#432： How to Achieve Creative Success
Episode Stats
Summary
Alan Gannett argues that the myth of the creative genius is entirely wrong and lays out a different picture of what it really means to be a successful creative. In his new book, The Creative Curve, he explains why the best creative ideas aren t novel, and instead riff off on what already exists.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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Now, when we think of creative people, we often think of a genius who works alone,
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comes up with an earth-shattering new idea, instantaneous eureka moment,
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and then sees that obviously valuable idea naturally become a well-known sensation.
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My guest today argues that this picture is altogether wrong
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and lays out a different image of what it really means to not only be creative,
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but to become a successful creative and achieve one's aims.
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His name is Alan Gannett, and he's the author of the book The Creative Curve.
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We begin our conversation discussing what exactly creativity is
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and the myth of the creative genius that exists in the West.
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Alan shares why the best creative ideas actually aren't completely novel,
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Then we discuss why the most creative people in history are the biggest consumers of other content ideas,
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why timing is crucial in a creative idea taking off,
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and the four types of people a successful creative needs to have in their network.
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Whether you need to be creative in traditional business or more artistic pursuits,
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this show has some good insights on how to make your ideas more successful.
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After the show's over, check out the show notes at aom.is slash creativecurve.
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how to develop the right idea at the right time.
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Now, this idea that you can instantaneously, on demand, bring up good ideas.
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I don't know, man, the idea out there is that genius, inspiration, creativity,
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it just happens thanks to the muses, thanks to inspiration.
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Why do you think that's a myth about creativity?
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Yeah, so I think it's definitely not that you can bring it up within a minute, right?
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But we have this view of creativity in our culture, in Western culture, that's wrong.
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The view of creativity in our culture is that some people have this prodigal talent,
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and they are zapped by the forces above with these moments of inspiration.
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And the rest of us, us normies, could only sort of quake in their presence.
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We're not going to be J.K. Rowling or Elon Musk and Steve Jobs and all this thing.
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And I think that this is a very dangerous belief.
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Because for a lot of people, this is very discouraging, right?
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If you think for some people, it's super easy, and for the rest of us, it's impossible,
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You're never going to give it that best effort.
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And so I got a little frustrated with this a few years ago.
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And I just was hearing this so much, this idea of, you know, I'm not creative enough,
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And what I found, what resulted in the book, was that when you actually look at the research,
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the science behind creativity, it's actually very clear that creativity is a skill.
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It's a skill that you can nurture, a skill that you can develop, and a skill that you
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And so the book, it's basically taking this myth down and then also prescribing things
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And what's interesting, too, in talking about, you actually find some of our biggest, some
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of the big creativity stories out there, right?
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And you dig into them and actually find out, well, no, it wasn't just this single moment.
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It actually took years for them to come up with that idea.
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Is there one that stands out to you in particular?
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I mean, one of my favorite ones is, you know, there's this myth that J.K.
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Rowling, you know, was hit with the idea for Harry Potter on a train, and she started writing
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And like, there's just so many things not true with this.
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She just came up with like the idea for the characters.
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And then it took her five years to write the first book, five years.
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And she shows in an interview she did on TV once, she actually shows the box with all
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of the different versions of chapter one of book one.
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Like this was a highly iterative, long, methodical thing she did.
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It wasn't this boom, you have an idea and boom, you have a bestselling book.
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And so I think we have this romanticism around these creatives that we want to believe that
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And I almost wonder, I almost worry that it may be just be an excuse that we tell ourselves.
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You know, maybe it's not that it's discouraging.
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Maybe it's that, well, if it's easy for them, it's impossible for me.
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And so I wonder how people really internalize it.
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Get rid of this idea that creativity just happens because of happenstance or just luck
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But this is an interesting point that you talk about in the book that I think is important
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to talk about as well is what makes something creative, creative, right?
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Like you can come up with an original idea, but it could suck.
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Like, how do we figure out like, this is actually a creative idea.
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It's, it's, it's amazing because creativity is actually subjective, right?
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Because it's kind of like that famous Supreme court case about porn.
