What’s this series all about? Read Creative Contradiction #1.
2. Convergent and divergent. The folks with the most consistent creative output are thought to be using two contradictory yet complimentary modes of thinking: convergent and divergent.
Convergent thinking is logic, measured by IQ tests. It’s used to solve a definable problem and find its one right answer. Black and white. Cut and dry.
Divergent thinking, on the other hand, leads to no one conclusion but generates a mound of ideas and possible relationships between them. Central to divergent thinking is the ability to see associations between seemingly unrelated thoughts, and to see all sides or perspectives of an issue.
Most of my day is spent in divergent thinking. My wife asks me often, “Who are you talking to?” My mouth and hands move a lot when I’m driving or making breakfast. I’m dialoguing through songs, blog posts, conversations, pitches. It’s embarrassing but I can’t stop it. And I don’t want to really. It’s true that 99% of that mound of ideas created by divergent thinking is crap. But that 1% is golden.
Here’s an example of how these two kinds of thinking work together. One night I dreamed I was watching a hummingbird outside our kitchen window. I woke up thinking about hummingbirds and everything related to them. I wasn’t trying to. It just happened. By the time I got out of the shower a mound of hummingbird related stuff was piled up in my head. And it stayed there, with all the other piles, for weeks. Then one day, eating dinner before a show, someone said I looked tired. They asked me how I was doing. I told them I felt “run down.” And I don’t think I heard anything else anyone said at dinner from that moment on. Instead, my brain started connecting stuff in the pile about hummingbirds with stuff I was feeling. And in the next few days I wrote words like “Feathered, tethered, feels like all the world’s a cage/worked up, run down, in this race to earn a wage/something inside tells me I was made to split the sky, so tell me why I’m living like a hummingbird/getting nowhere fast from all this work...”
One dream and a morning of divergent thinking built the mound. And divergent thinking connected the mound to a seemingly unrelated thought/feeling. And convergent thinking went to work on the pile to find only the best stuff. Convergent thinking sifted the pile by saying “Yes” and “No”, “Keep it” and “Trash it” a hundred times until the song was done.
Now, beware. If a creative person’s divergent thinking is stronger than their convergent thinking, they’ll have lots of projects going on and few completed, lots of output but low quality standards. They’ll tend to think every idea is a great one. But, if their convergent thinking is stronger than their divergent thinking, they’ll be so self-critical (always saying “no” in their head) that they’ll have low output of a higher quality - at least in their mind. But, and I know this from experience at the moment, if convergent thinking is turned up to 11, output will end altogether.
Ideally, we creatives need both kinds of thought in balance.
If you live or work with creatives…
Let them talk, if they’re a talker, about what’s in the pile. And then help them sift through it for the best ideas.
Do not tell a creative person everything they have done or are doing is great. Great means nothing if it’s all we hear. And hearing it too often kills our ability to self-critique, to think convergently.
Help develop the divergent part of a creative child’s mind, especially if he/she has perfectionistic tendencies, by drawing a doodle with a pencil on a piece of paper. Then ask the child to tell you everything they see in it. Don’t critique at all.
Help a child develop the convergent part of their mind by handing them a crayon and asking them to turn your doodle into one of those things they saw. They’ll have to make choices, pick from the pile they just made.
Does this help at all?
My nephew Phillip is extremely creative. His father, Brian, wonders if that’s why he moved his family here to Nashville a few years ago - not so Brian and I could work together, but so I could help interpret Phillip to him and reassure him on a regular basis that Phillip’s completely normal. For a creative person.
Creative people are weird complex. So this series is my attempt to explain us to anyone having to work or live with us. Each statement is laid out as a contradiction. I’m borrowing heavily from researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book Creativity: The Work and Lives of 91 Eminent People but putting him in my own words. It’s more creative that way.
Keep in mind that these are generalities, which means they won’t be true all the time for everyone.
1. Energetic and reserved. Creatives aren’t lazy. We were built with two modes: work and idle. It’s important essential for a creative person to spend time in both.
When doing something they’re passionate about (something creative) creatives can focus and work feverishly for long hours at a time, forgetting to eat or go to the bathroom, sometimes staying up late, toiling long after every sane person has gone to bed. This is the work mode and it’s taxing even when it doesn’t look it would be. It may seem like I’m merely sitting at my computer typing, but what’s happening in my head is more than one fast-paced conversation (we’ll get to that later). It may look like I’m just painting or singing leisurely but my emotions and thoughts are thick, consuming every bit of my attention. Sometimes I look like I’m doing nothing at all, just sitting, but in my head a problem and a million solutions are being turned and examined from every perspective. It’s not hard work by any means, but it’s intense and isolating - I’m truly incapable of being fully present and fully involved with everything and everyone around me.
Thus the need for an idle mode. Without idle mode we’d have no relationships or much of a life. Creative people intuitively manage their creative energy by expending very little energy between creative sprints (or marathons). Some creatives sleep a lot. Others golf or eat or find some other way to relax. I shut my computer, ban music from being played in the house (hearing music sets off a work mode in my head), and just play with my kids or sit under a tree with my wife, or go for a drive alone.
Here’s the kicker though. I can’t always control my modes. I may be on a date with my wife, for instance. She’s talking to me about the movie we just saw. We’re laughing, having a great time. And all of a sudden, something she says sparks an idea. Seconds later a complete melody is playing in my mind, buzzing in my brain louder than the world around me. I don’t hear her anymore. I want to, but I can’t. I have to find a pen and something to write on or call our home phone and leave this melody on the answering machine in hopes that making a record of the idea will appease it for the next hour at least so I can get on with my life.
