Mastery | Robert Greene | Talks at Google

1. 0:01 – 2:52

   Creativity beyond the “ABC” decision trap

   1. SPSpeaker0:01

      Good afternoon, everyone. Um, we're excited to have you all here for another outstanding Authors at Google event. Um, today we're going to, um, dispatch with the formalities and get straight to the point. Um, Robert Greene is here to talk about his new book, Mastery. So this is what happens, you know, after you get the ten thousand hours, you get the twenty thousand, like, like once you're a true expert at something, you know, what does that mean and, you know, how, and how do you get there? And so Robert will lead us along that path, and we'll also have time for some Q&A at the end. So, um, please join me in welcoming Robert to Google. Thanks. [audience applauding]

   2. RGRobert Greene0:35

      Thank you. Um, I've been a, uh, a huge admirer of your company for many years. Uh, for... I've blogged about it. I've compared Google to the French Revolution and Napoleon Bonaparte and your competitors to the Prussians.

   3. SPSpeaker0:49

      [laughing]

   4. RGRobert Greene0:51

      So you can imagine that, um, I'm deeply honored and very happy to be here. Um, my talk is about creativity. I have a lot of, um, I hope, practical information to convey, so... And I know how valuable your time is, so please excuse me if I dispense with any cute anecdotes to begin and I just dive right into the information part. Um, [coughs] now, I'm sure that all of us, or maybe most of us, um, have encountered more or less the following scenario. We have, um, a problem to solve, a project to create or direct. Along the way to completing this project, at certain junctures, we have to make some decisions. We have to choose between A, B, or C, whether to go in this direction, over here or over here. We do the best we can based on our knowledge and experience. But often, after the work is done, we have the sensation that there is something missing, that perhaps we could have done it better. What if the answer or the best decisions involved D, E, and F, something that we never even considered? What blocks or limits us from considering these wider options? We're all aware of great historical figures who have indeed demonstrated the b-- the ability to consider D, E, F and beyond. This is the source of their incredibly creative power to make uncanny discoveries or to invent the kind of things that change how we think and act. We see examples of such people around us in the world today. What makes some people more, seemingly more creative and imaginative than others? Is it genetics? A matter of luck? Is it being born

2. 2:52 – 5:56

   Mastery as a process: right field, apprenticeship, and a creative crossroads

   1. RGRobert Greene2:52

      into a great family? Going to the right school? Et cetera. [coughs] Well, in my book, Mastery, I attempt to definitively answer this question. I maintain that true creativity comes through a process, a process that I describe in great detail in my book. To summarize it as briefly as possible, this process begins with the critical first step of choosing which field or, or subject to pursue. Creative people are those who opt for career paths that mesh with their deepest interests and inclinations. They feel a deep personal need to discover something about this, about the world, to solve a problem that perplexes them, to invent something that's simply not. Feeling personally engaged and motivated in their work, they focus more, they learn faster, they're more patient and persistent than other people. Having begun on the right career path, the first step, the next step is to go through an effective apprenticeship, absorbing all of the rules and standard procedures in your field and accumulating the maximum amount of skills. Now, I believe we all go through an apprenticeship phase of one sort or another. And at a certain point in this phase, we reach a kind of turning point or crossroads. Either our minds will become active and experimental with the knowledge that we have accumulated, in which case we will slowly awaken creative energy, or we will become prisoners of that knowledge. We remain conservative and conventional, our minds just simply rotating between A, B, or C. Well, masters are those who take the first path, and after years of generating creative energy, they reach a point where they have a complete feel for their subject. They have internalized it. They have mastered it. They can see all the way to the end of the alphabet. So in my talk today, I want to focus exclusively on creativity and moving past that ABC syndrome that stymies so many of us. I'm going to be assuming that many or most of you have chosen career paths that mesh with your deepest interests, that you've gone through or are nearly finished, uh, the apprenticeship phase, having absorbed the necessary knowledge and, and accumulated an array of skills. You are perhaps poised at that turning point in which your minds could take the path towards greater creative energy, or you could settle for the conventional route, never being aware of how that settling is occurring.

3. 5:56 – 6:57

   Two goals of the talk: creativity is natural, and blocks are learnable

   1. RGRobert Greene5:56

      My goal in my talk today is twofold. I want to convince you [clears throat] that the human brain is a naturally creative instrument. It is designed for making connections between ideas, for envisioning DEF and beyond. It wants to go in that direction. Creativity is not a function of some freakish genetic wiring that occurs in the brains of a few people. It is instead the function of awakening and exploiting the natural creative energy we all possess. Second, I want to show you what prevents many of us from taking this path towards greater creative energy, how we block and inhibit ourselves. [coughs] Excuse me. In doing so, I'm going to be revealing to you certain strategies that highly creative people, past and present, have used to move past these blocks

