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Ah! Don’t you just love that new newsletter smell? I washed my hands before I started typing because I didn’t want to get it dirty. That attitude will have worn off by the fourth newsletter, I’m sure, where I’ll just be punching my keyboard with filthy meat-hammers.
“So what’s all this ‘Experiments in Creativity’ stuff about?” I hear you muttering (I probably need to see someone about those voices in my head). Well, I’ve only recently realised that trying to discover new things about creativity has been a thread through my professional life for years. And it’s what makes me happy. I always seem to be conducting a study or trying out new ways of producing ideas. And I love sharing the results. So here we go!
In this newsletter series, I plan to share some learnings from experiments I’m doing (or have done) and suggest some experiments you may want to try yourself. I’ll even give you tools to help you get going. Because experiments are simply trying out different ways of doing things. They’re how we move ourselves – and the world – forward.
And they’re not necessarily about succeeding, either. As this story illustrates.
The Time I Nearly Broke My Brain
The first experiment I want to tell you about is one I conducted on myself to see if I could improve my creative thinking.
I’d read that what often stops us from having fresh ideas are the habitual ruts we develop over time. These cause our minds to go down the same old paths and come up with the same old solutions. I wanted to break out of obvious, safe thinking habits and free my mind up to explore more unusual and interesting ideas. So I started an experiment.
My hypothesis was that if I broke down all the habitual stuff in my life, I’d become more creative.
It started as soon as I woke up. I’d try to get out of bed a different way each day. It got so ridiculous that one day I found myself slithering out of the bottom of my bed on my back headfirst. But if that’s what the experiment demanded, I was going to do it. I’d then try to brush my teeth in a different order. I’d try to put my clothes on in a different order. And then I’d try to take a different route to work. It carried on like this for the rest of the day. Every day. For months.
After about six months, I’d broken down all my habits. I was free!
Or was I? The truth was it had created a different kind of prison. Everything now took a lot more time because I had to think about it consciously. And that left me less brain-space to spend on creative tasks.
I discovered this one morning while standing in the kitchen trying to make myself a coffee. This formerly automated task should have taken a couple of minutes. But for me it involved trying to work out where the mugs were. Then the spoons. Then the milk. And then the coffee grounds. Only once I’d collected all of this paraphernalia did I consider the step I should have started with: turning on the kettle.
The experiment was a failure. It took me years to build up all the useful patterns I’d broken down in just a matter of months. But I learned a few things from the experience.
✅ BREAK THE RIGHT HABITS
I wasn’t wrong about breaking habits, it’s just that I’d broken the wrong ones. The right habits to break are your consumption habits. It’s important to vary the information you put in your head and experiences you subject yourself to. If your input is all Kardashians and chardonnay, you can’t expect great output.
✅ STICK WITH IT
This experiment proved to me that you need to consistently apply yourself to your experiment. If I’d just dipped in and out of it whenever I remembered, it would have never have had the impact it did. Admittedly, that impact wasn’t positive. But results are results.
✅ HAVE A WAY TO MEASURE YOUR PROGRESS
This was something I didn’t have. I just said I wanted better ideas. But I didn’t have a way to measure that. So the experiment drifted on longer than it perhaps should have. When I run experiments now, I make sure I know how to measure the results.
This was one of my earlier experiments. I’m glad to say no other experiment has had such a detrimental impact. It took me a few years to fix the damage I’d done. But I’m still really happy I did it.
In the next newsletter, I’ll tell you a story about an experiment that involved 18 advertising creatives, an unlimited supply of alcohol and a mutiny. You don’t want to miss that one!
