished at anything is a skill we can all develop. We may not become the greatest or most creative at a chosen skill, but we can all become better at anything we put our mind to if we understand how. Here to explain is Anna Abraham. She is a professor and the Director of the Torrance Center for Creativity and Talent Development at the University of Georgia and author of the book, The Creative Brain: Myths and Truths (https://amzn.to/3QReQcn)

When it comes to family dinner, many parents serve different food to their children – like mac and cheese or chicken nuggets because kids seem to prefer it. Is that a good idea? Listen as I reveal the dangers of dumbing down your kids’ meals. https://www.npr.org/2006/11/02/6418289/break-your-childs-mac-n-cheese-diet

People

Edward Humes, Anna Abraham

Companies

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Books

"Total Garbage" by Edward Humes, "The Creative Myths and Truths" by Anna Abraham

Guest Name(s):

Edward Humes, Anna Abraham

Content Warnings:

None

Mike Carruthers
Today on something you should know, something to be aware of. If you do important work while sitting on an airplane, then waste. We waste a lot. And a lot of that waste is getting into the environment. Like plastic.

Edward Humes
Plastic is showing up in newborn babies. Poop. These are newborns who have yet to actually consume a meal out of the womb, and yet they have plastics in their systems. That horrifies me. Also, do your kids eat the same food you eat at dinner?

Mike Carruthers
I'll explain why that's important. And creativity, what it is, and how creative people actually get creative. All creative artists, I think what they have in common is they emphasize discipline, they emphasize ritual, setting time apart to write, to paint. And what they all have in common is practice to make sure that no dust settles on it, right? All this today on something you should know.

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Just go to indeed.com something right now and support our show by saying, you heard about indeed on this podcast, indeed.com something terms and conditions apply. Need to hire you need indeed something you should know. Fascinating intel, the world's top experts, and practical advice you can use in your life today. Something you should know with Mike Carruthers hello there. Welcome to something you should know.

Here's a question for you. When you travel by air, when you're on an airplane, what is it you tend to do to occupy your time? I know a lot of business travelers in particular, like to use that time in the air to catch up on work, to write a report or analyze some data. Well, research suggests that working on an airplane could be a really bad idea. You see, in flight, our brains don't work like they do on the ground, according to Professor Gradwell of King's College in London.

He says our thought process becomes impaired at high altitudes, due to the reduced air pressure and reduced oxygen levels, long flights are a good opportunity to catch up on sleep or reading. But we're better off making important decisions with our feet on the ground. And that is something you should know.

It comes as no surprise to you, I'm sure, that we waste a lot. A lot of food goes to waste. Theres a lot of wasteful product packaging. And I suspect people think that because we recycle plastic and cardboard and whatever else you put out on the curb in your recycle bin, that we are doing something about the waste in the world. But today I want to dive in a little deeper on this topic because there are things about waste that I wasnt aware of until I spoke to the gentleman youre about to hear.

And they're perhaps things you're not aware of either that are quite interesting, not in an alarmist sort of way, or, you know, if we don't do something, the world's going to end kind of way, but really some interesting and sensible things to consider that may change the way you look at the waste in your life. Here to discuss this is Edward Humes. He is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who has written extensively on the topic of waste and garbage, and he is author of 16 books. His most recent book is called Total Garbage how we can fix our Waste and heal our world. Hi Edward.

Welcome to something you should know. It's great to be here. Thanks. So what is your big message? What is it you want people to understand about waste in the world?

Edward Humes
Basically, the planet has an arch villain and it's our waste. We literally live in the most wasteful civilization in history, way beyond what we roll to the curb each week. It's what we eat and drink. It's how we cook. It's the main thing you pay for in your monthly utility bill or at the gas pump is for the energy that gets wasted, not for what you use.

It's our waste that's literally killing us. It's embedded in our daily lives so thoroughly that we think it's normal when we think about it at all. And it's the one thing people think, yeah, I could do something about that. Everybody recognizes waste as a loss and a cost. And fixing it actually isn't necessarily about giving up stuff we love, which is what people always seem to associate with doing the environmentally good thing.

