The Surprising Science of Creativity (with Dr. George Newman)

(upbeat music) Pushkin. Hey, happiness lab listeners. Welcome back to our new season on Hatiga Unstuck in 2026. Over the past few episodes, we've been exploring different ways to get back on track in the new year, rethinking how we spend our energy, learning how to deal with unexpected changes, and getting clearer on our values. And what we really want in life. I hope these conversations have already given you a few new tools for the year ahead. But buckle up, because out of all the episodes we've had so far in this series, today's conversation has challenged my assumptions about getting unstuck the most. Today we're diving into the question of creativity. And more specifically, the stories we tell ourselves about how creative ideas are supposed to happen. Think inside the box, use those constraints to your advantage. Today's guest will argue that nearly everything we imagine about generating creative ideas is wrong. - My name's George Newman. I'm a professor of organizational behavior at the Rotman School of Management. It's a University of Toronto. My book is called How Great Ideas Happen? The hidden steps behind breakthrough success. - George and I are about to unpack some of the most common myths we have about creativity. And we'll learn just how important rethinking these assumptions will be for getting unstuck. - That being a slab, we'll be right back after some quick ads. - This is an I Heart Podcast. - Guaranteed Human. - Creativity expert, George Newman and I go way back. - This is such a treat to be able to talk to you, George, because as you know, we've known each other for a long time. - I know, it's like 2002. - Oh my gosh. - Before he joined the University of Toronto, George was a PhD student at Yale. But George has been thinking about creativity long before his academic career began. - Both my parents are musicians. My brother was a musician too, and I thought I was gonna be a visual artist. So I've kind of have this lifelong interest in creativity. That was like a big topic of conversation around the dinner table, really talking about like composers and different musicians. And then when I became a psychologist and got interested in cognitive science, it seems like a really natural progression to say, oh well, can I study this thing that I've been interested in forever and try to make sense out of it? - One way of making sense of things is to define things, which may be an impossible task with creativity, but how do you define creativity? What is it? - The definition I like is the process of generating new and useful ideas. I think everybody associates creativity with newness and novelty, but the useful part is really interesting because it's not just newness for its own sake. The idea about creativity is finding these ideas that provide value to people. And that value could be entertainment or it could connect with us emotionally, but it could also be things like new scientific theories or new inventions or new kinds of technology. So it's a really broad definition that I think captures what this more general process really is. - I love that definition because this whole series is about getting unstuck. And I think sometimes when we think about creativity or getting unstuck when it comes to the creative process, we think about some artist or an inventor sitting there trying to get unstuck. But I think for so many of us, we can get stuck creatively for very seemingly much more mundane things. What am I going to cook for dinner tonight or what's a new idea at work? All of us have these moments of generating new ideas that we hope are effective. - Totally. This is kind of like association of creativity as it's messy or it involves finger paint or you've got to put on a smock, but absolutely creativity applies in all of these different contexts, right? It could be a new way of folding your laundry or a new way of cooking your favorite recipe or actually the last example in the book is this guy Dan Pashman who wanted to come up with a better type of pasta. And so that can be a form of creativity as well. So it seems like we have these myths when it comes to creativity. One is that it's kind of this big thing, you know, I have to make a painting or I have to do something really incredible and invent a new technology or so on. But another myth you talk about is how we often think of where creativity comes from. What's our usual way of thinking about it? And why is it problematic? - Well, I think the common wisdom about creativity is that it's something that comes from inside of us. And there's this genius myth that there's this lone genius and you're gonna go off into the cabin and wait for that light bulb moment where that brilliant idea kind of just springs forth from within and it's also kind of how arriving at an idea might feel to us sometimes where it just hits you like a lightning bolt in the shower. But what I argue in the book is actually creativity is much more like a process of discovery than doing careful work to kind of uncover something that is going to be new and useful. - And so in the book you go through all these pieces of evidence against this isolated genius light bulb idea. And one of the ones I found most interesting with this idea of hot streaks. What