On Grad School, Creativity, and “Honoring Your Vomit”

Back when I was just starting graduate school, I remember feeling as if I already understood the components needed for great scientific research: knowledge of a domain, the ability to implement a system or execute an experiment, and a creative insight about a phenomenon worth studying. While the domain knowledge and ability to execute seemed like pre-requisites for doing science at all, the capacity for creativity seemed to the element that separated a great scientist from the good. Since I felt like I was good at identifying creative research, I hoped that once I immersed myself in academia and started gaining domain knowledge and engineering skill, the creative ideas would come to me. Now, almost a year into my PhD program, I feel like I have learned a great deal, but I am left with the question: Where are all those good ideas?

Now, don’t get me wrong – I know that I have a long way left to go until people start calling me Dr. Kairam. At least for piano players, Ericsson theorized that 10,000 hours was the required amount of time to gain expertise, and I had always figured that PhD programs were around 5 years long for that very reason (40 hours/week * 50 weeks/year * 5 years = 10,000 hours, though it seems that some of us may become ‘double-experts’ by the time we’re done!). However, we’re also expected to complete some great research before we’ve finished the program; while I’ve done some research so far that I think is pretty good, I don’t think I’ve had any insights yet that I would consider ‘great’. As a result, it’s become difficult to shake the nagging doubt that perhaps I won’t get there.

Just as I was beginning to hit a low point, however, I came across this great video of radio host Ira Glass:

In case you don’t want to watch, he starts off by saying:

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, and I really wish someone had told me…All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste…But there’s a gap – that for the first couple years you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good…it’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not quite that good. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game…is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you…A lot of people never get past this phase…they quit.”

Inspired by this quote, I’ve decided to try and implement two policies to help foster my own creativity in research (as well as some other areas where I’m often creatively blocked, including songwriting and posting on this blog).

1. Repetition, Repetition, Repetition

Glass continues later in the video with the advice:

“The most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month you know you’re going to finish one story…because it’s only by going through a volume of work that you’re actually going to catch up and close that gap and the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions.”

Fostering creativity through repetition is evident in the insights gained from psychologist Keith Sawyer‘s interviews of winners of the New Yorker cartoon caption contest. According to his research, “the ‘sudden flash of insight’ is largely a myth”; instead, creative ideas ‘emerge over time’ through ‘hard work and constant revision’. Specifically, he says:

“Cartoon contest winners usually generate lots of captions. Studies have shown that quantity breeds quality – what I call the productivity theory, because high productivity corresponds to high creativity. When the famous physicist Freeman Dyson was asked how to generate good ideas, he said, ‘Have a lot of ideas, then throw out the bad ones.’ “

An important element in following this advice is reminding myself that I don’t have to publish everything I produce. If a project fails but spurs new ideas and helps me gain necessary skills, then I should view it as a success. If a song or blog post never quite comes together, it may inspire something better down the line. The important thing is to rehearse the process of crafting an idea, executing it, and committing it to paper so that I get practice with the creative part of the process. Regarding the process itself, this brings me to my second point:

2. Honor My Ideas

I draw my inspiration for this second policy from Lady Gaga, an artist who I view to be consistently creative. Near the end of GagaVision, episode 43, she describes her creative process:

Transcribed:

The creative process is approximately 15 minutes of vomiting my creative ideas…And then I spend days, weeks, months, years fine-tuning, but the idea is that you honor your vomit. You have to honor your vomit – you have to honor those 15 minutes.

While it sounds silly (and a little gross), I found these thoughts to be very instructive. I think that while I often have ideas that are creative or ‘out-there’, my internal filter shuts them down before I ever get a chance to examine whether or not they are viable. By committing your ideas to paper as soon as you have them, you can circumvent this filtering process so that those ideas don’t get lost. As Dyson said above, having a lot of ideas is a first step towards having good ideas.

As I’ve been taking the Caltrain to Stanford more often these days (in no way motivated by my spotting a sign for $4.99/gallon gas last week), I’ve decided to implement a policy of spending each morning train ride just throwing ideas on paper. Whether it’s lyrics to a song, thoughts for a blog post, or ideas for research, by forcing myself to just ‘vomit up’ whatever’s in my head, I am hoping that this deliberate practice at creativity will result in more ideas, and thus more good ideas, getting past my filter. In fact, that is actually how I put this blog post together, so let’s see if it keeps working.

If you try these or discover other methods for fostering your own creativity, share your experience in the comments!

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