4. 6:57 – 10:00

   A one-minute “empty your mind” exercise to reveal how thought actually works

   1. RGRobert Greene6:57

      and awaken that natural energy. My hope is that I will plant a seed in your brain, that the ability to go past ABC is already there, and with a few gentle indications of the right direction, you'll find your way there on your own if you haven't already found your way there. But before I discuss these ideas, I want to involve you in a very short and simple exercise. It's gonna seem kind of moronic, but the purpose of it will become clear soon enough. I'm going to be asking all of you to close your eyes and for the space of a minute to try to completely empty your minds. Have no conscious thoughts, no mental images. Go totally blank. See if you can do this and what happens if you can't. I'm going to time it. A little gong will go off to indicate that the minute is up, and then we'll discuss. Okay? So prepare yourselves for a moment. It's gonna be completely silent. Okay. Close your eyes and begin. [gong sounds] Very good. Um, okay. How many of you were able to experience total emptiness, not a single mental image during that entire minute? Come on, how many? [audience laughing] You were? Do you pract-- Are you a Zen master or something? No. No? [laughs] Okay. Just focusing on anything. Oh, that's very good. Um, for the majority of you who couldn't, did any of you experience, uh, something like the following scenario, where, uh, an image will suddenly pop up in your mind of a person that you know, and that'll lead to an event that is associated with that person, and that event will then lead to the thought or image of another person associated with that event, on and on and on? Any kind of links like that going on in your brains, anybody? Uh-huh. You don't have to share it with us. I don't want you to embarrass yourself or anything. But, um, where, where did these, these images come from? Were you somehow consciously controlling them in any way? There was stuff from my to-do list. There was stuff from your to-do list. [audience laughing] Right. But were you consciously calling them up? Did-- or did they just come to you? Just fill the void. Okay. Were they-- Are these things that come up in your mind totally random, or is there some sort of apparent logic to it? Are they just totally random images from anywhere? I think the logic is it's just you and reminding ourselves of something. Right. But it's not the logic that you

5. 10:00 – 15:04

   The associating brain and “original mind” in children

   1. RGRobert Greene10:00

      have in your conscious daily life, right? Okay. Well, um, I happen to practice a form of Zen meditation. I do it thirty minutes every morning religiously. I've been doing it for close to three years now. Um, and even after that exper-- that much practice, I've noticed that it's nearly impossible for me to still the conscious mind for more than a few minute- more than a few minutes. Images keep bubbling up to the surface, which lead to all different kinds of chains of connections. The deeper I go into my meditation, and the more I'm able to somewhat still the conscious mind, the more bizarre and seemingly random these associations are. Well, the reason I had you do this, this simple exercise is to illustrate what I consider the basic principle about the human brain. Its natural state is one of constant motion and association. It's like a smooth ball bearing at the top of an endless incline. Unless it is obstructed, unless it is made still, it will just keep rolling and rolling and rolling until the day we die. It moves in constantly shifting chains of connections between ideas, sensations, and memories, equaling what we call the stream of consciousness. The human brain is a dual processing system in which any piece of information or perception is instantly compared to another one in our short or long-term memory to generate a sense of pattern and continuity or to take notice of things that don't fit into these patterns. The brain functions through comparison and association. If we are tired or about to fall asleep, or even if we dream, we can suddenly become aware of the most bizarre associations that are going on, as if the brain were doing this on autopilot below the level of consciousness. In our daily conversations, we might make some joke or witty remark that is connected to something that somebody just said. This connection, the source of our joke or witticism, would be impossible for us to trace back because it occurs so naturally and so rapidly. Our conversations themselves reflect this basic pattern, endlessly shifting angles and chains of connection, building on what other people say. Well, this is the brain in its pure form, never stopping, always connecting. And by the way, that's sort of why I think the, the Internet is so addictive and engaging. It reflects this basic pattern of the brain on a global scale. It's like a global brain. [coughs] That this is so incredibly natural to us, we only have to look at children. Almost instantly, acquiring a basic vocabulary at the age of three, they'll begin to make the most interesting associations between words and ideas. Their drawings can also bring together the most unexpected and imaginative connections. In my book, I call this mind that children possess original mind. It is marked by incredible fluidity and openness. But children do not create great works of art, and they do not invent significant pieces of technology, and they don't make discoveries about the world, and neither do we when we daydream, or dream, or make a joke, or change the subject of a conversation. These are all examples of what I call low-level creativity, exhibiting the natural associating power of the human brain. But let us add to this natural associating power of the human brain something else: years of study, practice, and experiment within a field. [coughs] With all of this experience, a great deal of knowledge is stored in our long-term memory. The brain has a much larger range of information that it has access to, much larger than anything a child could play with. With all of this accumulated knowledge and experience, the mind can roam about in this vastly expanded cognitive space, making all kinds of novel, insightful associations between ideas over here and ideas over there. What we call creativity is nothing more than the ability that some people cultivate to search wider, to imagine more possibilities, to imagine more connections, to associate what has never been associated before. Namely, to