are hot streaks? And why do they show that creativity doesn't work in a lot of the ways we often think? - It's a super fascinating research Dasha and Wang at Northwestern and his colleagues have found that across a lot of different fields. So in science, filmmakers, artists, experience these moments in their careers where they generated their kind of most impactful work all at once. And they're short lived, but there seems to be this flurry of activity. And what he finds in his work is that those periods of hot streak moment are actually proceeded by a lot of exploration. So these creators and lots of different disciplines are kind of poking around trying out lots of different things before boom. You know, they hit on that one idea that they're able to mine and refine further. Do you have any favorite examples of these hot streaks? - One of my favorite is Jackson Pollock. You know, the artist known for his drip paintings and splattering paint on canvas. Those iconic, Pollock works really came from a very short period of time. Only about three years. And that's really what produced a lot of the work that we recognize. - I feel like every modern art museum I've go to has like a bunch of these splatter paintings that it was just like three years of his time where he did these. - It was just three years. And the notion there is that through exploration, Pollock kind of hit on this much deeper principle that he was able to explore and then exploit. - You've also talked about this idea of parallel discovery. Explain this phenomenon, why it also kind of goes against this idea of these isolated genius moments. - This is a super interesting phenomenon. And actually I was like shocked when I found this paper from over a hundred years ago that was talking about parallel discovery and cataloging just hundreds of instances in which scientists and artists and across a lot of different fields had hit upon very similar ideas at the exact same time. And so kind of challenging this genius myth that, oh, I've just discovering things come from within. The fact that multiple people can arrive at the same idea at the very same time suggests they're actually finding their way to something that's outside of them. - I can't help but jump in and nearly share one of my favorite examples of parallel discovery. On March 12th, 1951, the cartoonist Hank Ketchum debuted what would become the famous syndicated comic strip Dennis the Menace, illustrating the adventures of a young boy who was constantly getting into trouble. But on that very same day, the British cartoonist David Law debuted his own new comic in a UK newspaper. And that comic was also about an adventurous young boy and it was also titled Dennis the Menace. Is that crazy or what? George's book is filled with stories like these. Once that show, there's lots of great ideas out there. Just waiting for you, me, or whatever cartoonist happens to be paying attention to find them. So it seems we really need to drop this idea of the isolated genius. George has a metaphor he believes reflects the science of creativity even better. - I really like this metaphor of the creative explorer or even archaeology where we're exploring a landscape and searching for an idea. So there's this notion that ideas are in some way external to us and that we can draw on inspiration and forms of insight and use that to really propel our creative process when you're feeling stuck, look out and see what kinds of things can I draw on for my environment. - One of the things I was shocked by in your book is it seems like so many of the people I think of is like the great kind of light bulb inventors. They were the ones who also think of this creative process as exploration. There was this quote from Thomas Edison that I really loved, which was my soul-called inventions already existed in the environment. I took them out. I created nothing. Nobody does. There's no such thing as an idea of being brain-born. Everything comes from outside, which is funny, particularly for Thomas Edison, who I literally think of as the light bulb, like the light bulb creator, but also like the light bulb popping up in his head. But even he was like, nah, I didn't do anything fancy. Just the found and the stuff that was already out there. - Totally. I mean, I think it's kind of like the quintessential example, right, because we do associate Edison with inventing the light bulb. And light bulb is kind of our model for creativity. And yet, Edison employed, at one point, 200 different people in these large teams. He called them these mucker teams. And they essentially were just exploring space, trying out every different combination they could. And even the discovery of the light bulb is really fascinating because different parts of it had been worked out for almost over a century. And it was really Edison at the end, working out a very tiny detail, which he largely borrowed from somebody else. So this notion that idea is just spring forth from nowhere. I think really mistakes. A lot of what's really happening. - I kind of love George's new take on where good ideas come from. That we don't need to just wait around for some light bulb moment to show up. Because if finding good ideas is like excavating a landscape, that means we can actually hack this process to generate