Overwhelm Yourself to Jumpstart Creativity

Setting up life to foster synthesis, putting together ideas and materials in a way that leads to new connections and concepts, will help develop creativity. Considering how things fit together is a kind of exploration. One counterintuitive way to explore and find creative ideas is to deliberately overwhelm yourself with input—specifically the creative output of others.

In my field and graduate school program, studying for comprehensive exams meant spending about a year reading hundreds of books and articles, some from lists of books chosen by others years ago that were barely interesting and others that I selected and had to defend me selection of. I read so much in such a short period of time that I obviously could not fully absorb what I was reading, but my job was to synthesize it and remember it all so that at the end of the study period, I could take three full-day open-book essay exams. I had the maximum number of books checked out from two libraries and stacks of books with post-it notes all over my apartment. They were organized by theme, sort of. I had typed notes and handwritten notes. I would listen to audiobooks if I wasn’t reading. 

I regularly calculated my weekly reading pace and it was never fast enough. I frequently timed my reading pace, calculating how long it would take me to finish a book, and realized I had to skip along. At a certain point, it wouldn’t matter if I read the words, because there wasn’t enough room in my brain to hold it all together. 
It was absolutely ridiculous. 
What this absurd process did, though, racing through stacks of books and complex articles day after day, is create an atmosphere of synthesis. I made connections I would not have made under normal conditions. I had intriguing ideas that came from the juxtaposition of listening to The Scarlet Letter during a lunch break after zipping through not an article on shame, because that would make sense, but a dull tomb of literary criticism from the 1980s that was definitely written in response to another not terribly compelling 1980s piece of literary criticism that I would read two weeks later, when it happened to show up via interlibrary loan. The interesting thing about this whole mess is that I had intriguing ideas at all. 

The good news is that grad school is far from the only way to overwhelm yourself into a state of overwhelmed creativity. More feasible opportunities to invite chaos abound. Here are three:Rather than spending all of your time at a museum in one time period, and rather than trying to wander through wing after wing, pick two disparate exhibits: Go from, say, ancient Egypt to contemporary textiles in just an hour or two. Rather than reading one book at a time, or a couple of books, have a poetry collection, two nonfiction books, a graphic novel, and three novels going at once. Rather than spending the week perfecting one soup idea or trying ten variations of vegetable soup this month, browse recipes promiscuously and let that coconut lime idea into your mushroom toast plans. 

Because it is deliberately, overwhelmingly chaotic, exposing yourself to a wide range of creative content in a condensed time-frame allows you to make unexpected connections and to develop surprising concepts. 
To wrap up, here is the final lesson from grad school: I remember my year of studying for exams as a time of eating hastily and wondering if I had time for a shower. I would take a jog and love it even though I hate jogging. 

That’s the most crucial bit of wisdom. Stop the input. Reflect. 

And take notes: I cannot remember what I realized about The Scarlet Letter, and because it was quirky, idiosyncratic, not useful for any possible comprehensive exam, I failed to write it down. All I remember is the surprise of discovery, which is probably more valuable anyway.