6. 15:04 – 21:38

   High-level creativity: combining deep knowledge with mental fluidity (Pasteur example)

   1. RGRobert Greene15:04

      go beyond the A, B, and C. As an example of what I'm talking about, I wanna look at a particular discovery by one of the most creative scientists who's ever lived, the nineteenth-century scientist Louis Pasteur. Pasteur [coughs] was trained as a chemist and mineralogist, but later in his career, he became fascinated with the subject of germs and bacteria. He studied them for y-- for years, elaborating a radical new theory on how germs are created and the role that they play in disease. After decades of study and experiment on this field, in his late fifties, he decided to investigate the deadly disease of cholera. He wanted to figure out how these germs operate and what makes them so fatal. As part of his research, he injected chickens with cholera, and he observed how the disease progressed. He needed to abandon work on these experiments over one summer, but when he came back to his lab, he resumed them, and he once again injected some cholera into a group of chickens, which we shall call group A chickens. These chickens fell ill, but to Pasteur's surprise, all of them survived. He surmised that the batch of cholera that he had injected into them had become weakened over the summer months. And so he ordered a, a new fresh batch of cholera, and he proceeded to inject it once again into the group A chickens and to a new collection of chickens, which we shall call group B chickens. All of the group B chickens died, and all of the group A chickens survived. Now, this phenomenon, which occurred totally by coincidence, it wasn't the purpose of his experiment, this phenomenon had been noticed before. Over one hundred years prior to Pasteur's experiment, it had been the practice to inject people with small-- uh, cowpox in order to out-- uh, prevent an outbreak of, of smallpox. Um, but it-- nobody understood how or why this worked, and it was simply limited to this one disease. When Pasteur's group A chickens survived, news of this incident came to all of his eminent colleagues, and they basically all reacted in the same way. Some of them said that the difference between group A and group B chickens was merely a coincidence, and that a larger sampling would reveal this. Still others, um, ascribed the differences to what the chickens had been exposed to in their environment. A third group said they didn't know how to explain it. Maybe there'd be an explanation someday, but this simply wasn't a significant enough phenomenon to warrant any special attention or some new theory. Well, Pasteur was different. He had studied germs so intensely and much longer than any of these other scientists. He understood their complexity and how their behavior of these germs did not fit into the simple [coughs] theories of his time. He felt certain that the difference between group A and group B chickens represented something truly significant. As he pondered what had happened in his laboratory, he entertained the wild, seemingly irrational possibility that one set of weakened germs still in the bodies of group A chickens could potentially fight off another form of the same germs. In other words, germs, illness fighting against illness. Pasteur, in other words, had connected two pieces of knowledge, of information that had never been connected before. We might take this concept totally for granted, but decades before the discovery of antibodies, this represented -- this idea of germs killing germs, illness fighting illness, represented an incredible leap of imagination, a leap that was made possible by simply the fact that Pasteur was willing and able to entertain more possible theories and inter-interpretations than, um, any of his fellow colleagues. Naturally, after entertaining this hypothesis, he worked to verify it, and he then thereby created the science of immunology. Well, this is an example of what I call high-level creativity. It is a function of two critical elements. First, a great deal of knowledge that is stored and organized in our long-term memory, and second, the willingness and ability to roam freely through all of that knowledge. This second quality is what we might call fluidity of mind. We notice this fluidity if we've had a few drinks, or we take some drugs, or we smoke some pot, or we're ex-feeling extremely tired. Suddenly, it seems as if doors are opened up, and our minds can move about more freely, and they can come upon ideas, interesting ideas that eluded us before. Well, highly creative people do not need this extra bit of stimulation. [laughs] They have managed to retain or rediscover that fluid, original mind of the child and wedded it to all of this knowledge and experience, giving them what I call the dimensional mind, a mind capable of seeing more dimensions of the visible and invisible world around us. High-level creativity requires these two elements. If you have an open and fluid mind, but not enough knowledge and experience, you will basically remain on the level of a child. If you have a lot of knowledge and experience, but your mind is tight and unwilling to roam, you will come up with the same conventional responses, the same A, B, and C, like Pasteur's colleagues. Well, highly creative people have both. They have the knowledge and the experience, plus the mental fluidity, which gives them the ability to see more possibilities in the world around them and to maximize, to realize to its fullest the natural connecting power of the human brain. The