It's actually in many cases upgrading to stuff we're going to love more and that's healthier and gives you more value for your dollar. Well, let's get specific here, because that all sounds good, but by doing things like what? And I know one of the things you talk about is about not cooking with gas. And I remember when I first heard this that we were, some states or cities were going to ban gas stoves. I thought, here we go with some do gooder idea that isn't going to do anything.

Mike Carruthers
And if you don't cook with gas, what are you going to cook with? Electricity, which still requires burning coal to power the electricity. So what is this all about? Not cooking with gas? I met two chefs while I was working on this book, and they're trying to convince their colleagues and the home building industry to stop cooking and heating and making hot water with gas.

Edward Humes
And the conversation is not only about our health and saving the world, it's about cooking faster and better and more cheaply and serving more people faster. And the way you do that is to get rid of the gas stoves, which wastes 70% of their energy heating the room and heating the entire stove, and heating the cooks trying to make their living in 130 degree heat, which is not unusual in a commercial kitchen, and switch to an induction stove, which uses magnets to cook, which sounds like wizardry, but it really isn't. It's the same thing that your wireless phone charger uses to wirelessly move energy from your wall outlet into your phone battery. But when you use it to cook, the heat isn't an accidental byproduct of the process. You know how your, your charger gets warm?

It's. It is the product. And that magnetic field creates heat inside a pan or a pot that's made out of ferrous metal, you know, steel or iron, something that a magnet will cling to. And it doesn't heat anything else in the room, not even itself. The stove makes no heat.

It makes magnetism. So you can literally rest your hand on a full on induction cooktop set to high and feel nothing. Think about cooking in that environment where only the food gets hot. It lowers all your costs. It makes for cool kitchens, very little ventilation.

There's no indoor air pollution. There's a 42% higher risk of childhood asthma and respiratory ailments in kids and vulnerable adults when you have a gas stove in use in your house. One of the things with this whole discussion about gas stoves and certain government agencies wanting to ban gas stoves is they want to ban gas stoves. And my sense would be, if these induction stoves are so great, put them out there and let the market decide if. If they're so great.

Mike Carruthers
They will rise to the top, and people will get rid of their gas stoves, but banning them takes us down a whole other rabbit hole. Absolutely. Oh, yeah. I don't believe in bands. I think that just upsets people, and it's counterproductive.

Edward Humes
This technology sells itself. There is a movement in the restaurant industry for economic reasons as well as fire safety reasons, because induction cooking, basically, it's almost impossible to start a fire with it. The economic benefits, particularly in commercial kitchens, are just. It does sell itself. The kitchen stay cool.

The ventilation needs are much less. It's a money saver, and it improves the service in a restaurant. And chefs are very skeptical. They're really trained. That blue flame, you got to have it.

But when they try it out, when they see chef Chris Galarza, one of the, he's based in Pittsburgh, one of the real advocates for this new technology in kitchens. He pulls a pan out of the freezer, puts it down on the stove, and within seconds, he's sauteing in that pan. No preheating. It is instantaneous. It looks like science fiction, but it's not, actually.

It was demoed, this technology in the 1930s at the Chicago World's Fair. And the way they demoed it, they called it cool cooking. And I like that name, sounds better than induction, which is kind of wonky. But what they did was they had the induction top, and he put a hardcover book down on top of it, and then a tea kettle on top of the book, and then turned it on, and the water started boiling. And the guy made tea, the demonstrator, and he picked up the book and started reading it while he was having his tea.

And all the spectators are watching this at the world's fair, and the book was perfectly fine because the magnetism travels harmlessly through the book and into the metal kettle and heats the water inside. One of the things that I'm certainly concerned about, and we've talked about it before on this podcast, and that is plastic. There is so much plastic, it doesn't go away. And I know it's a big part of the waste problem, right. Plastic has become a part of our diet.

It's in our food, it's in our water, it's in the air. It's being found in heart patients, inside their hearts, in the plaque in our arteries. Plastic is showing up, and newborn babies poop. These are newborns who have yet to actually consume a meal out of the womb, and yet they have plastics in their systems. That horrifies me.

