When you «rise to a challenge», you know for sure that there will be difficulties that can bring your progress to a complete halt.
These blocks, which may commence with a question as immediate and simple as «how do I get started?», demand that you allow yourself to become immersed in the challenge. You must positively allow it, because it is natural to shrink back from the uncertainty and open-endedness of immersion. More on «Allowing»
Immersion is not an experiential state that just happens and it is rather easy to avoid by distractions, having too many projects, listening too much to what others say, endlessly researching, becoming sensitive to pressures or reverting to expedient thinking.
If you are familiar with the classic description of creativity, you will quickly link the notion of immersion to the preparation and incubation phases. (The subsequent phases, intimation and illumination are about how the breakthrough appears: you do not «do» these, they happen to you.)
The function of allowing immersion is to deal directly with profound uncertainty and seemingly insuperable difficulty. The new requirement for immersing in order to generate a breakthrough is that it is deliberate. Note that immersion is often allowed conveniently e.g. in a professional subculture, or conventionally e.g. in Internet games or chat-rooms. This may be minimally creative if at all.
This deliberate quality is provided by adding a 6th adjacent Level of using willpower to form 2 Hexads.
The 2 Hexads reveal that the breakthroughs occur in two distinct forms or perhaps on two distinct planes:
Preoccupation-RG62 is where you grasp the issue and eventually get a relevant idea or come to see the issue in a new way. It seems to be on the mental plane, but it involves practical activities of various sorts.
Experimentation-RG61 is where you take the risk and try out different things to see what happens. It seems to be on the practical plane, but it involves mental activities of various sorts.
These two states naturally interact: it is natural to experiment to check out a possible breakthrough emerging from your preoccupation. It is natural to be preoccupied with what is involved before and after any experimenting in search of a breakthrough.
Forms of Breakthrough
Preoccupation-RG62
Getting clear in your own mind what your response to the challenge should be and how specific matters are to be handled is essential. Because there is no simple solution, you have to go into yourself and allow inspirations to break through.
These brainwaves or eureka moments are neither predictable, nor controllable, so there is a risk that they may not emerge. However, if the challenge is suitable for you and if you deeply immerse yourself, then it is predictable that breakthroughs will occur. The timescale for the breakthrough depends on the nature of the challenge: it may take an hour, a week, a month, a year, a decade or a lifetime.
The Absent-Minded Professor: This is a stereotype of a person so engrossed in their work that they fail to keep track of what is going on around them. The Greek astronomer Thales reportedly fell down a well through his preoccupation with the heavens. Other creative inquirers recognized by their colleagues as absent-minded include: Isaac Newton, Adam Smith, and Albert Einstein. Their genius derived from their preoccupation.
Preoccupation is not mere rumination. Nor is it sitting about waiting and hoping. It is a deliberate process with a structure as shown in the diagram and outlined below.
Preoccupation requires you to use willingnessdeliberately so as to keep the issues and problems emerging from the challenge in the forefront of your mind.
If you are not narrowly preoccupied then you are simply not going to get the brainwaves that you need. Some of these will be false positives and as you think them through at lower levels they will evaporate. But you need to keep new ideas coming.
Preoccupation requires you to handle purposesadaptively in regard to the challenge. In thinking, it is essential to adjust your goals in various ways: e.g. narrow the focus, or re-phrase the goal, or re-frame it, or unbundle its subgoals and re-combine them differently, or adjust the meaning &c.
If you are too rational and let yourself be controlled by a given goal and an agreed plan, then you block yourself. Creativity needs flexible thinking to enable emergence of the unexpected.
Preoccupation is a form of reflectiveintense communication. That is why creative people often seem to be talking to themselves. Not «seem»: they are doing just that. Intensity is ensured in various ways: e.g. keeping notes and then writing out ideas in detail for later review. Discussions with others are often valuable but if you watch yourself closely, you will see that the other person is a vehicle off whom you bounce your ideas and arguments.
If you cannot write down what you think, you do not know what you are talking about. You must make reflection concrete i.e. you must write down what you think to know what you are thinking. It's a great trick and an amazing discipline.
Preoccupation is based on shrewdly intensifying inner experiences. Amongst the flow of possibilities and ideas, emotions and intuitions, identifications and thoughts, you have to select which deserve enhancing and which you must block out, or at least put to one side, for the moment.
If you don't get this right, you will be ruminating pointlessly or allowing personal feelings (e.g. impatience, resentment, isolation, depressive moods) interfere with your creativity. No breakthroughs will result.
Disruptive Feelings: It may be important for you to be aware of feelings and moods irrelevant to your creativity. When you are over-powered by them, you must not expect anything to emerge. Be gentle with yourself and these unproductive times will pass. You can use the time to do something mundane and boring.