7. 21:38 – 25:13

   The apprenticeship paradox: learning rules can make minds conservative

   1. RGRobert Greene21:38

      great psychologist Carl Jung, he called this serious play, the combination of the playful exploratory spirit of the child with the serious tasks and experience of the adult. [clears throat] Now, let me engage in a little, uh, metaphor or, or a symbol to sort of explain more fully what I, what my, uh, the idea I'm elaborating here. Imagine a relatively small circle. This circle represents what we know of our field when we begin our apprenticeship. As we proceed and accumulate knowledge and experience, this circle keeps slowly expanding, increasing the cognitive space within which we can explore and make connections between ideas. But as this space expands, we confront a paradox and a challenge. Part of our apprenticeship involves learning the rules, the standard operating procedures, and the paradigms that prevail in our field. It also involves learning how to work with other people, how to fit into the group ethos. When we begin work on a project, we feel the pressure, conscious or unconscious, to adhere to these rules and paradigms, to follow the procedures that other people follow. To break these rules and conventions would entail a lot of risk, probably a lot of criticism, and certainly a lot more work. [coughs] All of this tends to limit what we consider and imagine. Instead of exploring that expanding cognitive space, we unconsciously hold ourselves to those A, B's, and C's that we have assimilated. We become consummate insiders, strict adherers to the rules and paradigms in our field. Ideas in different parts of our cognitive space are never connected. If we're not careful, this establishes a momentum of its own. Once we turn conservative and defensive with our knowledge, it becomes increasingly more difficult to move in the opposite direction. Furthermore, the mind, like any muscle, tends to tighten with age. This is why in the history of science and great technological innovation, so many of the most significant discoveries are by people who are relatively young, or who are outsiders to the field, or who are both. This is the paradox. In order to have high level creativity, we have to assimilate a great deal of knowledge, and that knowledge includes rules and paradigms and conventions which make us conservative. [coughs] Highly creative people learn the value of moving against this conservative tendency by making their minds experiment and explore with their increasing knowledge. Emerging from their apprenticeships, they may begin this on a relatively small scale, but they slowly rediscover the original fluid spirit of the child. They adopt certain strategies to force

8. 25:13 – 26:13

   Four creativity exercises to loosen the mind

   1. RGRobert Greene25:13

      the mind out its-- out of its conventional and conservative and defensive positions. They learn how to loosen and return the mind to its original fluidity. Instead of narrowing what they consider as they get older, they find a way to continually expand their horizons. I want to focus now on these creative strategies that I've just mentioned. They form a large part of chapter five in Mastery. I want to focus on these strategies in the form of four simple exercises that I believe if you adopt somehow in your practice, they will slowly loosen up the mind and push it in this direction that I'm talking about of greater creative energy. These exercises are the following: cultivate negative capability, think like an outsider, use active imagination, and finally, subvert your patterns

9. 26:13 – 33:22

   Exercise 1 — Negative capability: resisting premature conclusions (Keats, Mozart, Einstein)

   1. RGRobert Greene26:13

      of thinking. This first exercise, cultivate negative capability, is the most philosophical, and it basically involves an attitude, a way of looking at the world that will naturally loosen up the mind. The term negative capability comes from the great early nineteenth century poet and writer, John Keats. Keats was struggling to understand what makes one person, like a William Shakespeare, so much more creative and imaginative than another. In his opinion, fear and anxiety play a determining role. When we are physically frightened by something in our environment, we have a particular physiological response. Our minds naturally narrow their focus onto what is immediately present, preparing us for a fight or flight response. Well, something similar happens, although more subtly, in the intellectual realm. When we are confronted with new problems or set of circumstances, or when we begin work on a project, we are unconscious-- unconsciously plagued by insecurities and anxieties, and we don't like this. Mysteries, any apparent contradiction, situations that are unfamiliar and ambiguous and elude immediate understanding, all of this makes us uneasy. Under these circumstances, we are in a rush to come to a conclusion, to make a judgment, to explain what is happening. [coughs] Being able to make a judgment or explain what is happening soothes our insecurities and anxieties, makes us feel confident and consistent. We can express an opinion before other people. In this way, our egos become enmeshed in our creative work and our interpretations, [coughs] our interpretations of the world. Think of how difficult it is for us to admit that we don't know an answer or that we were wrong on a particular issue. Admitting that we don't know or that we were wrong should be a sign of intelligence, of a questioning nature, of a willingness to reassess our own ideas. Instead of that, we will hold on to our ideas with double the tenacity if ever we are made to feel doubtful or insecure about them. Well, mysteries, uncertainties, anything ambiguous, it all has a similar effect upon us as a phys- physically frightening set of circumstances. The mind tightens and narrows its focus, a fearful reaction. According to Keats, the Shakespeares of the world, the highly creative types, cultivate what he calls negative capability. They can negate the ego and its anxieties. They are not in a rush to come to a conclusion about the world or any new phenomenon. They are completely open to entertaining this idea or that idea at the same time, while continuing to observe what's going on around them. They can look at ambiguous or contradictory evidence and not be disturbed or feel the need to explain them away. This ability to withstand what seems mysterious, to manage the lack of knowing something with certainty, is the primary quality of all creative people, no matter their profession. Because they feel less anxious and in need to rush to a conclusion, they consider more possibilities when confronted with a problem, which allows for greater possibilities, a greater range of connections and creative associations. Let me give you two examples of negative capability in action, one in the arts and the other in the sciences. The first example involves Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the composer. At a somewhat advanced part in his career, after he was famous, Mozart suddenly discovered the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. And in looking at Bach's elaborate counterpoint, he realized that this represented a diametrically different and even superior form of music to his own, at least, at least in its complexity. Now, the reaction that most composers have would be to most... to emotionally close themself off from any uncertainty or doubts about their own music, and to assert their own ideas, and to make themselves imagine that the music of Bach rep- represented something old-fashioned or irrelevant. But Mozart possessed negative capability. He could look at two diametrically op- opposing forms of music at the same time and not feel anxious. He could explore them and try to synthesize the differences between them. He decided to spend a year intensely studying Bach's counterpoint and finding a way to incorporate it, which he later did with his operas, creating a whole new style that revolutionized music in the West. In physics, at a very early age, at the age of 16, Albert Einstein was struck by the paradox in the following thought experiment. A man standing on Earth looking at a light beam in the sky, and another man theoretically moving at the speed of light alongside that light beam in the sky, that both people would see that light in exactly the same way, in exactly the same form. That is what Maxwell's law on the absolute speed of light necessitated. But how could it be so? Certainly, somebody moving at the speed of light would see that light before it could travel far enough to appear as light. In other words, he would see it as electromagnetic particles. Well, for ten long, laborious years, Einstein thought only of this paradox and thought experiment, without straining for quick answers or simple conclusions, in a complete state of negative capability, considering every possibility until it finally bore fruit with his theory of the relativity in time s- and space, the special theory of relativity. What