And the data just keeps getting worse. We are consuming about a credit card's worth of plastic a week in America. And it's because we have, in fairly short amount of time, gone from a relatively plastic free daily existence with literally no disposable plastics in our trash in the 1960s, to it being the biggest part of our waste stream, being an enormous pollutant in our environment. And part of the reason for that is we've been sold not only the idea that disposable plastic products made out of a material that does not occur in nature and that nature can't handle, really can't be effectively recycled, in most cases, we've been sold a bill of goods that it's a great idea to use it once and throw away product out of this stuff. It's not a good idea.

And that's why we're in the space of 50 years, it's become a new food group and not a healthy one for us. But there's a problem that seems impossible to fix, because plastic is everywhere. It's everything. Where would anybody even begin to start to get rid of it? This is the kind of thing where actually what we do as consumers and taxpayers matter and can drive change, but also where we need top down solutions, which we are getting.

So if you go back to this, I'll break this down for you. Go back to the sixties and before, we had a lot of reuse systems in place, beer bottles, all those would be returned, washed by the manufacturers, and refilled and resold. You could have a glass coke bottle, for instance, and it would be used 50 times before it started to be unusable. And then it would be ground up and recycled into new bottles, because glass, unlike plastic, is infinitely recyclable. And that was the business model.

And that business model goes back to the colonial days. It was the system we've always had. We were in the aberration moment, not the normal moment. Now by getting rid of that. In the 1970s, when someone finally invented a plastic bottle that didn't explode when you put a carbonated beverage in it.

Previous attempts had exploded, so we stuck with the glass for a long time. Now we have this new system, and what happened, these plastic bottles come into use. It's marketed as a convenience. Look, you don't have to bring it back. Nobody wants to talk about, though, when this first came out, what happens to that material, what the big brands like Coke and all the others that are filling our pantries and our supermarkets with plastic bottles did was offload the expense of dealing with the end life of their products, which they had always been responsible for and foisted it off on consumers and taxpayers.

Oh, well, you know, that stuff can be recycled. You guys take care of it. Somehow they managed to convince us and we've been stuck in this model ever since, subsidizing a waste that is really impossible to recycle well and to repurpose or even when it is recycled, it has low value and very few viable uses. Only about 9% of our plastics get recycled in this, in the world, and it's even less in the US, about 6%. That's a horrendous record.

So the solution from the bottom up is stop buying stuff in single use plastics. We don't need it. There's other alternatives. If you have to have a, have a soft drink or a single use beverage of any kind, buy it in a can, buy it in glass. You don't need plastic wraps and bags when you have free with your peanut butter, a glass jar.

It's great for storing stuff. I talked to an author named Emery Bonneau, who blogs as the zero waste chef, and she says, I don't use plastic. I keep these containers, I wash them, I reuse them. If I have leftover salad, I don't put it in a bowl with a plastic wrap over. Let me put a plate on top of that bowl and put it in the refrigerator.

It works great. Keeps everything fresh. Without the plastic. You are eating 100 times more plastic than when you store food in plastic, than if you store it in a substance that doesn't constantly shed itself into the food, which is what plastic does. We're talking about waste and recycling, and my guest is Edward Humes.

Mike Carruthers
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Use as directed as a listener to something you should know. I can only assume that you are someone who likes to learn about new and interesting things and bring more knowledge to work for you in your everyday life. I mean, that's kind of what something you should know is all about. And so I want to invite you to listen to another podcast called Ted Talks Daily. Now, you know about Ted Talks, right?

Many of the guests on something you should know have done TED talks. Well, you see, Ted Talks Daily is a podcast that brings you a new TED talk every weekday. In less than 15 minutes, join host Elise Hu. She goes beyond the headlines so you can hear about the big ideas shaping our future. Learn about things like sustainable fashion, embracing your entrepreneurial spirit, the future of robotics, and so much more.