new ideas. But how do we do that? We'll have the answers and bust even more creativity myths when the happiness lab returns from the break. - Creativity expert, George Newman, argues that we find our best ideas not by waiting for some muse to strike, but by engaging in a process that's more like an archeological excavation. And that means that interesting new ideas are to be found outside ourselves. Whether that's from the people we interact with, the places we explore, or even the songs we listen to. - So I had been thinking about this exploration, discovery idea, and then I was listening to the pixies and they have this song "Dig for Fire" and something just clicked for me there where I was like, oh yeah, like archeology. And so I started kind of taking notes about it and then the longer I thought about it, it really started to actually connect. And I started learning more about archeology and these different parts of the process really started to map on to what I was trying to say about creativity. - And so you've argued that the same process that we see in archeology can be applied to creativity and that can help us get unstuck. And one of the first parts of these processes is what you've called surveying, what's that? - So surveying is basically getting a sense of the landscape. In this case, out of the conceptual landscape, trying to figure out where am I, where are other good ideas? What is a good idea going to potentially look like? So it's a way of orienting yourself in space. And it's a big part of the process of archeology, right? You have to know where you're digging otherwise. You're just gonna dig up a bunch of empty ground. But it's also a really important part of creativity where if we just start generating ideas randomly, probably not gonna be super productive. It's about looking to where have good ideas been discovered in the past. And can I help orient myself towards those more promising sites? - And when we start thinking of how we can go about finding those promising sites, I think this is a spot where another myth comes in. We assume that to think really creatively, I need to be by myself. We have this idea that I have to go off to a cap and somewhere and lock myself up and just have time by myself to think of all these good ideas. But you've argued that that's wrong too. How do we know that? - Yeah, so a major source of creativity is exposure to outside information, even new pictures on the wall and new kinds of furniture and exposure to new people can be that trigger which cues a new idea. So there's some empirical evidence. Also, a lot of the myths that we have about those cabinet of the woods, like Theroux, was probably the most famous one, but he wasn't isolated at all. He was like half a mile from town. He threw these parties and was seeing people all the time. So I think there's this kind of cultural myth that we're going off in isolation when actuality creatives are really drawing on their environment. - Wait, I wanna pull that out 'cause I've been to the Theroux house. It was basically a size of my podcast studio with a little table and so on. And my understanding was like he went there and just hung out and like Walden sprung on him. But you're saying he was at dinner parties and he was part of civilization? - Absolutely, yeah, he would have over his author friends, family members, he had an annual melon party. You know, Theroux was very much connected and I think that was a big part of his creativity and creativity for everyone. - I think it's so critical, right? Because a lot of the work that we talk about on the happiness lab involves the importance of social connection for being happier. And we also know that feeling better increases your performance. So it makes total sense that like just being around other people kind of puts you in the mindset to be performing better and being more creative. But it also seems like other people are just a font of lots of different ideas. Just like putting new posters on the wall might getting you think differently. Just hearing other people's random ideas might help you too. - I mean, even writing this book was a real opportunity to kind of take my own medicine where you know, inevitably I hit all of these creative blocks and then I would kind of start sweating and try to block out all of the noise and everything. And it wasn't until I started just reading and exploring things online and checking out new sources that were new to me that I really started unlocking some of those new ideas and new kinds of insights. - Another thing we need to reject is this idea that to come up with something creative has to be perfectly original. You've argued that we should just embrace the idea of emulating a bit more. Why is emulating so effective when it comes to new ideas? - We often hear phrases like it's been done before and I think that can be a way to dissuade us from going down a particular avenue. But it turns out that a lot of great ideas throughout history were about building on what has come before and just tweaking it a little bit. And I think about this as kind of like finding your own 5% call it the 5% novelty rule in the book. But we were able to borrow an existing idea and then put your own spin or find a new application or a new way of thinking about it. That can usually