10. 33:22 – 35:24

    How to practice negative capability in daily life and in work

    1. RGRobert Greene33:22

       possessing negative capability will do for you is help you push past the impatience and the anxiety that make you come to conclusions too early on in the process. Here's how you could potentially adopt negative capability in your life. First, you practice it on a micro daily level. In your personal relationships, you counter the tendency that we all have to label and categorize the people that we encounter, the people around us. Your goal is to judge these people much less and to observe them more. People are infinitely complex, and they never fit into the little categories that we have of their behavior. Your i- your goal is to move inside their perspective, to see... try to see the world from their point of view, to get a more nuanced and individualized sense of who they are. This will instantly make you less anxious, less judgmental, and more perceptive. Now, you apply this to your work. Before you begin on a project, I know it's difficult, but you throw out as many assumptions as possible. It may be difficult, but you open yourself up to other possible theories, interpretations, the other... the kinds of interpretations and theories that you never usually entertain. You speculate and think about the information in front of you, but you control that constant desire to rush to some sort of conclusion. Third and finally, you learn to embrace uncertainty and chaos. Life is inherently chaotic, and it doesn't fit into our tidy formulas. Not only does this not make you anxious, but you find chaos and uncertainty deeply exciting and stimulating. Slowly adopting this as an overall ph- philosophy will naturally loosen the mind up and give it greater creative

11. 35:24 – 42:00

    Exercise 2 — Think like an outsider: creativity from cross-field perspective (Yoky Matsuoka)