Like I said, if you like this podcast, something you should know, I'm pretty sure you're gonna like TEd talks daily. And you get TED talks daily wherever you get your podcasts. So, Edward, isn't it interesting how there doesn't seem to be as much concern about all the plastic in the world, for example, that people hear things like, we're eating a credit card's worth of plastic every week, or this stuff will never go away, and we're just going to keep piling up wasteful plastic. And yet there are alternatives because we used to use glass bottles and we used to use glass or aluminum cans and still do. But why not focus back on that?

Edward Humes
That's what other countries are doing. They say, why are we making all this waste when we can make things we can use over and over again? You know, an aluminum can is infinitely recyclable, and it uses 95% less energy to do it that way than mining virgin aluminum. Why would we use plastics when we have such better options like that? It's crazy.

And the plastics are killing us. They're making our sick forever. Chemicals, you've probably heard of those. Those are compounds that are released into the environment and they're related to plastics, and they are in our water. They're getting into everything.

And it's not just from the obvious sources, but things like fake grass are like spewing these harmful, forever chemicals into our ecosystem, into our waters and into our food. And it's almost unchecked. One thing that really kind of gets me going is the problem of food waste. And, you know, when you walk, you leave a restaurant and you walk through on your way out the door, you look at tables that still have plates on them and there's so much food left on the tables. I hate that.

Mike Carruthers
It's just, there's so much, and that's just in restaurants. Plus all the food that goes bad at home and all. We waste so much food, and what do we do about that? I think it's really interesting. A nonprofit in Los Angeles going.

Edward Humes
It's called crop swap la. And his answer to waste in our food system is to make it more local and to also make it healthier and fresher. And he thinks the secret to nutritious, plentiful, and affordable local food that cuts waste and lowers emissions is to replace our lawns with vegetable gardens and urban micro farms. Now, I know what you're thinking, that's ridiculous. It sounds impossible, but actually there's precedent for it.

During World War Two, nearly half of the nation's produce was raised in home vegetable gardens because we needed it. And they called them victory gardens. And everybody got into it big time. And the results are incredible. Almost half of our produce in people's yards.

So this is sort of the 21st century take on it. Crop swap la is converting lawns in Los Angeles food deserts, in neighborhoods where it can be really hard to get fresh produce and fresh fruit. And what he does, he can take a thousand square foot plot of grass and convert that to an organic regenerative micro farm and send weekly bags of produce to up to 40 families a week from these little tiny farms. His motto is, why mow your yard when you can eat your yard? And they're beautiful.

They're not like eyesores or something. Aesthetically, they're kind of gorgeous to look at. Well, I don't know a whole lot about that, but it does seem like a bit of a drop in the bucket to the problem of food waste throughout the world. There's no one solution to any of our problems, and I don't think we should think that way. What people can do is actually make small choices and small changes that they have power over and the additive power of that starting small but building momentum that's powerful.

I mean, no, of course not. There's not one thing you can name that's going to fix any problem. It takes just a different way of thinking about things. All right. Yeah.

I can't give, give up everything made out of plastic because it is everywhere, but I can start using less of it. I don't need plastic wrap. I don't need plastic bags to put my kids sandwiches in. I can wrap that to send to school. I could wrap that in something else.

I could use a cloth napkin and wrap the sandwich in that, and then it becomes the kid's placemat while he's eating. And then he wipes his face with it, and then he brings it home and I'll wash it and do it over again. What's so hard about something like that? Make one little change. It adds up.

That's the great thing. Thing about reducing waste, those reductions add up. You can't solve everything in one fell swoop. That's our problem. That's what we're waiting for, for the czech gods of Silicon Valley or something, to descend and say, aha, here it is.

This is going to suck all the plastic out of the water. This is going to suck all the carbon out of the atmosphere. If we wait for that, we're all going to be waiting a very long time. What's really cool is that there's a lot of good enough solutions and things that work better and create less waste and more quality of life and more value, and we embrace those where we can, when we can, and that does add up, and that will save the world. You know what I wonder is why, with the plastic issue, why we didn't see it coming?

