I just finished reading (and immensely enjoyed) an excellent book published in 2020 by comedian and writer John Cleese titled Creativity a short and cheerful guide. Elsewhere he said this ~100 page book was meant to be short enough for a 13-year-old to read in an hour. In the second chapter Cleese discusses having read Guy Claxton’s 1999 book, Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind (how intelligence increases when you think less).
Mr. Cleese put what he felt was important in bold. Here is everything [with brackets around the preceding words or phrases when only part of a sentence was in bold]:
By creativity, I simply mean new ways of thinking about things.
The first time I discovered I was a bit creative, it came as a surprise.
[This is how I began to discover that,] if I put the work in before going to bed, I often had a creative idea overnight.
[So I began to realise that] my unconscious was working on stuff all the time, without my being consciously aware of it.
This intelligent unconscious of ours, then, is astoundingly powerful.
[And] the language of the unconscious is not verbal.
The schools I attended concentrated entirely on teaching us to think logically, analytically and verbally (or numerically).
[The absolutely critical point he goes on to make is that] this leisurely ‘Tortoise Mind,’ for all its apparent aimlessness, is just as intelligent as the much faster ‘Hare Brain.’
[The first is that] the creative architects knew how to play.
[The second was that] the creative architects always deferred making decisions for as long as they were allowed.
[But] creative people are much better at tolerating the vague sense of worry that we all get when we leave something unresolved.
The greatest killer of creativity is interruption.
When you’re being creative there is no such thing as a mistake.
You create boundaries of space to stop others interrupting you.
You create boundaries of time, by arranging, for a specific period, to preserve your boundaries of space.
[Once you start chasing away any distracting thoughts, you’ll discover, just like in meditation, that] the longer you sit there, the more your mind slows and calms down and settles.
When we’re trying to be creative, there’s a real lack of clarity during most of the process.
Let these new notions of yours slowly become clearer, and clearer, and clearer.
[It is, however, very important that] when you first have a new idea, you don’t get critical too soon.
In a final section, where he draws on his experience as a writer (and of course applies to speechwriting), there are the following headings:
“Write about what you know
Looking for inspiration
Making an imaginative leap
Keeping going
Coping with setbacks
Get your panic in early
Your thoughts should follow your mood
The dangers of over-confidence
Testing your idea
Kill your darlings
Seeking a second opinion”
This book was discussed by Robin Young at WBUR Here & Now on September 9, 2020 in one article titled John Cleese on awakening your creative instincts, and by Doug Gordon at Wisconsin Public Radio on November 14, 2020 in a second article titled John Cleese tells us how we can be more creative. A third article by Michael Schulman at The New Yorker on September 20, 2020 titled John Cleese discusses creativity, political correctness, Monty Python, and artichokes discusses both the book and other topics.
There are two excellent five-minute YouTube video interviews about the book. One from Australia is John Cleese’s guide to creativity | 60 Minutes Australia, and the other from London Real is THE CREATIVE PROCESS: How I wrote the book ‘Creativity’ & the importance of creativity – John Cleese. There also is a 36-minute video at Prof. Profit titled John Cleese creativity.
The 1895 image of a woman dancing on a flower came from the Library of Congress.
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