    1. RGRobert Greene35:24

       flow. You will naturally consider more options and possibilities. The second exercise, think like an outsider, is related to a notable phenomenon in the history of creativity. Some of the most important discoveries, inventions, and innovations co- within a field come from people who are trained in a much different field and who have an outsider's approach. Louis Pasteur was a classic example of this. He was trained as a chemist and mineralogist, so he brought a much d- a much different way of thinking to the subject of medicine and germs, a method that was infinitely more creative. Albert Einstein was a complete outsider. His two most important discoveries came when he was working at the Swiss patent office. Google itself exemplifies this idea. It is perhaps the most successful business on the planet, founded by two men who are relatively complete outsiders to business and who therefore structured and directed their company in a very novel and creative fashion. I could go on and on and on with this list, including many great artists. There are two important reasons why outsiders generally have a creative advantage. First, [clears throat] they are less steeped in and burdened by the conventions of the field that they are attacking. They ask a different set of questions. They approach problems from unconventional angles. And second, they are often trained in totally unrelated fields, and so can make, um, interesting and creative connections between two very different forms of thinking, like science and business, or chemistry and medicine, or engineering and design. Now, we can't all consciously follow such a path, but even within the careers that we're pursuing, we can train ourselves to think like outsiders and help loosen up the mind in the process. A great example of this would be somebody that I interviewed and profiled in my book, a contemporary master. Her name is Yoky Matsuoka. Yoky was one of the original heads of innovation for the Google X project. She is now, uh, the senior vice president in charge of technology at Nest Labs here in Silicon Valley. She was trained as a, uh, electrical engineer and roboticist, and early in her career, she was asked to design, help design the hand o- of a full-scale robot that was being developed at the MIT Robotics Lab where she was getting her PhD. Now in the past, all of her fellow engineers basically attacked this idea of, of designing such a hand in the same way. They would place in this hand all sorts of very cleverly built motors that would give the hand maximum grasping power. They would load most of these motors in the palm because that's where there was the most space. But in packing the palm with all of these motors, they would render it completely inflexible, and so this pa- this hand could not make even the most simple grasping maneuvers. These hardware engineers would then fob off their design to software engineers, hoping that they could program back in the flexibility that they had lost. Hardware engineers are trained to think in a certain way. [clears throat] They're trained to think, to focus on the mechanical and technical aspects of a, of a problem and stay within that circle. To speculate, to think of something wider or larger would be too unconventional and would require too much work and effort. Well, Yoky decided on a much different approach. Thinking like an outsider, she asked the kinds of questions that other engineers ignored. She wondered about what made the hand so dexterous and powerful in the first place. How did it evolve into being so powerful? What is the role played by the palm in grasping objects, and how does it work in tandem with the thumb? Asking these larger questions made her extend her research to biology, neuroscience, evolution, biomechanics, and so on. She decided to build an elaborate model of the hand itself, including all of the tiny bones in the knuckles. In the process, she learned the importance of having a rounded, flexible palm and the role that certain bones play in grasping objects. Now all of her fellow engineers scoffed at her method and the apparent waste of time that it represented. In the end, however, her outsider approach led to many more creative decisions. For instance, she decided to keep the palm rounded and flexible and place motors in different parts, substituting flexibility for power. In this way, her hand later on became the industru- industry standard for prosthetics, um, one that was infinitely more lifelike and effective for users of this hand. Following this outsider approach, Yoky was able to avoid the ABC syndrome and that technical lock that stymied all of her other engineers. To think like an outsider requires basically two things. It basically means to take advantage of any training that you have had in any unrelated field, which almost, almost, almost all of us have had. It also means to take advantage of the incredible explosion of information that we are now all have access to and to expand your searches on any project to seemingly unrelated fields. By applying what you know from a different field and by using this expanded research, you will naturally absorb and u- and use different patterns of thinking. This will make you ask a different set of questions before you begin your project, and asking a different set of questions

12. 42:00 – 46:04

    Exercise 3 — Active imagination: generate widely, then test and iterate (Ford example)

    1. RGRobert Greene42:00

       is almost half of what it takes to be creative. The third exercise, use active imagination, is deceptively simple. Often what separates creative from conventional thinkers is that they simply search wider. They use their minds to generate possibilities that others don't, don't think of, and then they work to verify what they came up with. We saw a classic example of this with Pasteur. Another great example is with Henry Ford. Early on in his career, in the earliest years of, of what would later become the Ford Motor Company- Ford was anxious to inc- to speed up the production of cars. Um, it was... He, he saw the automobile as the ultimate consumer product, but in order for it to become that, he had to greatly, um, increase the production rate in his factory. So he spent a couple days looking at his employees on the factory floor and trying to imagine how he could get them to move faster from car to car. Suddenly, one day, he imagined something completely different. He imagined the men standing still and the cars coming to them. He didn't know what that really meant, but he decided to try it out, and lo and behold, it increased productivity by such an inc- incredible exponential rate that it could now become the consumer product that he had envisioned. Things like antibodies or assembly lines, they seem so obvious to us now, but they are never obvious in the present, and they involve an incredible leap of what I call active imagination. The difference between regular and active imagination is that the latter is used consciously to reach very, very practical results. It's not imagination for coming up with wild things. It's imagination used for very practical results. Think of the active imagination as a kind of creative muscle that you're developing. First, within the loose constraints of what you're working on, you open your mind up to... You give it complete free reign. You entertain almost every possibility that you could imagine or visualize. You engage in what Charles Darwin calls fool's exper- fool's experiments. This is the fun, play part of serious play. You use notebooks, sketches, diagrams, models, prototypes to help externalize the products of your imagination. Once you have gone through this, you now enter the second serious part of the process. First, you choose one or few of the more promising possibilities that were generated by your imagination, and now you actively work to test, verify, or confirm it. This might entail launching a, a beta version on the public. Once you have feedback, you now go back into the first part of the process in a shortened form, using your imagination to perhaps take what you have into an even better and higher form, circling constantly through this process in shorter and shorter cycles until you've got something that's both incredibly imaginative and incredibly realistic and practical. By developing this, by going through this over and over and over again, you will de- develop your imagination into an incredibly powerful creative muscle. Okay, I'm nearing the end. The fourth and final exercise, maybe the most important