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It's like, if I painted a replica of the Mona Lisa, it wouldn't be creative.
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It would be technically skilled, but it's already been done.
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And so in creativity, there's actually two different concepts of creativity.
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And you have to understand the distinction between the two.
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And these are the real, this is what academics call it, lowercase C creativity, which is
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basically just creating something new, creating something, creating something out of something
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And this is what we actually mean when we're talking about creativity.
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This is creating things that people actually want, things that people actually care about.
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And the definition that academics have come to for things that are capital C creativity is the ability
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to make things that are both novel and valuable, novel and valuable.
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And that's actually really important because I could throw a bunch of paint on a canvas and certainly
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On the other hand, I recently learned how to do conditional color formatting in Excel.
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It's certainly not novel and certainly not creative.
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So really, when we're talking about creativity, what we're really talking about is that ability
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So creativity then is a social concept in a way.
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For something to be valuable, we all have to agree that it's valuable.
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And so when you want to study creativity, one of the things you really have to dig into
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is you also have to dig in to what drives human preference, what drives trends, consumer
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And one of the things, if you don't mind me geeking out for a second, is there's actually
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some really fascinating evolutionary biology around human preference.
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So it turns out that there's actually pretty good reason and rationality to why we like certain
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And it comes down to these two seeming contradictory urges.
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On one side, our brain has this urge to seek out things that are familiar.
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We like things that are familiar because they represent safety to us, right?
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When we go to a stranger's home for the first time, we're sort of looking around.
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We're a little, you know, we're looking around.
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If you were a prehistoric cave dweller and you saw two caves, one cave that you've slept
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many nights in and one cave you've never been in before, the cave you've never been in
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We also have this urge to seek out things that are novel.
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And the reason why is that we want the potential reward that they represent.
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So for example, if you were a hunter-gatherer and you see a new berry on the field, you might
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And so these two things are a seeming contradiction, the search for familiarity and
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the search for novelty, but it turns out that this is our brain's really elegant way of balancing
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If we're in a field and we see a berry that kind of looks like a weird strawberry, we'd
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But if it was like a berry we've never seen ever before, so weird, so novel, we'd probably
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So it turns out that we're wired to like things that are familiar with a twist of novelty.
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You know, the first Star Wars was a Western in space.
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Right now, there's these sushi burritos that are taking over the coasts of America.
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We like these things that are familiar, but novel.
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We don't actually like things that are radically new or radically novel.
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That's actually one of the biggest misconceptions when it comes to creativity.
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Turns out the ideas that people like are the ideas that are in that sweet spot of familiarity
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And that's what the creative curve is, is that finding that sweet spot where you're getting
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just the right amount of novelty, just the right amount of familiarity.
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So scientists have found this really, really cool phenomenon.
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And the scientific name for it is the inverted U-shape relationship between familiarity and
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And basically what it is, is this is upside down U-shape where it turns out when we first
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see something or first experience something, like the first time you heard that new Drake song,
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you're like, ah, I don't really like it that much.
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Then the more we hear it, because we like things that are familiar, we start to like it
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But then it reaches a point where our drive for novelty seeking starts winning out, reaches
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And the more we experience it, we like it less and less.
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And so your goal as someone who wants to be creative is to create things on that left
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side that are going to quickly take off from low preference to high preference with some
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It's to create ideas that are at this sweet spot, this sweet spot where people will actually
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be interested and they'll actually define it as valuable.
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I think, you know, besides, I think some of the great way where you can see this in action
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Yeah, like, for example, Bruno Mars, he's the perfect, like, he is the king at this.
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Like, I remember when Uptown Funk first came out, like, the first time I heard it, I was
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And the reason why is because it sounded familiar.
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It sounded kind of like, you know, 80s, you know, 70s type funk, but it was a new spin
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Kanye recently tweeted, I hate quoting Kanye, but recently tweeted that, you know, great
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And music is such a great example of this with all the sampling that goes on and the
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It's even interesting when you think about the people who are really great songwriters.
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He's one of the greatest songwriters of all time.
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He's the third most number one singles after Paul McCartney and John Lennon.
