Practice Practice

"Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work.

Chuck Close

In the classic tale of a creative breakthrough, Archimedes was asked by Hiero, the king of Syracuse, to find out if his crown was made of pure gold.  Archimedes knew that a crown made of lesser stuff would be less dense but he had no idea how to compare the density of two differently shaped objects.  In the legend, Archimedes hit on the solution when he got into a bathtub one day and noticed the water level rise over the rim.  Aha! he thought.  He could immerse the crowns and see which displaced more water.  The denser one would make the water rise more and therefore would contain the most gold.  Thrilled at the insight, Archimedes jumped out of the tub and ran naked through the street yelling “eureka!”  The word means: I have found it.

Historians doubt the truth of the tale since Archimedes was notoriously lax in his bathing habits.  Also, moments of sudden insight like that are actually pretty rare.  Bolts from the blue, lightning strikes in the mind, and flashes in the brainpan are all notoriously elusive to anyone mucking around in creative waters.  The link between new ideas and new stuff is more commonly a long road through trial and error, effort and frustration.  Creative achievements or insights do not easily bob to the surface; they are the tip of an iceberg of hard work.  Solutions often take time to work out and even quantum leaps tend to be the result of tiny steps added up.  Edison’s famous equation of 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration says it succinctly.

In fact even creativity itself benefits from working at it or, to put it another way, from practice.  The more you do it, the easier it becomes.

That is the ingredient we need to put into the Ingenarium….practice.  Not in the sense of a rehearsal for anything but as a habit of working, working, and working at something.  Practice, in other words, in the same way that an architect has a practice.  Or a dentist for that matter.  In other words, doing it.  In the practice of Zen, the masters say, “when you sit, just sit.”  The goal is simply to be sitting right now.  Not thinking, worrying, planning or trying...just sitting.  You do it to do it.

Same with creativity.

From this angle, the goal is not the final breakthrough – or that elusive Aha! moment – but the continual rehearsal of creative maneuvers like lateral thinking, leaps of the imagination, unexpected connections.  You practice this, not to get better at anything or to achieve something in particular, but simply to do it.  In this sense, being creative is nothing more or less than doing things in a certain way – a creative way – that becomes more natural with time.

Epictetus, the Greek philosopher, had it right when he wrote that: “No great thing is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig.  If you tell me that you desire a fig, I answer you that there must be time.  Let it first bloom, then bear fruit, then ripen.”

In other words, it takes time, focus, and effort to have even an Aha! moment.  Archimedes, bathing or not, had to have an understanding of density and displacement or he would have simply ended up with a nice spill to clean up.  The fable is really a summary of a longer process of deliberation and experiment.  Similar to Thomas Edison and his assistants, who tried thousands of types of material for the light bulb before they hit on carbonized thread and Mary Kay who researched her industry for a decade before hitting on the idea that led to her cosmetics empire.  Ray Kroc worked in and studied the food industry for twenty years before the “sudden” insight that led to McDonald's.

And so we toss a heap of practice into the Ingenarium…and of course, a dash of patience to go along with it.