13. 46:04 – 52:11

    Exercise 4 — Subvert habitual thinking: structure, anomalies, and the absent/invisible

    1. RGRobert Greene46:04

       in some ways, is called subverting your patterns of thinking, and it's based on the idea that our minds tend to fall into certain habits and patterns and grooves that severely limit what we consider as possible. Well, creative people have the ability to move against these patterns, to actively subvert them, and thereby expand what they, they consider. One pattern that we often fall into, and we're very rarely aware of it, is our tendency to always focus on the end result, the finished product, how to make that product as perfect and powerful as possible. We live in a goal-oriented culture. To see a contrast, we would have to look at Asian cultures in which thinking about process and structure and how the parts relate to the whole are given much more emphasis and importance. In a goal-oriented culture, when there is a setback or a glitch, we naturally focus on the end result. So if, for instance, I'm writing a book and the book isn't coming out as I, as I had imagined, I will look... I will think about the ideas and my style of writing and how I can improve these ideas and the communication of them to give the book more wallop, more effect. But often the source of the problem is the structure of the damn book, the organization of the chapters, how one idea is linked to another. So many books start off well but completely fall apart because of faulty, faulty structure. We can say the same thing about businesses. The problem is in how the products are produced, how the personnel in the company is or- is structured and organized, the decision-making, the chain of command, et cetera. Napoleon Bonaparte effected the greatest revolution in military history by thinking deeply about the structure of his army and how to organize it so it could be faster and more fluid in the attack. Thinking about structure, process, organization, they're not natural to us, but in making ourselves do it, we will naturally expand what we consider, giving ourselves more possible creative associations and connections. Another habit we fall into is our tendency to be mesmerized by patterns themselves, by trends, by paradigms, and how all the information that we're looking at somehow fits into these patterns and paradigms. Well, highly creative people have the ability to look at what doesn't fit into patterns, the anomalies that cannot be assimilated. An example of this is very close to home. In the 1990s, the prevailing paradigm in internet searches was established by companies such as AltaVista, which ranked searches according to how many times a subject was referred to in an article. Now, this worked reasonably well, but somehow, sometimes it would yield the most bizarre and incredibly unhelpful results. Almost everyone at that time [clears throat] thought that this was a temporary glitch that would eventually be ironed out. Well, while at Stanford, not so very long ago, Sergey Brin and Larry Page looked at these anomalies themselves, and in pondering these anomalies, they came up with a much different form of search, one that ranked according to links, like, like citations in a scientific journal. Thinking outside the prevailing paradigm, they came up with a much more powerful and creative form of search. Anomalies are incredibly eloquent. They indicate new paths, trends, ways of thinking, problems that should not be ignored. Paying attention to anomalies will naturally expand what we consider. Related to this pattern bias is our fixation on what is immediately present to the eyes and minds. We focus on what has happened in a set of circumstances as opposed to what didn't happen. Well, highly creative people can think in an added dimension, that of the invisible and the absent. An example of this way of thinking, uh, although in literature, is with Sherlock Holmes. He, he was constantly thinking like this. In, in the story Silver Blaze, for instance, he figures out that the murderer must have been somebody that was very familiar to the victim because the family dog did not bark in the presence of the murderer. Now, this way of thinking in, in the real world led to one of the more radical and interesting innovations in medicine. Prior to the 20th century, doctors would only focus on germs and bacteria and dangerous agents in the environment and how to protect the body from them. Well, looking at the disease of scurvy at the turn of the 20th century, the scientist Gowland Hopkins suddenly turned this around. Instead of thinking of the germs that might be responsible for scurvy, he looked at what was absent from the picture, what the body was not producing, namely vitamin C. Thinking in this way led to a total revolution in our concept of health. It led to vitamins and preventive medicine. Thinking about what is absent, what didn't happen, is a highly creative form of thinking. Okay, well, I've loaded you

14. 52:11 – 58:57

    Creativity as fusing the child and adult + Q&A on emotions and group idea selection

    1. RGRobert Greene52:11

       up with, with, like, pack mules with far too much information. Uh, I'm sorry about that. Um, the good news is that almost all of this information, uh, and even more if you're a masochist, is available in chapter five of my book, Mastery. Um, I'm gonna leave you with one final idea that I believe encapsulates and conceptualizes all of this tonnage of material I've given you, and the idea is the following: Think of creativity as the ultimate synthesis of the child and the adult within you. We carry both of these within us, the child being the remnant of our earliest years when we were more imaginative and exploratory and fluid. Now, normally, we keep the adult and the child within us rigidly separated. We let the child out in our free time when we socialize or go to parties or watch a movie or play games or sports or go on vacation. This is also when our minds are freer, more fluid. Maybe a little bit less productive, but they're freer and more fluid. The adult dominates our work world and our careers. This is also when our minds become a lot tighter as we try to fit into the narrow role of businessperson, engineer, writer of self-help books, et cetera. By keeping the adult and the child rigidly separated, we completely dry up any creative potential that we want, that we want to have. The goal is to find a way to distill and incorporate that playful, exploratory, fluid spirit of the child into our disciplined, experienced work. It is not that we alternate sometimes between the child here or the adult there, but that we fuse the two together into one inseparable whole, that whole being the creative individual. That's it. Thank you very much. Thank you for your patience. And, um, I entertain any questions that you might have. [audience applauding] Yeah.

