Title - The Truth About Creativity Tags - creativity
Have you ever seen Amadeus?
It’s a movie about the great composer, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
It won eight Academy Awards, four BAFTA’s, four Golden Globes, and a Director’s Guild of America (DGA) award.
The movie also reveals that Mozart was… well… a strange character.
Despite being a creative genius, Mozart had a rather infantile sense of humor. The man who was composing from the age of 5… who performed for royalty… and who is widely considered the most gifted classical musician of all time…
Loved A Good Poo Joke!
Yep. Many letters and song lyrics written by Mozart are scattered with toilet humor.
My personal favorite is a snippet from a letter Mozart sent to his cousin:
“Oui, by the love of my skin, I shit on your nose, so it runs down your chin…”
Astonishing.
Apparently, when Margaret Thatcher went to see the play of Amadeus, she refused to believe that a man who produced such elegant music could be so foul-mouthed.
So, the Director sent copies of Mozart letters to number ten Downing Street the very next day. But still, such was the contrast between his music and humor, Mrs. Thatcher refused to believe it.
Anyway, I don’t just bring up Mozart’s unusual character to entertain you. Amadeus reveals another habit of Mozart’s that provides tremendous insight into the creative process.
A short scene shows Mozart at a billiards table. Candles burning, he leans over a table scattered with notes. He has a quill, an ink bottle, and a sheet of paper. He takes the yellow billiard ball in his right hand and rolls it.
Bounce… bounce… bounce.
The ball ricochets against the three edges of the table and slowly returns to its original position next to Mozart’s sheet of paper.
Each time the ball goes on its journey, Mozart dips his quill in the ink pot and scribbles notes.
Using this technique, Mozart never re-wrote his music; every note remained as it appeared in the first draft.
He had a remarkable ability to tap into his creative power.
A case in point: The night before the famous opera, Don Giovanni, Mozart hadn’t even begun writing the overture.
According to one account, when Constanze Mozart tried to keep him awake with punch and poetry reading, it had the opposite effect. Mozart went to sleep for a one-hour nap but ended up sleeping through until 5 a.m.
Under massive pressure, Mozart sprang into action, banged out the overture and delivered it to the copyists in two short hours.
So, why did Mozart follow his unusual practice of composing at the billiard’s table? Was he just crackers, or is there something more going on?
Well, as Eugene Schwartz explained in one of his seminars, ideas are not created from thin air—like when God created heaven and earth—but rather, through a connection between two or more previously-unconnected facts.
And, it is in the connection of pre-existing facts and ideas that Mozart was so effective.
You see, the mind is a huge network of cells that translates images and thoughts back and forth. When you are focused on a particular task, all of your brain’s energy is concentrated on the small number of cells in your conscious mind.
Your conscious mind uses logic, but it doesn’t make connections very well. Thus, you cannot produce ideas using your conscious mind alone.
If you want to generate ideas, then you have to get out of the conscious mind. And, that’s what Mozart was doing by rolling the billiards ball.
The trajectory of the ball was unpredictable. He had to concentrate and temporarily engage his conscious mind to have the ball arrive back in the same place. By diverting his conscious mind onto something else, his subconscious mind engaged and subsequently spat out notes that Mozart could quickly scribble down.
Okay, so how can you use this to your advantage when writing copy?
Here is one technique:
- Get yourself a timer. Punch in 33 minutes and 33 seconds. Hit start. And work intensely until the timer buzzes.
- When the timer buzzes, stop working immediately (even if you’re in the middle of a sentence)
- Punch 5 minutes into the timer, press start, and go do something else. Play with your dog. Make another cup of coffee. Billiards table? Bounce the ball off three sides and try and have it land in the same place.
You must engage your conscious mind on something other than your work. This frees up your subconscious mind to mull over what you’ve just been concentrating on.
It can make connections and throw new “ideas” (previously unconnected facts) back into your conscious mind when you sit down to work again. As Schwartz explained:
“You’ve been working, now you create.”
Finally, a word of caution: when I first started working this way, I used my iPhone as a timer. And, I quickly noticed that the moment I hit a wall when writing (and sometimes before I’d even got started) my mind drifted.
Like one of Pavlov’s dogs with a collar and leash around my neck, I just couldn’t resist picking up my phone and mindlessly checking emails or browsing Facebook.
For this technique to work, your conscious mind has to work extremely intensely for the 33 minutes and 33 seconds. So much so that you don’t notice time passing and you need the timer to remind you to stop.
For me, having a phone on my desk was a constant distraction. It was far too easy NOT to work intensely.
Perhaps you have a stronger immunity to the addictive powers of smartphones and social media than I do. But, even if that’s the case, every morsel of will power you invest in NOT checking your phone while working is energy you could be putting into your copy.
I don’t have a mobile phone anymore (a story for another day), but at the time, I got around this problem by turning my phone off and leaving it in another room. I now use a small hand-held timer which cost less than $5 on Amazon.
Anyway.
This is just one way to tap into the power of your creative subconscious every day. Learn it. Apply it. Profit from it.
And, in the next chapter, I’ll show you how to unlock your inner creativity to generate big ideas for kick-ass supplement ads.