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And his technique is all about taking elements of the chorus, but introducing them much earlier
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By the time it actually reaches the chorus, it's already catchy.
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And so over and over again, when you start to see it, you start to realize that creativity
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It's about the blend of the familiar and the new.
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But going back to that creative curve, there's a point where it becomes too familiar and
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Like whenever Uptown Funk comes on now, I'm just like instantly change the channel because
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And this is actually, they've actually done studies with music specifically where they just
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make people listen to music over and over again.
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Like we have this very predictable way in which our preferences change.
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And what's interesting is that that effect happens both at the individual level, the
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Because obviously within a population, people are experiencing things at different times and
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But at all three of these levels, the same thing happens.
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And so one of the key jobs for a creator is to understand how familiar a novel something
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So what I did in the book is I interviewed all of the leading academics who study creativity
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across neuroscience, psychology, anthropology, but I also interviewed 25 living creative geniuses.
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These are people like Ted Sarandos, the chief content officer of Netflix, billionaires like
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David Rubenstein, Pasek and Paul, the songwriting duo who did most of the music for La La Land,
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And what was so interesting from these interviews is that because familiarity is so important,
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one of the things that these creatives do that seems like unexpected is they actually
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are some of the biggest consumers of culture, not just creators, but consumers of culture.
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Because they realize that to know what's going to have the right amount of familiarity, they
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have to know what their audience has experienced.
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You know, Ted Sarandos told me the story about how, as a kid, he was the clerk at the local
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video rental store, and he literally watched every single movie in the store.
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And like, granted, this was the 80s, so there was less movies, but he watched every single
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And he says this is a big way in which he developed his taste.
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Because so much of taste, so much of creativity is knowing what's already out there and how what
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you're creating will relate to past creative products.
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Okay, so this idea of consuming content, right?
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So you kind of can have this stuff that you can remix, right?
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We're all like on our smartphones, looking at Reddit or Instagram or watching Netflix.
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So why is it that some people are able to take that stuff they consume and create something
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Yeah, so what's interesting is that how these creators consume is different than how probably
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Like, we'll watch a movie and sort of sit back and relax, or we just read a book and
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What's interesting is these great creators, they like, they touch and they feel it and they
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You actually find that imitation is a huge part of the creative process and the consumption
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I talk in the book about, I interviewed Andrew Ross Sorkin, who, you know, editor of Dealbook
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of the New York Times, anchor at Squawk Box, wrote the book Too Big to Fail, co-creator
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of the show Billions, like someone who knows how to learn, right?
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And it was so interesting, he told me that when he first wanted to become a journalist,
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what he did is he would take front page articles from the New York Times business section and
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he would literally outline, how are they structured?
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And by learning that structure of a great creative work, that's how you actually learn
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what is that familiar baseline that your audience likes, that they enjoy?
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You don't have to go recreate the wheel, since familiarity is important, and imitation actually
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Ben Franklin writes in his autobiography that he did something literally the same thing as
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You know, we think of Ben Franklin as this amazing writer, but when he was 18, he was actually
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scolded by his father for being such a terrible writer.
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And so he was sort of like in a shame spiral, and he decided he was going to become a great
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And to do this, he literally took copies of The Spectator, which was a magazine at the
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time, and he like went and outlined how they built their arguments.
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And that's how he learned how to write, was by imitating the structure of a great successful
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And you see it over and over again with these creators, you know, novelists will go and
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they'll outline books and see how they're built, how they're structured, and that's how they
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Kurt Vonnegut actually did that for his master's thesis.
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His entire master's thesis was about mapping out the story arcs of great novels.
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And so imitation is actually one of the keys to creativity.
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Yeah, no, we wrote an article a long time ago about copy work, which is basically you
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take someone's thing that they've written and you just copy it verbatim, either type
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We took Robert Louis Stevenson's books and just wrote it.
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He wrote, I think he wrote Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
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And he, he typed out the great Gatsby just because he wanted to, he wanted to know what
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And you see this, it's such a common experience with these great creators and they're not
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And I think a lot of times aspiring creators view that, you know, view the word imitation
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as this like dirty, dirty word, but like the great artists know that creativity is a
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So everything that's come before you is part of how people internalize creativity.