    2. SPSpeaker54:37

       Yeah, I have a question just regarding emotional intelligence and how that is related to creativity. You didn't touch on that, but I would think that the negative capability is related to the capability of the person to avoid the emotional part that, uh- tends to focus you on solving the immediate problem, uh, coming from, from, from your emotional attachment to, to that, uh, original goal?

    3. RGRobert Greene55:01

       Well, you know, I was limited to, uh, however long I had for this talk, but I do have a whole thing in there about emotional intelligence and, and the role that it plays in creativity, a whole section in chapter five in the book. Um, so for instance, um, I talk about the emotions that tend to get clogged and kind of tighten us up so that we can't become create- creative. One of them being, for instance, curiosity. Um, we lose our sense of wonder and curiosity as we get older. We tend to have the feeling that we know everything. Um, and this is extremely dangerous, and it severely limits what we consider. And negative capability is basically very much related to that childlike feeling of wonder. Children don't sit there going around at the age of six feeling like, "I know what that cloud up there means." They don't, and they o- open themselves up to all kinds of possibilities. So I go through a range of other emotions, uh, that tend to attack us as we get older and that severely tighten and limit the mind. And believe me, I cover emotional intelligence. [laughs] Yeah, sorry.

    4. SPSpeaker56:09

       Uh, yeah. This question may be more relevant to your former stuff during the Master of Business. So one thing I noticed is that a lot of these historical, uh, examples you gave of these guys trying to work here, some of them, like you said, didn't offer the social conception of it. Um, a lot of modern innovators, you know, are within a large organization-

    5. RGRobert Greene56:29

       Right

    6. SPSpeaker56:29

       ... uh, like Google here.

    7. RGRobert Greene56:30

       Google.

    8. SPSpeaker56:30

       So frequently, we have the, we'll have a group of people working together. They're all very creative, and they all have a bunch of different ideas of things we should try varying.

    9. RGRobert Greene56:38

       Yeah.

    10. SPSpeaker56:39

        Um, but there's not maybe enough, like, bandwidth to try all of them.

    11. RGRobert Greene56:42

        Right.

    12. SPSpeaker56:42

        So what's your advice on, like, convincing a group that this creative idea to come up with something that, you know, should actually interest everyone?

    13. RGRobert Greene56:50

        Who are you trying to convince, people within or without?

    14. SPSpeaker56:53

        Um, usually, like, other, other people within the same organization. Uh-huh.

    15. RGRobert Greene57:00

        Well, so you're not asking about... He, he's asking about, um, uh, working in a group, coming, like most people do, and coming up with creative answers and trying to convince others that your group has somehow come up-

    16. SPSpeaker57:14

        Yeah. Well, another way to ask the question-

    17. RGRobert Greene57:16

        Yeah

    18. SPSpeaker57:16

        ... is what do you do when you have too many creative ideas-

    19. RGRobert Greene57:18

        I see

    20. SPSpeaker57:19

        ... and there's not enough bandwidth to, even to kind of experiment with all of them?

    21. RGRobert Greene57:24

        Well, normally, um, you know, I talk in, in, um, in the war book, 33 Strategies of War, of the dangers of groupthink. So hopefully, in your, um, brainstorming sessions, you're not getting the dangerous thing known as groupthink. And what the, what groupthink means is that people tend to funnel their ideas into what they think the heads of the company want to hear for political reasons. Creativity is unconventional. It's iconoclastic. It doesn't recognize rules or limits. So hopefully, you're not doing what I just mentioned. If that's the case, you need an adult. You need somebody in there who's doing the f- the funneling process. It's like when I talked about active imagination, and it's as if you never went into the second part of the process and you were only doing the first part, which is imagining every possibility and never getting to the point of testing and verifying it. The point of that testing and verifying thing, I call it in the book, it's like a, a, a cycle of, I can't even remem- a current that's slowly winnowing down your idea into something practical. You need an adult or a person within the group. I, I'm not meaning the adult literally. But you need somebody in there who's sort of directing this and who can sort of make the decisions between, "This is not a, a reasonable idea. We need to winnow this down and take three or four or five of the most realistic of all of your ideas." If it's just everyone for themselves, I don't know how you can necessarily get around it. It's a structural problem. [audience applauds]

Episode duration: 58:57