Preoccupation must sensiblytarget change. The goal of creativity is to create something over time. Whatever the object is—an artefact, a solution, a social outcome, a business result, a life—there will be a sequence of stages in its development. The targets chosen as the process unfolds require thought and focus.
If steps are not considered sensibly, there is a danger of going all in, of arrogance, of expecting too much of yourself or others, of losing confidence and credibility.
Preoccupation must focus inquiry meaningfully. This will help you determine what to get preoccupied about and help guide your preoccupations so they are useful. To sharpen preoccupation, you must make sure your inquiry is focused on issues from higher Levels like change targets or adapted goals or intense communication and develops them further. Inquiry might be as simple as a five-minute Internet check or as lengthy as a year of travelling or as complex as a three year higher education degree.
If you just wallow in your preoccupations and do not inquire then you must imagine that you already know everything there is to know. That is most unlikely. You are probably a fraud.
Secondary actions to enable the above mental activities are of course necessary e.g. you may need to do an Internet search or attend a conference as part of focusing your inquiries sensibly. However, Action-RL1 is not required as a primary use of willpower.
Experimentation-RG61
You knew there were risks posed by the challenge. Immersion is where you take constant risks by trying things, many of which will fail. This is deliberate experimentation. Experiments are intrinsically risky because they are based in action that uses precious time and consumes scarce resources. As a bonus: failed experiments can make you look extremely foolish. But you have no option.
In experimenting, your willingness-RL7 is taken for granted, while all action-RL1 must be meaningful to get the desired breakthrough.
Action is unpredictable in its ramifications and consequences. So experiments can produce something amazing and unexpected. (In scientific inquiry, the experiment is regarded as crucial to discovery: but there is control of as many aspects as possible.)
More on Scientific Experiments. Conventional scientific experiments aiming to produce discipline-based knowledge are largely risk-free. Results are pre-specified in the form of a hypothesis that is to be falsified (but may be confirmed) and surprises are few. The biggest risk is to do something unsupported by senior scientists. If the result goes against the scientific consensus then it can be rejected. The scientist may even be ridiculed and hounded out of the institution. This is what happened to Daniel Schechtman, the 70 year old winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for research carried out in 1982.
Experimentation as part of deliberate immersion has a structure as shown in the diagram and outlined below.
Willingness is naturally required secondarily for the application of every component of experimentation. However, experimenting is about action-RL1 driven by goals-RL6, and a primary use of willingness is not required.
Experimentation requires the use of deliberate goals, as that is what the experiment must be carefully built around.
If everything that is done is based on purposes that are routine, expected, predictable or consensus-driven, then you cannot expect a breakthrough. You will get conformity, not creativity.
Experimentation involves you in doing something that is unpredictable or unusual or could easily fail. So you have to win over participants and soothe their fears. This requires you to adaptivelyintensify communication. The primary participant to win over is yourself: unless you have thought through the experiment and can talk about it intelligently, you cannot proceed.
If you assume others are always happy with your experiments, you may be surprised. Here is where you must manage the risk of failure in social terms e.g. to handle your boss, partner or family.
Experimentation works only if it is allowed to intensify experiencesvia reflection. By being reflective, you can learn lessons from failure, partial or total. It is harder to reflect effectively on success because that usually confirms your biases and a belief in your own brilliance.
If you fail to reflect, you may very well miss out on the breakthrough which may relate to the process rather than to the result. You may have to be sensitive to what does not happen rather than to what does.
Experimentation must shrewdlytarget change. These trials are performed to develop breakthroughs. As they take time and effort and may cost money, getting the incremental step right is as difficult as it is crucial. The first, and sometimes only, person who has to be convinced is you.
If the target is not suitable for any reason, then you suffer more than a loss of time and money, you are in danger of losing your way. Targets may be too small, too large, too focused, too diffuse, too conventional, or misguided.
Experimentation must focus inquiry sensibly in design so as to be guided by knowledge and local facts, and also in the collection and analysis of information that emerges.
If you allow swamping by information or try to mine data then you are probably going to lose your way. As well as checking of pre-determined ideas, you must recognize that the key often lies in qualitative information or in what does not happen or in unexpected sequelae.
Experimentation is built on taking actionmeaningfully. This is determined primarily in terms of the higher Levels.
If action is expedient or mindless at any stage, the experiment is liable to go nowhere.
Next
Allowing immersion-RG6 supports perseverance-RL5 and flows from rising to the challenge-RG7. Persevering until there is a breakthrough demands courage because there is no guarantee that any breakthrough will occur.
More on «Allowing»
, the 70 year old winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for research carried out in 1982.