Mike Carruthers
Why the people who made plastic and they made it because it's so durable? Why we didn't see this problem coming? That if we keep using lots and lots of plastic, there's nowhere for it to go, and it's going to be a problem. In fact, the inventors of plastic, they never envisioned it being used 100 years ago when these materials first came online, that it would be used to make ridiculous, throwaway items that people only touched once, used once and threw away chip bags. They wanted to build durable, beautiful, and useful things.

Edward Humes
And everything from billiard balls making it out of plastic instead of ivory or piano keys, to the early infrastructure of our then nascent electrical grid. All that was made out of long lasting, durable plastics. And the allure was that it could be any shape, any color, and serve a lot of different purposes where natural materials were not easily adapted. And the selling point for plastic is it didn't decompose. Bacteria didn't break it down, it didn't rot.

Natural forces that break down natural materials didn't apply. Why in the world would you take that something designed never to be absorbed by nature and turn it into to a disposable product and throw it everywhere? I mean, that is insanity by definition. And the people who vented plastic never, never intended that. Well, this is something that really, it affects everyone.

Mike Carruthers
I mean, if we're all eating a credit card's worth of plastic every week, it affects everyone. And like you say, there isn't going to be one solution to all of this. But if people do what they can do, then collectively it may make a real difference. I've been speaking with Edward Humes. He is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who's written 16 books.

His latest book is called total how we can fix our waste and heal our world. And there's a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Appreciate you coming by and talking about this, Edward. Thank you. I really appreciated your interest in having this conversation.

The concept of creativity is one that's always interested me, not just from the point of view of the creator, but also the recipient. What is creativity? Is it really important to the average person to be creative? Are we driven to create? Or is it enough to appreciate other people's creativity?

Are there ways to up your own creative abilities? Well, here to discuss all this is Anna Abraham. She is a professor and director of the Torrance center for Creativity and Talent Development at the University of Georgia. And she's author of a book called the creative myths and truths. Hi, Anna.

Welcome to something you should know. Thank you for having me. So, if you had to. It's probably a hard question to answer. Well, maybe it's not.

If you had to define creativity, what is it? I would define it as our ability to have ideas or create products that are in some way novel or surprising as well as satisfying to some end. Ooh, that's a really good and different definition. And I guess almost everybody has the capacity to be creative. But what interests me so much is those people who are just so driven to be creative, who must write or paint or invent things like, what is that?

What is that engine that pushes them? I think that is really the million dollar question, if you want. We tend to look at creativity from the outside and look at people who do these amazing things that fill us with wonder and joy and awe. We understand very little about the internal processes, and, I mean, really, that this drive, this energy that we have to do the things that we really care about, because it's hard work. It takes a lot of effort, it takes a lot of discipline to reach the heights of creativity.

Anna Abraham
And we know very little about what exactly those of us who do it have very differently from the others. A lot of it stems from just getting a lot of meaning and joy in doing that activity. That that's where you feel your purposes. Right? So there's.

All of these aspects of creativity, from an empirical standpoint, are less well studied. This discipline focus, this need to do this and not that why am I moved to do this? One activity are deep. Individuality is involved there, which is what makes it hard to study, because it's easy to study things that are general and common to all of us. It's much harder to study things about our unique interests and our unique proclivities.

Mike Carruthers
I wonder if the satisfaction of being creative is being creative or the reward that comes after the payoff, the satisfaction, the accolades, whatever it is.

Is that what drives creativity, or is it just doing it? I think a lot of it is what comes in the moment, in the process. So we can think of reward in terms of phases that it comes in. So there's a lot of joy in the process of creating. Yeah.

Anna Abraham
So you're sitting there at the. Of course, with a lot of frustration, but when the ideas start to flow, when the words start to chime and do what you want it to do, that is an immense experience to have in and of itself the moment of creation. The other aspect of the reward is what happens when you put it out there in the world. Yeah. So that we should distinguish between two phases of the re, if you want to call it the reward process.

One is the joy of the moment, the fulfillment, even. Let's say, maybe joy is too light of a word. The fulfillment of the doing, the meaningfulness of what you get when you're doing it as the creator, the explorer, and the other part of it, which is, how does it reach people? Is it falling? Well, so even if, let's say, you create what you think to be an amazing song, when you created it, it was wonderful for you.

