Creativity & The Power of Persistence

Source: Thrive Global

Does our creativity diminish over time?  Most people think so.  They believe that that we are likely to generate our most creative and innovative ideas during the early stages of brainstorming.  Unfortunately, people are being misled because they think that those ideas that are harder to generate (i.e., that take some time to surface) are less innovative. They are mistaken in that belief. Those ideas you generate quickly and easily are not necessarily your most creative concepts.  

Professors Loran Nordgren and Brian Lucas have conducted a series of studies demonstrating that our creativity increases with some persistence.   Moreover, they have shown that people's failure to recognize the power of persistence comes at a cost.  Nordgren notes that people's mistaken beliefs may actually cause them to give up prematurely in search of transformative ideas, and therefore, not to maximize their creativtity. Nordgren explains, "People think their best ideas are coming fast and early.  You’re either not seeing any drop-off in quality, or your ideas get better. People don’t maximize their creative potential, and part of that is because of these beliefs." 

It's perhaps not surprising that people don't recognize the power of persistence when it comes to creativity.  As brainstorming begins, people tend to generate lots of ideas.  As time passes, it becomes more difficult to offer original ideas.  The drop in quantity often leads to a drop in energy in the group.  There's a sense that the team is floundering a bit.  Those feelings likely cause people to conclude that they are not likely to generate highly creative ideas if they continue their conversation.  Teams should not fall into this trap though.  They should not confuse quantity with quality.  Perhaps they need a break to achieve some pscyhological distance from the problem.  However, they should not give up. They should persist.  

Persistence & Creativity

Brian Lucas & Loran Nordgren have conducted a series of interesting studies about creativity.  They find that people tend to underestimate the number of creative ideas that they can generate.  The scholars asked people to generate ideas on a particular topic.  Then they asked them to predict how many more ideas they could generate if they continued thinking about the topic.  The subjects then continued to try to generate ideas.  

The scholars found that people underestimated how many ideas they could generate by persisting for that additional period of time.  Moreover, outsiders judged the ideas generated after persisting as of higher quality than the ideas generated initially.  

The study shows the value of persistence, but it also demonstrates that we sometimes downplay its importance. I think it's because we often think of creativity as a flash of brilliance.  It's not.  It's hard work! It takes time to reflect, think, make connections among disparate concepts, and synthesize ideas.  

How to Encourage Persistence

Wharton Professor Rom Y. Schrift and Georgia State Professor Jeffrey R. Parker have written a new paper titled, "Staying the Course: The Option of Doing Nothing and Its Impact on on Postchoice Persistence."   They discovered that people are more likely to persist in pursuit of their objectives if they originally had an option of doing nothing.  In other words, imagine that someone had the option of choosing a membership at Gym A or Gym B.   Now imagine that they were explicitly presented the option of not joining any gym at all.   In the case where this third option of doing nothing is explicitly presented to them, people are more likely to stick to their original goals.  Parker explains, "The intuition is we don’t want to give them the option.  ‘Not doing whatever’ may sound like giving up. But what people decide for themselves is, ‘I didn’t have to do it and I decided to do it, so I’ll stick with it for a longer period of time.'"  The authors explain their conclusions in the paper:

“Sticking to a diet, completing drug regimens, regularly visiting the gym and working through personal or professional challenges are all instances in which persisting is beneficial and important,” the authors write. “Using the right incentive structures, one can drastically reduce or eliminate the tendency of opting out, while maintaining the positive impact that affording no-choice options has on persistence.”