If you live with a creative person…
Remember the importance of both modes and allow time for each, within reason, without harming yourself or others.
Remember that our hand isn’t always able to reach the switch - we’re often as annoyed with us as you are when there’s a mode change.
When mode changes without warning, especially if we’re young and new to all this, we can feel out of control. Planning a break and setting goals helps control the modes.
Did any of this help?
"I hope it was worth your trip,” the chaplain said.
“A four hour drive in exchange for fifty-two lives. Yep,” I laughed, “I think that’s a pretty good trade.”
And unexpected.
King College only has about 500 residential students. And only 120 of those crowded into the old wooden pews this morning for the chapel service. They represent incredibly diverse Christian traditions too. Most of the faculty are Presbyterian. Many of the students are too. But they’re the minority, outnumbered by a slew of other backgrounds including some folks who grew up leaping pews and handling snakes on Sunday mornings in the mountains of East Tennessee.
The old chapel walls were lined with large silk banners decorated with words and beliefs that make us one - ideals every Christian can agree upon. Halfway through the service one of them caught my eye and without thinking about where the diversion might take us, I read it out loud: Let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth.
Another passage came to mind: In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead...You see that his faith and his actions were working together, and his faith was made complete by what he did.
My eyes closed. I played one last song while Compassion packets were passed out to anyone raising their hand. The students were dismissed and made my way back to the Compassion table to collect filled-out forms and answer questions about Compassion’s ministry if anyone had them. And it was only then that I realized what had happened. We’d run out of packets.
Before the service had begun, the chaplain and I had discussed attendance numbers and how many packets he thought we’d hand out. He and I reasoned we had about twenty too many packets. Turned out we reasoned wrong.
Students ran late to classes and lunch to stay around filling out their forms. Ben ran to the car to get more packets. Two girls sponsored together. Four guys sponsored together. This team sponsored a child. That campus ministry sponsored a child. Professors. Students. Presbyterians and snake handlers side-by-side around a table loving not with words but with action.
Now we’ve got another hour until we head to a local church to pay a concert and ask another crowd to do the same.
I was on lunch duty today. From my perch at the front of the classroom I watched second and third graders wrestle with Caprisun packages, ziplock bags and themselves. One emerged the victor. Make that two.
It all began when a cluster of third grade boys called Kathy “chicken nose.” Kathy laughed at first. She rolled her eyes, giggled and whispered with a friend. “Chicken nose with chicken legs,” the boys continued until Kathy’s giggles were smothered by her shame.
Fortunately, third grade boys have the attention spans of chihuahuas on speed and quickly moved onto to other amusements. Unfortunately, second grade boys do everything they see third grade boys do.
A second grader in a blue shirt, sitting at a rectangular table, put down his sandwich and leaned over his neighbor to have a word with a smallish kid at the end going to town on a box of Lunchables. “Go tell Kathy she’s a chicken nose,” he said.
“No,” the boy in white answered, laying a small circle of ham on a cracker precisely.
The kid in blue, a little annoyed that he’d been disobeyed, gripped the shoulder of the boy in white and insisted again, more firmly this time. “If you don’t go tell her you’re never coming to my house. Ever.”
The boy sandwiched between the two, a pale lanky kid in all green, interrupted. “If I go tell her can I come to your house?”
“Yes.”
And with that the boy in green slammed his drink down on the table, stood and walked over to Kathy. “You’re a chicken head, Kathy,” he seethed. And went back to his seat to collect high fives from the boy in blue.
Then I watched the boy in white stand without saying a word. He walked over to Kathy, knelt down beside her and spoke the most miraculous words for a second grade boy. “I won’t call you a chicken head,” he said, “You’re a good person, Kathy.”
There were no high fives offered back at his seat. But Kathy smiled.
A cold front moved into the netherworld this morning as I was featured on a website of the sport-y variety. An actual athlete, a guy who knows the name and rules of every major sport in this hemisphere, posted an interview with me on his site. My answers were predictably lame.
I think you could do better. Because you own a “jock strap” or a “sports bras.” Hopefully not both. And you know what RBI stands for, and what the difference between a period and a quarter is and to which sports these terms belong. You, my friend, exercised in high school by lifting band nerds like me with one ripped arm, possibly even your left one to make it challenging, and dunking their head in the nearest toilet. Unleash your competitive inner self once again and take a stab at these questions that left me stumped.
(As always, bonus points for sarcasm.)
1. What number best describes the role sports play in your life on a scale of 1 to 10?
2. Rank your 3 overall favorite sports, college or pro.
3. What is the one team that you root for more passionately than any other, and is there a team that you hate, maybe a little too much?
4. Do you play fantasy sports?
5. What is the most memorable sporting event you have ever attended in person?
6. What is the best highlight and/or worst lowlight of your sports playing career as a child or as an adult?
7. If you could change one thing about sports, what would it be?
8. Do you have an opinion on Christian athletes who, without being prompted, talk about their faith in post-game interviews?
9. High school gym class…your favorite 45 minutes of the day or the source of countless nightmares and embarrassments?
10. Sports are often the whipping boy of pastors and clergy because so much passion, money, time, and energy is poured into them. Do you think this criticism is valid, or are sports okay as a diversion from the stresses of life.\
11. If you had to compete against other musicians, in which of these 5 competitions would you have the best chance of winning? 5-mile run, 18 holes of golf, free throw shooting contest, arm wrestling match, or a game of bowling.
12. What is your favorite sports movie of all-time?
Go here to read the answers of a sissy boy soft rock star...who can get his bowl on thanks to Baylor University’s superior physical education program.
