The #1 Killer of Creativity (and the #1 Unlock)

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#1 killer of creativity: lack of foundational knowledge/skills.

#1 unlock for creativity: having information subconsciously accessible and effortlessly manipulable in your brain.

Your brain wants to find patterns and connect the dots, but it can only do that if

1) all the data is available for background processing, and

2) manipulating that information takes so little effort that it doesn’t derail your big-picture train of thought.

Everybody wants to think critically and creatively but nobody wants to build their knowledge base!

Reasoning, creativity, etc., involve combining elements of a knowledge base.

You can’t think with knowledge you don’t have. You can’t cook with ingredients you don’t have.

And if you’re not able to execute information manipulation subskills effortlessly without conscious thought, then you have to consciously think about every low-level action, which overloads your working memory and leaves no room for higher-level creative thought.

That’s the funny thing about creativity: You can’t be creative at a high level unless you’re robotic at a low level. If you’re not robotic at a low level then all your brainpower is going to be spent there and none will be left for higher-level creativity.

Some people think that repeated practice turns students into mindless robots, whereas to leverage the power of human creativity, one needs to break free from that robotic mindset.

In reality, the whole purpose of repetition is to reduce the amount of bandwidth that the brain must allocate to robotic tasks, thereby freeing up cognitive resources to engage in higher-level thinking.

In other words: repetition and creativity go hand in hand. The whole point of repetition is to automate basic skills so that they don’t waste the mental effort that’s needed to fuel higher-level thinking. Repetition is the very thing that allows you to break free from robotic thought processes.

TLDR: Learn the isolated pieces so well that you can reason about them in the back of your mind without losing your overarching train of thought. It’s so much easier to think in systems and see the forest for the trees when the low-level details are understood so well that they don’t take up much brainpower.

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