The Benefits of "Creative Grit"

Why the signals you think mean it's time to stop are actually cues to keep going.

When the painter Franz Kline was a young artist living in New York City, he adopted a very particular way of working: He used black ink on white paper to produce study after study, employing just a few bold lines and shapes.

He made so many of these preparatory sketches that he resorted to using pages torn from a telephone book—a material that was abundant and free. Kline liked to paint at night under a bright light suspended from the ceiling; working under these conditions, Kline said, “I could go through the whole telephone book in one night.” 

The black-and-white compositions ended up strewn across the floor of his studio and piled in a corner. Every so often, the artist would go through the stack and choose one that displayed a particular energy and verve. Kline would tack this study onto the edge of a canvas, rendering its outlines as a much larger painting. 

Kline was exploring, with great thoroughness and intensity, a very restricted creative space. He wasn’t painting realistic landscapes or portraits or still lifes. He wasn’t availing himself of reds and blues and yellows. He was producing thousands of permutations of his distinctive black and white marks, until he found the few that were worthy of being made into a major work.

His approach represents a striking example of a creative path now under study by psychologists. We’re all familiar with the insight model of creativity: an idea comes us, apparently effortlessly, often while we’re not even working—we might be taking a shower or going for a walk.

Researchers have found that there’s another, very different way of being creative: what they call the persistence model. While the insight model is characterized by a flexible, open-minded search for ideas and associations across many domains, the persistence model features a very narrow and focused investigation of all the possibilities contained within a very small number of domains. 

Both of these approaches are effective in generating original ideas—but our assumptions about how creativity works lead us to favor one and neglect the other. “People exhibit an insight bias, such that they undervalue persistence and overvalue insight in the creative process,” wrote psychologists Brian Lucas and Loran Nordgren in a paper published last year.

Lucas and Norgren’s studies have found that when people begin working on a creative task, they usually experience a rush of ideas right away. Then the pace of idea production starts to slow, and people assume that the well has gone dry: no more creative ideas will be forthcoming.

But this assumption is wrong. Research shows that creativity stays steady or even increases across the length of an idea-generation session. Conventional and obvious notions are often the first to surface, and it takes a while to clear these out and move on to more original ideas. 

We may never get to this point, however, because we give up too early. Studies have found that people systematically underestimate how many ideas they will generate in an extended round of brainstorming, as well as how creative those ideas will be. Lucas and Nordgren call this the “creative cliff illusion”: we imagine that, after an initial upward leap, our creativity will then fall off a cliff—when in reality our creativity capacities are just getting ready to ascend.

We also misjudge the thoroughness of our search. In one study, people estimated that they had explored 75 percent of the solution space—when in fact they had covered only 20 to 30 percent of the relevant domain.

Insight will always have a role to play in creativity, but it’s time we gave persistence its due as well. Here, three ways to make it work:

1. Apply some “creative grit.”

   Bring passion and perseverance to one narrow area, exploring it from every angle. Keep going even when it seems like you’ve reached the end of your useful thinking on the subject. You haven’t. 

2. Use disfluency as a cue to keep going.

   Lucas and Nordgren have found that people generally expect creative ideas to flow smoothly and easily. When they don’t—when coming up with original ideas starts to become more challenging—people take that as a sign that they should stop. Instead, we should be using the uncomfortableness of disfluency as a signal that we’re just now getting to the good stuff. 

3. Make use of your negative mood.

   Positive mood is associated with expansive thinking, of the kind we expect from the insight model of creativity. Negative mood, by contrast, leads our thinking to narrow and contract: a useful development when our goal is to persist in a focused way. You could even try deliberately inducing a negative mood when employing the persistence model of creativity. Play some angry, clashing music as you work (not music that makes you feel sad, a “deactivating” emotion that actually discourages creativity). 

How about you? Have you ever used focused, intense persistence to generate creative ideas?

Since I last posted, the Science of Creativity attracted a whole bunch of new subscribers when the amazing author Austin Kleon posted about the newsletter in his newsletter. Austin’s book Steal Like an Artist recently went into its 30th printing and now has more than a million copies in print. Welcome to Austin’s crew! Hope you find stuff you like, here and in the newsletter’s archive.—Annie