Turning your creativity off can be good for you

Tom Monahan is the founder and former ECD of Leonard/Monahan and now runs a creative consulting firm called Before and After. He's also the author of the best-selling Do It Yourself Lobotomy which interestingly enough you can read for free at Google Books.

There's a post on the Before and After blog about how turning off your creativity can allow you to be more creative.

I though this excerpt was insightful and it also echoes what Sean, Matt, and Maria taught us in Portfolio classes. I remember Sean's syllabus instructing us to watch movies, watch TV, read magazines, watch people at the mall (but not in a creepy way).

When you’re working on a problem head on, so to speak, it’s your conscious mind that’s doing virtually all of the work. Your conscious mind is what you’re processing on the conscious level - mostly your observations, knowledge and recollections. Even when you’re trying to imagine new things, what’s the raw material for the new thoughts? Stuff you know. I mean, you can only think about what you know, right?

Well, the conscious mind is quite disciplined by nature. It likes order. It likes to make sense of everything. This is a good thing most of the time. It keeps you on he right side of the road when you’re driving. It helps you deliver your work on time. But when you’re using this orderly machine to find new ideas, yes it can serve you, but it’s like a car in perfect alignment, whether you’re steering or not, it tends to go where it’s pointed. So your thoughts tend to be linear, therefore predictable.

There’s another side of your mind that is a lot less disciplined, much less predictable. That’s your subconscious mind. Where we can only process a mere seven or eight thousand bits of data a minute on the conscious level, we are processing literally billions of bits of data on the subconscious level at any given moment. That’s an absolutely immense well of possibilities to tap into...

Bringing this back to the main topic of this article - the on/of method of thinking - when you’re “not” thinking about something consciously your subconscious mind is free to toss around some ideas on the subject in that gigantic thought auger where anything goes. So when you’re not using the conscious linear method you’re simply more likely to have fresh combinations of data that materialize as new thoughts.