be a really powerful source of creativity that lots of different people have used throughout history. - So that's stage one surveying. Next stage, stage two is what you call gritting. How does gritting work and what's the connection with what archaeologists are doing there? - So gritting in archaeology is the stage of where they're stringing up twine over the side into manageable grids. And the notion there is I wanna keep track of everywhere I've searched, where did I find stuff and importantly where didn't I find stuff. And so I make an argument for a similar kind of process with creativity of trying the best you can to make your search process systematic. - You've also argued that gritting requires having a guiding question to know that you're on the right track. What's a guiding question? Why is it so essential? - I'm talking about the guiding question is kind of like your compass in this process and it essentially comes down to what am I trying to do and why, who is this idea for? Who's gonna find it impactful? And it's not really about handling to a specific audience so much as understanding the value that somebody's going to get from your idea, why they're gonna find it useful. And that can be such a powerful way of helping to orient us more or away from less promising directions. - So there's another myth that we have during this gritting process, which was one that I was kind of surprised by. I think we're thinking about our guiding questions and coming up with new ideas. We often assume that we need to think outside the box, right? But you've argued that thinking outside the box is bad, which shocked me, why isn't this a good idea? - What I say at the book is think inside the box. Use those constraints to your advantage, right? I talk about the way in which creativity really responds to not only what's in our environment, but what about the environment is limiting our idea. And when we can take those limitations and use them to our advantage, it actually can be a very powerful source of creativity. So I talk about the artist Matisse and how late in life he had to get a major surgery which basically left him bedridden. He wasn't able to paint in the way that he had before, but that led him to explore this totally new method using paper cutouts. And that's a lot of what we know Matisse for today is the style that developed specifically because of those limitations that he was facing. - This thinking inside the box is awesome because I think it allows us to remember that not only can we be creative when something tricky has happened, right? Like I'm bedridden, I can't do the same thing, but maybe those constraints and with those bad situations might make us more creative, which seems like a different attitude than we normally take towards the creative process. - Yeah, I mean, I even go so far in the book to say, let's run towards those constraints. Let's try to find them and seek them out and narrow our search field a little bit or narrow the way that we're exploring for ideas. - Another practical strategy for using constraints is what you call transplanting. What's that? - The transplanting is this idea of taking principles or things that have worked in one domain and applying them to another. And if you look across history, this also winds up being a really powerful way in which people generate new ideas. One of my favorite examples there is a woman named Janet Stevens who was a hairdresser and she was at a museum and noticing Roman busts and said, oh, I wonder how they were able to construct these elaborate hairstyles. And so she began this process of trying to recreate them herself and figured out that it was possible to do by stitching the hair together. And this wanted to be actually a big discovery for classic scholars who had assumed that must have been wigs or something like that. - You also tell this example of the invention of the bullet train, which I found fascinating. Can you share that one? - So when they first invented the bullet train, you had this problem that it was traveling at such speeds that when it would exit the tunnel, it would create this like supersonic boom effect. And so engineered happened to be an avid bird watcher knew about the Kingfisher bird, which doesn't want to scare away the fish. And so it has this very long beak that kind of allows it to seamlessly enter the water. So by copying the Kingfisher's beak, they were actually able to redesign the train. So it could exit the tunnel and not make this boom effect. - So the front of the train actually looks like the beak of a Kingfisher? - To me almost identically. - Yeah. - That's so awesome. It also fits with these studies coming out showing that if you look at like Nobel Prize winners, they often are more likely to have these kind of outside hobbies and things than folks who haven't won the Nobel Prize. This idea that like being interested in multiple fields or having kind of funny hobbies actually helps you be more successful in your field, maybe more creative in your field, even just that maybe if you're doing these other hobbies, you just have more ideas to transplant from one domain into another. Those are some really fascinating studies on early diversification and how people who wind up being very successful in their careers early on instead