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So you have to know what's out there and you have to know how it's structured.
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So consume a lot of content, but it's an active consumption, right?
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Besides that, you argue that great creators aren't, aren't just like these lone geniuses.
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They actually are embedded in a deep community of other creatives.
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I mean, for example, let's take, you know, JK Rowling, right?
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That, that seemed like it was sort of like a solo thing, but did she have a group of
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community, like creative community that she was going to, to help her out?
00:20:36.800
So, you know, we have this notion of these creators, as they go to a cabin, they write
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a book, they hit the end, you know, they're done.
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But the reality is you can sort of start to think about you quickly, that quickly, that
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I actually interviewed her first agent, interviewed her publisher, her first publisher.
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She had marketing teams, she had all these people, and all these people were helping
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her take her work and actually get it out to the masses, right?
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Her first agent had a whole idea around how to build buzz for the book so that it actually
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And there's all of these things that went into taking this great product and making
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a true creative success, making it a true creative success.
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And so, you know, what you see with these great creatives is that there's typically four
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types of people they have in their creative communities is what I call it.
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And so the one that I think is probably most interesting is that of a prominent promoter.
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And so typically what you see is that since creativity is about having people see you and see that
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you're creative, you typically have someone, you know, more experienced with a bigger reputation
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who lends you their reputation if you are younger and starting out.
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You see this obviously in music with the idea of opening acts for a band.
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You see some academics with junior researchers whose names are put up on papers, even if they
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You see this in every industry, this idea of sort of passing on down the reputation.
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And that's incredibly important to the process.
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Even startups, you have your board of advisors.
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The other one that's interesting is a master teacher.
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So you find these great creatives typically had someone that they learned from who is an
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There's one study done for this book called Developing Talent in Young People.
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And they looked at 120 people who are world-class across this wide variety of talents.
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And what they found is that of the 120, 120 had a teacher who themselves was world-class.
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So you need someone that you're actually going to learn from to actually learn the sort of the
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The third type of person in your creative community is what I call modern muse.
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And this is someone who helps inspire you, both through positive emotions, like giving
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you a pep talk, but also through friendly competition, which you find with these great
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You know, I interviewed Connor Franta, who's a popular YouTube creator.
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And he talked to me about how he has all these friends who are YouTube creators.
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Like a lot of us have friends from college and high school and past experiences.
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But these really successful creatives tend to surround themselves with other really successful
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They know that creativity is this up and down battle and they're willing to give you that
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pep talk and they serve as an example of something you can also achieve.
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And so I think that's just like one of these really, really critical, critical elements.
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I thought the section about having a promoter or just being able to promote yourself even
00:23:29.040
to promote a creative idea, because oftentimes we think like, oh, you know, creative idea will
00:23:34.480
Like if people, if you create something that's creative, people will just inherently recognize that
00:23:38.420
it's creative, but that's not necessarily the case, right?
00:23:41.440
And this is why, this is why it's so important if you're in a creative field to be in the
00:23:46.960
epicenter, to be in the cities where that is, right?
00:23:49.440
It's so hard to break into fashion if you're not in New York, because creativity has this
00:23:54.720
And, you know, you might think, oh, this is changing with the internet and Skype calls
00:23:58.700
But still what you find is the people who achieve the biggest success in their creative
00:24:02.920
fields are typically physically there because that's where the people are.
00:24:10.240
I mean, one example of, you know, failing to promote yourself or your creative idea that
00:24:16.360
I like from the book was the theory of evolution.
00:24:18.600
So when we think theory of evolution, we think Charles Darwin, right?
00:24:22.080
But as you pointed out in the book, there was another guy named Alfred Russell Wallace that
00:24:26.260
came up with the idea of evolution at the same time that Darwin did.
00:24:31.880
And, you know, Darwin got this letter from him saying, hey, I've come with this idea.
00:24:35.900
And Darwin's like, oh my gosh, I've been working on Origin of the Species and this guy's already
00:24:42.300
And they kind of did it together, but Darwin got most of the credit for it because he put
00:24:47.000
himself out there a little bit more than Wallace.