But if a lot of people don't listen to it, it doesn't mean anything was compromised about your process. You still had an engaging, positive, meaningful, fulfilling moment in the moment of creation. Do you think creativity is subjective? That you may look at something and say, boy, that's so creative, and I may look at it and go, that's horrible. Yes.

It is certainly very subjective. It also seems that time because there are plenty of works of art that did nothing at the time. But later, in fact, in a more recent example, I just watched an interview with Jerry Seinfeld who recounted how the first few seasons of his tv show were completely trashed and didn't do well in the ratings. Critics called it horrible. Now it is this iconic, every season of that show is iconic television that is going to go on forever.

Mike Carruthers
But at the time it really wasn't much. I think there's a distinction to be made between things that are really an acquired taste. And we have this even for, for music. This is where I've experienced it the most. There were certain types of music that just seemed dissonant and noise like to me when I was much, much younger that I would gladly listen to now.

Anna Abraham
It's almost like we have to evolve our sensibilities for certain types of mediums. So some things are more complex to grasp than others. Some things feel beautiful immediately you look at it and think, poof. And it's a kind of fluency there. It works well with things that are sort of not jarring at all in any sense.

Theres a lot of symmetry, theres an expectancy there. There is another completely different path to understanding aesthetic pleasure, which is sometimes you look at, lets say a work of art and its not immediately obvious to you what might be being depicted there. And then you work it out almost. So it takes some time. Its slightly more temporally distended phenomena.

And then you have what has been referred to as almost like an aesthetic. Aha. It comes to you a little later because it's a little more complicated. It's a little more like a puzzle that you need to work out. Do you ever stop and think, as I do, how many great books, inventions, ideas, stories, plays, movies, tv shows, works of art?

Mike Carruthers
How many did we never get to see because some gatekeeper said, no, no, sorry, that's not going anywhere. So that's the end of that and we'll never know. Absolutely. I agree completely there. You know, we probably live in an age now where we have a lot more exposure to things, where the gatekeepers are becoming, have maybe a little less power because of social media and the Internet and people having websites and so on.

Anna Abraham
That way they can just put up their own work. But it's still there, of course, who people will still go to galleries and exhibition spaces. That's the marker of achievement, right? And that's completely dictated by the gatekeepers and what they are willing or able to see as being groundbreaking and so on. That's the problem with creativity as well, because the appearance of something new can seem very, very jarring because it's not easy to sort of assimilate that into what you already know.

So a lot of really good new ideas can get rejected because they're new. They just seem perhaps nonsensical and so on. Or it's so far beyond what the status quo is seeing as okay, that they're not even going to entertain it. So that is the problem for creativity, because it relies on some recognition on the part of the recipient. But what the recipient can recognize is really based on what they already know and what they're open towards as well.

Mike Carruthers
Do you differentiate these two kinds of creativity? The singular creativity, the guy who paints a painting and wow, that's fabulous, versus making a movie kind of creativity, where there's lots of people who are very creative, all of whom played a part, but there's no one creativity. That's a great question. I don't know of any studies that have compared them. You know, it's kind of really interesting.

Anna Abraham
They're obviously very different. A painter, a lone painter doing her work by herself is very different from a director who has to direct, you know, who has to have. It's almost like a had to direct an orchestra of people who are doing very different things. You know, let's say a director, she would have to have a vision for what the sound should be like, what the set design has to be like, what the actors are doing, what the cinematography should look like. And a painting is just an object that you can have an immediate access to.

And it's a few seconds, perhaps, of your attention, maybe minutes, if you spend a lot of time examining it, and then it's over. Whereas for something like a film, it's several minutes and sometimes several hours. And so this temporally extended type of creative output, what is the process there involved is things that we know very little about. Do we have a pretty good idea of what goes on in the brain when someone is in that creative mode? In other words, have you ever hooked up sensors or whatever to the brain of somebody when they're writing or painting or performing or whatever they're doing, and compare that to when they're eating a sandwich and see what the difference is?