of specializing very narrowly kind of took a very broad swath. And it seems like what these folks are doing is being able to draw on a really diverse set of ideas and then re-explain them in terms of their own expertise. - It was fun to hear you talk about that, George, because we haven't mentioned this yet, but you and I worked together a long time ago on experiments with monkeys and I know you've done work on celebrities and possessions and you've done work on pro-social donation. Like if I look at your CV, there's just papers on all these different topics. You are so diverse as a young scholar and I feel like that might be why you're so good at talking about creativity today. - Or maybe I'm just trying to justify my own past. (laughing) - So far, George and I have covered steps one and two of his creative process, surveying and gritting. But once you've done that, it's finally time to dig up that new idea. And we'll discuss how to uncover something amazing when the happiness lab returns in a moment. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) In his new book, How Great Ideas Happened, Dr. George Newman upends common misconceptions about the creative process. Instead of waiting for divine inspiration, he encourages us to channel our inner Indiana Jones and start playing archaeologist. And once all your idea groundwork is laid with the first steps of surveying and gritting, it's time for the part that everyone's been waiting for, idea generation. - So this next stage in the process is all about getting everything you can out of the ground. And there's a study that I love called the Creative Cliff Illusion, that people kind of think that they're gonna run out of ideas, that when they start brainstorming, oh, I can only come up with 10 or 15 ideas in this domain, but when we keep persisting, when we keep going, we're able to generate many more ideas and we expect. So the real key of digging is more is more, just trying to generate as much stuff as possible, not worrying about how practical it is at that point. We're just gonna be generating ideas. We're just gonna be brainstorming, no idea is bad. In fact, let's generate as many bad ideas as we possibly can and then let's go back later to see what we've really found. - This may be a delicate question, but I guess one that a lot of folks are asking right now, how helpful is AI when we're going through this idea generation process? Should we be using lots of different LLMs to help us generate ideas? Is that a good thing or are there some constraints there? - But what the research is showing is that it can definitely be a good thing when it's used in the right way. The way I like to fit it into this archeology metaphor is that AI is like a really powerful excavator. It's a way of clearing a lot of ground in a very short amount of time, but you have to know what you're looking for and you have to know where you're going to direct it because if you just plow an excavator, you're gonna find a lot of ground where there's absolutely nothing. AI is a really powerful tool for kind of generating more ideas, but if we're not careful, those ideas can be really similar. And so on aggregate, it can make everybody's ideas the same. So we really need that guidance early on to make sure that I'm directing it to new and promising directions. - Okay, so we've excavated all the good ideas. Now we move on to the final phase stage four, which is what you call sifting. What's sifting? - So sifting now is we've taken up a bunch of stuff out of the ground, more is more, and we're gonna go back and see, do we find anything of note? Is there anything here that's actually gonna be useful to us? And so in the digging stage, it's all about optimism, go, go, go. The sifting stage is really the opposite we want to be as hard-headed and critical as possible to say, is this really something that we can carry forward? - And when we're doing that critical process, we have to make sure that we don't fall prey to a bunch of biases. One bias that I know I fall prey to a lot that I need to let go is what you've called the creative endowment effect. What's that and how can we let go of that bias? - So the creative endowment effect is actually some research that we did in our lab, which is our attachment to our own ideas that because I'm the person who came up with it, it's really good. And we found that if you just take those same ideas and pass them along to somebody else, they're actually much more accurate at finding the better ideas in those sets. - That's so important 'cause this comes up in group settings all the time, like we have this big brainstorm meeting and everyone's dropping ideas and we're on idea number 142. I'm like, I like to go back to idea number one that I had. I really like that one. - Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think it comes out of this, again, it's kind of like an extension of this genius or light bulb way of thinking that, oh, well, I thought of it, you know, how could it not be great? So as much as we can try to create that psychological distance and space between ourselves and our ideas, we can see them more objectively. - Another bias we need to overcome is our tendency to always want to add more. We're very good at adding stuff, but we kind of suck at subtracting stuff. Why