00:24:49.480
And you see this over and over again, this idea of what academics call simultaneous invention,
00:24:53.460
where two people will invent something like the light bulb, for example, two people tried
00:24:59.840
One is Thomas Edison, who we all know and we talk about.
00:25:02.820
And the other person, I don't even remember the name right now, right?
00:25:05.680
Because we, in our society, there's this whole other element to creativity around recognition
00:25:12.020
And so, you know, Darwin, after he published his book, went around, promoted it, talked to
00:25:18.660
Alfred Wallace literally went back out to sea to do more research.
00:25:21.900
He was, you could say in some ways, the more of a real scientist in that way, but it was
00:25:29.040
In fact, when later Alfred Wallace wrote a book about it, at that point, it was so clearly
00:25:33.240
associated with Darwin that he actually, in his book title, called it Darwinism.
00:25:38.000
He literally ceded it to him because it was so obvious that he had lost.
00:25:41.240
And so, I think you see this really fascinating thing in history where we think we know a lot
00:25:46.900
about creativity and who's created what, but really what we know is who sort of won this
00:25:53.680
sort of public opinion battle of creativity, who got their ideas distributed, who actually
00:26:01.020
And that's such a huge and undervalued part of it.
00:26:03.940
I mean, I think of all the great creatives, like we did a podcast about Da Vinci and Da Vinci
00:26:11.180
He consumed tons of content, but he's also, he promoted himself.
00:26:15.640
Like, I remember the way he got his job in one of the king's court that he did.
00:26:28.020
But like, he was willing to put himself out there and kind of puff himself up to get the
00:26:32.620
And because of that, we're talking about Da Vinci.
00:26:35.180
Like, oh, Da Vinci's like the prototypical genius.
00:26:39.000
There's this really fascinating study that followed art students from the time they were
00:26:43.340
in school to, I think it was 15 years after they left art school.
00:26:47.660
And what they found was that in art school, the students who did the best in terms of
00:26:51.800
grades and perception by the other students were the ones who most represented the archetype
00:26:57.600
Like they were sort of like dark and a little weird and all this stuff.
00:27:01.280
But 10 years later, the successful artists, actually, none of those kids were successful.
00:27:06.460
The successful artists were the ones who were best at salesmanship.
00:27:09.400
They were the best marketers, the best PR people.
00:27:11.320
In fact, they found that these successful artists, they all happened to rent a loft in
00:27:19.040
And the idea is that the loft actually represented this sort of extroversion to their work, this
00:27:23.740
ability to invite people over for parties, for people to see their work, to talk about
00:27:29.020
You know, they had this very public space in which their art was represented.
00:27:32.040
So even though it seems silly, there's actually this whole, you know, importance to actually
00:27:37.280
having people see you, experiencing you, and you be able to sell yourself.
00:27:41.540
This whole idea of the creative curve, like this intersection of familiarity and novelty.
00:27:46.160
An interesting, I think, insight that comes from this is that timing of your idea can make
00:27:51.580
or break whether it's considered creative or just crazy or stupid.
00:27:57.380
Rowling had written her book 100 years earlier, or if, you know, you painted Andy Warhol in
00:28:02.920
1920s, or if I painted and Andy Warhol has painted today, it wouldn't be creative.
00:28:07.420
It would just be sort of something you sell at Ikea, right?
00:28:09.980
And so timing has this huge element, like everything is compared to what's come before it.
00:28:14.280
And so if you don't understand that, you're at this huge disadvantage, which is why the consumption
00:28:19.520
is important, because then you know what's been out there.
00:28:24.240
So you're able to iterate to that new thing that you want to get to eventually, but do
00:28:30.280
it slowly so people are like, okay, that's cool.
00:28:33.720
And one problem that creators run into is that they have to have this deep amount of consumption,
00:28:38.000
but you can sometimes become like a super consumer where your knowledge or your familiarity
00:28:46.080
So one thing you also find, which is interesting, is that these creators are highly iterative and
00:28:51.840
The most successful creators aren't going off into the woods and writing their book and
00:28:57.100
The most successful creators are actually listening to their audiences early and often.
