Creativity

Last month I read Sarah Bakewell’s biography of sixteenth-century philosopher Michel de Montaigne and got so much out of it. Montaigne’s book Essays has influenced some of the greatest thinkers: from Francis Bacon and Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Friedrich Nietzsche and Shakespeare. Influential as he was, he was also, another biographer Stefan Zweig wrote, “the sworn enemy of all responsibility.” 

Montaigne’s “irresponsibility” was “essential to his battle to preserve his particular self as is.” Personal freedom is the supreme aim, he said, “to free oneself from fear and hope, belief and superstition. To be free of convictions and parties.” He thought certainty was absurd: all knowledge exists in humans, and because humans are fallible, all knowledge is to be doubted. He loved following his thoughts where they led, and delighted in viewing things from all possible angles. He went with the flow. If a book bored him or caused him to strain, he’d stop reading it, saying, “there is nothing I would break my head against in the name of scholarship.” He played with his cat, and pondered and wrote about his cat’s perspective. And he never worked harder than necessary. “The least strained and most natural ways of the soul,” he said, “are the most beautiful; the best occupations are the least forced.”

This idea of not straining yourself reminds me of how Richard Feynman won the Nobel Prize.

The Irresponsible Nobel Prize Winner

After spending 4 years working on the atomic bomb in Los Alamos, Richard Feynman accepted a position teaching physics at Cornell University. During this time, he was offered different positions at top universities with higher-paying salaries. Albert Einstein wrote him requesting he work at Princeton and the Institute for Advanced Study. Despite the wonderful offers, he couldn’t accept them—4 years of intense mathematical work in Los Alamos had left him drained. He was tired, uninterested in research, and couldn’t write more than 2 sentences on a scientific problem without becoming distracted. There was no way he could accept these offers, he reasoned, because they didn’t know he was burned out. “They expect me to accomplish something, and I can’t accomplish anything! I have no ideas…”

But then he had a thought. These offers, with their high expectations, were absurd. They would be impossible to live up to. And because they were impossible to live up to, he realized, he had no responsibility to live up to them. “It was a brilliant idea: You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be.” He realized he could apply this idea to his current work at Cornell.

Then he had another thought. Physics was becoming less interesting to him, but he used to enjoy it. And he used to enjoy it because he played with it—unconcerned with its scientific importance. From now on, he would work only on physics problems that entertained him. “Now that I am burned out,” he thought, “and I’ll never accomplish anything . . . I’m going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever.”

Within a week, he was working on a “fun” project, causing a colleague to question its importance. “‘Hah!’ I say. ‘There’s no importance whatsoever. I’m just doing it for the fun of it.’ His reaction didn’t discourage me; I had made up my mind that I was going to enjoy physics and do whatever I liked.” This project that he worked on for fun ultimately led him to win the Nobel Prize.

The Wise Make Time to Play

Just as Marcus Aurelius wrote about not being “all about business,” Seneca advised his friend Lucilius that the mind will fracture if given too much work and that “it will rise improved and sharper after a good break.” Montaigne wrote, “There is nothing more notable in Socrates than that he found time when he was an old man to learn music and dancing, and thought it time well spent.”

Perhaps it was playfulness that gave Montaigne some of his philosophical insights. Summarizing Montaigne’s thoughts on world conflict, Bakewell writes, “To believe that life could demand [homicide in the name of religion] is to forget what day-to-day existence actually is. It entails forgetting that, when you look at a . . . . cat in the mood for play, you are looking at a creature who looks back at you. No abstract principles are involved; there are only two individuals, face to face, hoping for the best from one another.”

My weekly newsletter is a mashup of a small number of other newsletters I read and enjoy. Billy Oppenheimer’s Six at Six showed me how to make each email thematic, and Ryan Holiday’s Daily Stoic emails (which I’ve read nearly every day since 2016) taught me how to connect Stoicism to different topics. Two other newsletters that have given me ideas are Tim Ferris’s 5-Bullet Friday (where I got the idea to include a quotes section), and Austin Kleon’s newsletter of 10 things worth sharing (where I got the idea for a monthly Top 10 list).

This week’s blog is about innovating by imitating and going deeper.

Extend the line

Bob Dylan is regarded as one of the greatest songwriters of all time. At 81 years old, with a career spanning more than 6 decades, he’s still writing, recording, and performing. He’s become an object of study: where does his creativity come from? 

“These songs don’t come out of thin air,” he said. They are the result of years spent listening to traditional music, and singing the same songs over and over. He elaborated:

“If you sang ‘John Henry’ as many times as me—‘John Henry was a steel-driving man / Died with a hammer in his hand / John Henry said a man ain’t nothin’ but a man / Before I let that steam drill drive me down / I’ll die with that hammer in my hand.’ If you had sung that song as many times as I did, you’d have written, ‘How many roads must a man walk down?’ too. All these songs are connected. I just opened up a different door in a different kind of way. . . . I thought I was just extending the line.”

(Similar to The Adjacent Possible)

Build on Top of Something

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how Hal Mumme revolutionized American football with his Air Raid offense. Of course, this offense was not conceived in a flash of inspiration: it was the product of more than a decade’s worth of imitating the best passing offenses in the country. Early in his career, instead of starting from scratch, he realized he could build on top of existing concepts. He mastered the formations and plays that other coaches used, making adjustments and experimenting as he went. He subtracted the extraneous, shrinking phonebook-sized playbooks down to just a few plays. He chose depth over variety. He meshed plays together. He added his own theories and ideas, extending the line to compose the Air Raid offense and change the way football is played. “If we’re free from the burden of trying to be completely original,” Austin Kleon said, “we can stop trying to make something out of nothing, and we can embrace influence instead of running away from it.”

Find Wisdom Everywhere

One of my favorite things about Stoicism is that it has no immutable laws. The Stoics encouraged new ideas to be built on top of existing ones. They gladly welcomed any worthy idea, regardless of the source. “I’ll never be ashamed,” Seneca said, “to quote a bad writer with a good saying.” In fact, Seneca used quotes from Epicurus, the founder of a rival school. Marcus Aurelius would quote various philosophers throughout Meditations, rephrasing and reworking lines to push the ideas deeper into his psyche.

Sing the best songs, practice the best plays, contemplate the best ideas. Over and over and over. Then make them your own.