is subtracting so essential during this part of the creative process? - Well, there's some really fascinating work showing that subtraction itself can be a really powerful way of generating new ideas. And it's not something that normally occurs to us, right? We think about what we can add, not what we can take away. - I think there's a very famous Lego study on this, right? - Yes, so Gabe Adams at the University of Virginia and her colleagues, you know, they gave people some kind of creative object and then said, can you make it better? In lots of different contexts and people always added stuff, they never took things away. And even when it came down to like fixing a paragraph of text that had a lot of redundant senses instead of removing the redundant senses, they just added more. - And so how can we get ourselves to notice that subtraction is essential? - I like this metaphor of floating a raft versus building a tower. You know, given our attachment to our own ideas, there's this tendency to say, you know, here's everything I've done. Let me stack up this giant tower of stuff. So you can see it and that reflects all of the effort that I put in. But when we're evaluating our ideas, I take it's much more powerful to think about like floating a raft. What's going to make my idea or set of ideas watertight and finding all of the holes? And a lot of that times getting to that place is about subtraction. - There's another thing that can derail us during this selection process, which I found kind of surprising actually, which is that we can sometimes get messed up when somebody else praises one of our ideas. How does that work and how does it mess us up? - There's a lot of situations in which praises can kind of be a creativity killer. And some very interesting work showing that when somebody says, "Hey, you've got a genius idea." We're gonna be really reluctant to prove them wrong. And because of that, we're gonna actually engage in less exploration, less swinging for the fences, which is exactly what the work on creativity suggests we should be doing. - And probably less subtraction if somebody tells you, "Oh my gosh, that idea's great." Even if it doesn't fit on your raft to make your ideas float effectively, you're gonna wanna keep it there 'cause someone just said, "Oh, this is great." - Absolutely. And I think this is a big issue even as people get more senior in their roles, right? It's hard to not attribute your success to all of the great ideas that you've had in the past. And so you become that much more attached to all of them in every part of them. So we need to be careful about praise but we also wanna get feedback from other people. So how can we get that balance most effectively? - Well, I talk about a lot of different strategies for getting feedback. One that I really like is thinking about feedback is how do we get on a learning curve? How do we think about making incremental tweaks to our idea rather than throwing the whole thing out? Because I think especially when we get critical feedback, there's a tendency to say, "Oh, scrap it, I'm gonna move on." But that's ignoring all of the progress that we've made along the way. - Final thing we need to pay attention to, which I love a lot because we talk about this a lot on the Happiness Lab is that the creative process and especially the subtracting part of the creative process really requires a lot of emotion regulation. Why is emotion regulation so critical for creativity? And where can do it badly lead us to stray? - Well, I think one place that leads us to stray is we were talking about the attachment to our own ideas. The other place that leads us to stray is that the research suggests that it's in fact those ideas that we maybe feel a little bit uncomfortable or anxious about that wind up being the most promising. Sometimes when an idea is really novel and kind of abstract, when we first think of it, we say, "Oh, like maybe it's not that promising and we use that feeling to inform whether or not we explore it further," but research suggests, "Hey, we should actually jump on those opportunities and those can be some of our best ideas." - So if you've been feeling bored or creatively uninspired, now is the time to get unstuck. You don't have to be an artist or an innovator to put George's advice into practice. You could use these strategies to pursue a new career path, remodel your kitchen or even rethink your exercise routine. Just remember to look outside yourself and be open to the possibilities and sources of inspiration in your environment. Something totally unexpected may just fuel a life-changing idea. And if you want even more tips about how to get more creative, be sure to check out George's new book How Great Ideas Happen, which is out this week. Coming up next week on The Happiness Lab, we'll wrap up our series on getting unstuck in 2026 and this time we're going big, like meaning of life big or at least meaning in life big. - You're just thinking about the paradigm of life wrong, getting more out of life, not cram more into it. Oh, I need another hobby, I need a bigger thing, I need more. No, you don't need more. You need to get more out of what's already there. - That's all next time. I'm The Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos. Guaranteed Human.