00:29:01.260
And I found this across food sciences, across novel writing, across movies, is that even
00:29:06.840
if it's sort of a low tech way of doing it, constantly these creative geniuses are constantly
00:29:11.880
getting feedback because they understand that their job is to triangulate their creative product
00:29:16.900
to be at that right blend of familiarity and novelty.
00:29:22.600
So if your job is to get a specific audience reaction, well, you better listen to them.
00:29:27.380
And so that was really surprising to me was just how iterative these processes were.
00:29:32.460
A great example of a product that was too early for its time was the Apple Newton.
00:29:45.940
Well, then think about when the iPhone came about, at that point, it was much more familiar,
00:29:50.560
It was basically combining a phone and an iPod.
00:29:56.300
Like, this had no longer become this, like, it wasn't radically new, right?
00:30:03.920
There was the idea of the touchscreen that was out there.
00:30:06.420
And so, yeah, the Newton was just, it was too new.
00:30:09.180
I talk in the book about, I talk in the book about the story of Campus Network.
00:30:12.860
So, Campus Network was a social network that started at Columbia University a month before
00:30:18.820
Facebook at Harvard, another Ivy League school.
00:30:22.520
And, you know, they started and they had, they went viral at Columbia.
00:30:26.260
But when they went up to compete with Facebook, it was so interesting because Campus Network
00:30:33.400
Like, they had features that Facebook didn't have yet, like the news feed, the activity
00:30:39.700
But it actually turned out that how simple the original Facebook was, it was basically
00:30:43.960
just a directory with photos and the ability to add friends and stuff, how simple it was
00:30:49.240
Because when people saw Campus Network, they were actually kind of intimidated at that point.
00:30:53.100
Like, they were just getting used to the idea of using the real name on the internet.
00:30:58.940
And so now I'm going to, like, share all my activity to people.
00:31:03.680
And so you see over and over again, that's not just about, is this feature useful?
00:31:10.800
But is it in the right time and place for people to want to even use it?
00:31:20.880
When you put it in your startup, cranking up the heat.
00:31:28.420
Like, it's not just, you can't just come with crazy ideas.
00:31:31.500
Other people have to recognize that it's creative.
00:31:33.680
There's an intersection between familiarity and novelty, right?
00:31:37.260
If it's too radically new, like, people are just like, that's stupid.
00:31:42.840
So, it needs to be a little bit of familiarity.
00:31:44.600
And you can do that, figure out that sweet spot by consuming lots of content, but in an
00:31:48.900
active way, being embedded in a community of other creative types who are going to help
00:31:53.060
promote you or maybe give you feedback or bounce ideas off of.
00:31:55.860
And then you're constantly iterating those ideas from the people you're creating for.
00:32:01.640
If you follow those steps, you're well on your way to capital C creativity.
00:32:07.040
Doesn't mean it's easy, but you're on your way.
00:32:09.960
I mean, I can see that taking a lot of work, especially the consumption and being active
00:32:14.680
Well, I mean, look, we literally scraped the surface.
00:32:17.660
There's so many like case studies that you get into that are really fascinating.
00:32:21.220
Where can people go to learn more about the book?
00:32:27.640
Well, Alan Gannett, thank you so much for your time.
00:32:32.520
He's the author of the book, The Creative Curve.
00:32:34.280
It's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere.
00:32:36.420
You can find more information about the book at thecreativecurve.com.
00:32:39.440
Also, check out our show notes at aom.is slash creativecurve.
00:32:42.580
We can find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic.
00:32:45.040
Well, that wraps up another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
00:33:00.480
For more manly tips and advice, make sure to check out the Art of Manliness website
00:33:04.640
And if you enjoyed the podcast, I appreciate if you take one minute to give us a review
00:33:09.640
And if you've done that already, thank you so much.
00:33:11.440
I appreciate if you'd also share the show with a friend or family member who let get
00:33:15.040
As always, thank you for your continued support.
00:33:17.180
Until next time, this is Brett McKay telling you to stay manly.