What we see in the brain is that multiple networks, brain networks are involved depending on the task in question. So the way to think about it, I think, is to think about what's happening in your mind when you're let's say reading a poem compared to when you're reciting a poem from memory, compared to when you're writing a poem from scratch. Right. And if you just think about how our minds work in each of these three situations with reading, it's pretty easy. It's so automatic.

And we know exactly the systems that are involved when it comes to the memory aspect of it. We also know a lot about how conceptual knowledge is stored and how we recall that information and which networks in the brain are involved in that. When it comes to the creative side, let's say you and I are both trying to write a poem about something, and we can have even a topic that we agree on. Let's write a poem about a pen. Yeah.

The way you use your brain networks will be very different from the way I use it because we are drawing on different sources of information. We have some things in common. We have some common associations with the word pen, but we have associations that go well beyond, like, oh, the pen is used for writing, and it's similar to a pencil and so on. Right. So all of our associations start to diverge after a while.

So what we see in brain imaging work these dynamic interactions between multiple networks. Because what you're trying to do when you're trying to be creative is to not do the predictable thing, to not go down the path of least resistance. You're trying to go away from it. So you have to use the networks that you have in place that follow the path of least resistance in their own specific domains, to sort of co opt them, to do different things. That's what changes about the creative brain.

You have this dynamic coupling between different networks, and that might look slightly different when I'm doing it compared to you're doing it. Even though we're trying to do the same task, so to speak, is a. Big part of creativity. Practice seems like it is that if I'm going to write a poem, and I've written 50 of them, the 51st is going to, the process is going to be more efficient, less wasteful. It's going to be a better process than the first one was.

Absolutely. And it's actually, sadly, one of the least understood aspects of the creative process. From a scientific standpoint, at least. All creative artists, I think what they have in common is that they have, they emphasize discipline, they emphasize practice, they emphasize ritual, you know, setting time apart on a regular basis, to write, to paint, to do all of these things. And what they all have in common is practice, is this constant need to perfect, improve, and just keep, let's say, their motor systems engaged, whatever modality they're looking at to make sure that no dust settles on it.

Right. So that's what's really unusual about the fact that when we think about the creative process, we're so drawn to all the magical stuff like the flow and insight and all of these things that seem so mystical somehow. Inspiration. Exactly. We tend to pay far less attention to the grind.

The fact that if you're going to write a book, you're going to have to spend a lot of time sitting at your typewriter or your computer or your book, whatever you might be using to get those words out. If you're going to be working on a piece of music, you're going to have to spend a lot of time just thinking up what kind of sequences of melodies you want. You have to keep trying things before it finds something that resonates. It takes time, it takes practice, it takes discipline. And a lot of the time can seem like wasted time because it didn't work, but it's a necessary step in the process.

Mike Carruthers
If you don't go through that, you never get to the good stuff. Absolutely. Yeah. That's the. It's just the process is the preparation.

Anna Abraham
The trying is an intricate part of the process. Even though after the end of perhaps months of work, you have just like a song or two. Right. All of those, those tries are very much. Even the ineffective ones, even the ones that didn't lead anywhere still told you where you didn't want to go, let's say.

Or still told you that, oh, this character development was not perhaps the best one. So I'm going to have to kill my darling, so to speak. And so that's all part of the process of creation. But is there any sense of other than just sit down and give it a whirl? Is there any sense of a process to be creative, or it's just too individual and there's too many different kinds of creativity to.

Mike Carruthers
That's not even a question. I think there is. The process is that people must figure out their own process. So all creative people tend to emphasize a practice of some sort. But what the specifics will look like are very different from person to person.

Anna Abraham
So some people will write every day, some people write three times a week. Some people will have a whole morning devoted for it. Some people will have just 2 hours and so on. People will have to cut themselves away from the world for a few weeks. Others don't do that.

And also, this can differ from person to person, even during their lifetime. So you might be someone who has a particular practice or style or ritual, let's say, to get to essentially access your creative mind, to work creatively when you're younger, and it changes when you're older, when your life circumstances change, and so on. So what's also really common to all of them is that they're very. They exercise a lot of metacognitive ability, so they're always thinking about what works for them. They're very in tune with what seems to work for them.

