In his latest book, The Myths of Creativity: The Truth About How Innovative Companies and People Generate Great Ideas, David Burkus dispels ten myths, including The Eureka Myth: “the notion that all creative ideas arrive in a ‘eureka’ moment.” The term is from ancient Greek, attributed to Archimedes, and means “I’ve found it!”
Burkus notes that contrary to this myth, countless creative people (e.g. da Vinci, Darwin, Edison, Michelangelo, and van Gogh) “all took on various different projects simultaneously, regularly switching back and forth between them.” Their greatest insights occurred to them only after extended periods of time (on average, about 10,000 hours) and rigorously disciplined effort. A former student and still admirer of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, he has this to say about the “switching” phenomenon:
“Csikszentmihalyi’s research allows for this, asserting that the unconscious mind is capable of keeping many ideas incubating in parallel, even if the conscious mind can focus on only one thing at a time.
“He writes that ‘cognitive accounts of what happens during incubation assume…that some kind of information processing keeps going on even when we are not aware of this, even while we are asleep.’ [Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, 1997]
“Once the incubation stage has run its course, which could be a few days or several years, it should lead a person into the insightful stage. This is where [and when] the feeling of ‘eureka’ happens, where the ideas incubated have fermented into a possible solution that can be tested and implemented.
“Sometimes the insight can seem as though it came from nowhere; other times it still takes intense focus on the project to yield a productive insight.”
I highly recommend the aforementioned books (The Myths of Creativity and Creativity) as well as all three of IDEO’s co-founder, Tom Kelley. They include Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All, co-authored with his brother David, co-founder of IDEA and founder of the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (d.school) at Stanford University.
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David Burkus is assistant professor of management at the College of Business at Oral Roberts University, where he teaches courses on creativity, innovation, entrepreneurship, and organizational behavior. He is the founder and editor of LDRLB, an online publication that shares insights from research on leadership, innovation, and strategy. His work has been featured in Forbes, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Psychology Today, Fast Company and the Harvard Business Review. He cordially invites you to visit his website: http://davidburkus.com.