Creativity and Productivity: Two Sides of the Same Coin?
Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.
―Stephen King, in On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Productivity and creativity are linked. In fact, the verbs "produce" and "create" are almost synonyms. But the difference in connation between these terms causes hang-ups for a lot of creative people, myself included.
Productivity sounds commercial. It conjures images of factory-floor managers shouting at workers to pick up the pace. It implies that the end result of work must be a "product" that can be packaged, bought, and sold, a product that has no inherent value, only a market value. It also implies a systematic process, a set of reliable rules to follow that repeatedly turns specific inputs into specific outputs.
On the other hand, Creativity evokes an aura, a sense of energy connected to the wellspring of human feeling which bursts out spontaneously from one's true soul, emerging as unique expressions that belie comparison to anything before or after. Such creativity arises in the heat of a particular moment, born of mysterious parentage, sometimes called genius, the muses, duende, divine inspiration. It seems to follow no rules, showing up in the least likely places as a flash of insight or a giant leap toward an undefined yet enthralling outcome.
The problem of the working artist, if they aim to make a living from their art, is discovering how to balance productivity and creativity. At the surface, these two concerns seem to perpetually compete with one another, but if we dig a bit deeper I think we can find a few ways they can work together.
The source of creativity
The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.
-Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Creativity is a fundamental part of being human, so much so that the United Nations recognizes a human right to artistic freedom. But creativity isn't limited to the arts: it is also the most important tool for successful scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs. It is the way we innovate, finding new solutions to old problems, and it's also the way we articulate problems that are observable but as yet unnamed. It is not merely an ability to recognize patterns in the world around us, but also to construct explanations for those patterns that allow us to truly understand them.[1]
In other words, creativity emerges as a natural result of engaging intentionally with the world around us. No one makes people be creative. When it comes to the arts, in fact, many young people are discouraged from pursuing their creative passions, told by family members to get real jobs in order to become productive members of society. The irony is that repressing passions is actually counterproductive: it can set a person on the path to disillusionment, discontent, and even depression. I've written before on the importance of following feeling to find connection, and I believe that's the essence of creativity. To discourage creativity, then, is to ask people to be mere automata, mechanically functional but utterly joyless.
The demands and false promises of productivity
It's easy to see why corporations want their employees to be more productive: if they can get more work out of workers without increasing pay, any increase in revenue amounts to net profit. This is why the push to maximize productivity will never end, why every increase in technology that has promised to free up time for the average joe has instead led only to new kinds of work, ever less fulfilling and more alienating. Too often, diligent skillbuilding and continued education is rewarded only with increased responsibility, not with promotion or increased pay.
In recent years, there's also been an increasing pressure for people to become productive in their personal lives. Software developers market task managers, email clients, digital calendars, cloud storage, and any number of other apps to individuals as well as businesses. These tools allow supervisors to assign work or send messages to members of their teams at all hours of the day, eating away at time that in previous generations would have been reserved for extracurricular enrichment or family life.
Meanwhile, social media sites foster FOMO and existential angst; they send the message that we should always be doing something worth sharing and run on algorithms that prioritize content that is controversial, saccharine, or inane, thus encouraging people to behave in ways that are controversial, saccharine, and inane. They have become essential tools for content creators, in spite of an old guard that would have it otherwise.[2] They promise opportunities for creative expression and community building, but they also distract us with a infinite scroll of novelty, disseminating content so quickly that even impressive work becomes of fleeting interest and amateur artists get ignored or (worse) denigrated by an apparently endless number of armchair critics who spread vitriol at lightspeed while maintaining relative anonymity.
What does creative productivity look like?
Creativity is a wild mind and a disciplined eye.
– Dorothy Parker
So, what can be done? How, today, does a sensitive person who wanders broadly and feels deeply protect that essential, living part of themselves that yearns to connect ideas and share them with others without collapsing under the weight of hustle culture, the pressure to 'monetize', to occupy a 'niche', to stagnate in the safety of stylistic sameness for the sake of 'branding'?
In truth, it's not enough to protect our creativity, we have to actively nurture it. For me, that means making a promise to myself that I will continue to grow and learn, continue coming to know myself. It means making a commitment to practice creativity, to explore my unknowns and follow my curiosity. It means making space for such exploration every day, which means learning to say no to people and yes to sudden urges others might dismiss. It means being accountable to myself, creating a set of expectations (a la "I'm going to write for my blog at least once a week") that I choose to follow for myself whether or not anyone else sees or responds to the results. It means recognizing that there are really no rules limiting how I express my creativity besides the ones set by me. And it means reminding myself, in those moments when writing, or acting, or editing starts to feel like a chore, that none of these activities are things that I have to do, they are passionate pursuits that I have the beyond fortunate privilege of getting to do.
Noam Chomsky cites this inability to explain or understand patterns as a key failing of current AI tools relative to human intelligence. Full article here. ↩︎
During my M.F.A., my writing mentor told me not to worry about social media even as I was beginning to submit to paying poetry markets whose submission forms had required fields for social media handles. ↩︎