And if something's not, they know that they need to change it. So they reflect a lot on their process. And so they're always sort of listening to themselves, making sure that they're putting themselves in their right space, creating the conditions that will allow them to get into the state of flow, have those ideas, do productive things that are very fulfilling for them. The person who's trying to write the book or be a painter, and they look at the masters, because when people talk about creativity, it's very easy to gravitate to the masters and talk about them. But is there any sense of what it is they have that I don't have, or is it like your example of the athlete, that some people just have it and some people don't?

Mike Carruthers
But it doesn't mean you're not good. It just means you're not the very best. It's the confluence of factors. Even the great masters started as novices. They didn't know much, right?

Anna Abraham
They started just like we all did when we learned how to write. Right? What did we start with? None of us knew how to grasp a pencil. None of us knew how to make the shapes.

When we think about creativity, we think about it in terms of the magnitude of what people are showing. So everything starts with mini c, as we call it, which is this subjective, exploratory space. We see it a lot with very young children as they're exploring the world. As you practice and you get better, you go into this little c. Let's say it's a little more objective.

I like to write poetry, for instance, and I know that I've gotten better at it compared to when what I write recently is, I think, better than what I wrote two years ago. Right. So you start to develop a more, let's say, objective from a personal standpoint lens about where you're going, where you're progressing. Further on you go, you get to proceed, which is like professional levels. People who are very talented, very motivated, decide to pursue it as a kind of profession.

And finally, when your outputs are reaching to the extent where that it really changes the world in some way or has a significant impact, that's when you've reached what's called big C, creativity. We know that this is even the masters had to work from a phase of being not knowing to being incredibly accomplished, and so that nobody is just born accomplished. The second thing to keep in mind is very often they've been in environments that are conducive to this. They had someone recognize this when they were young, right? Or just little.

The environment does matter, that they're in an environment where they're capable or able to create. Mozart is usually the one who's pointed out is the epitome of talent galore, that his earliest compositions were by the age of five. What people don't really realize, and this is really well captured in a wonderful book by Twyla Tharp called creative Habits, is that he was born to his father, who was an accomplished composer and pedagogue, who really trained up, sort of seeing that his child was so capable and interested, made sure that he got all of the exposure and training that he needed and gave him, like, the best opportunities in the world to develop that interest. So one side of the story is what you're naturally vacillating to in terms of your interests and what you want to do, what gives you purpose and meaning and fulfillment, and where you want to channel your energies to. And the other side is having people around who or an environment or society, whatever it might be, that provides you the opportunities to hone those abilities.

Without that kind of influence, it's very hard. The talent will just go. Will get wasted. Yeah, well, that's one of those other things to ponder is how many great painters never sat down to paint. So we'll never know.

Mike Carruthers
How many great composers never sat down to compose music. We'll never know. I've been speaking with Anna Abraham. She's a professor and director of the Torrid center for Creativity and Talent Development at the University of Georgia. The name of her book is the creative myths and truths.

And if you'd like to check that out, there's a link to it at Amazon in the show notes. Thank you, Anna, for coming on and talking about this. Thank you so much, Mike. Thank you for the opportunity. It's been a real pleasure.

You've probably seen this or maybe done this, if you have kids, where you make a meal for yourself, but the kids eat something else. They eat Mac and cheese or chicken nuggets or pizza. Well, according to a study. That's a bad idea. Researchers determined that children who ate adult meals were significantly healthier than those kids who ate meals that were dumbed down for them with things like chicken nuggets, Mac and cheese, and pizza.

It robs them of a balanced diet and it robs them of developing healthy habits. And it wasn't just the food that factored into the study. How and where the kids ate made a difference, too. Kids should be required to sit at the table with the grownups and not be allowed to eat or snack in front of the tv or in the backseat of the car. And that is something you should know.

How about leaving us a rating and review on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Castbox, wherever you listen. We'd appreciate it if you would let people know what you think of the show and hopefully give us a five star review. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to something you should know. The biggerpockets portfolio of podcasts are worthy of your investment.

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