IMAGE SOURCE: Neurosciencenews.com, https://neurosciencenews.com/creativity-zone-neuroscience-25697/
(Yes, I couldn’t resist a Dr. Seuss-esque opening title, so help me.)
Have you ever wondered about how some phenomenal outputs of the pop culture panorama were created in a few minutes, but some took a painstaking number of hours, or days, multiple revisions, etc.? For those immersed in statistics, like myself, you may wonder what the graph distribution looks like – I’d wager that it’s not a perfectly normal distribution.
Maybe you know of some specific cases of these “whacked a homer out of the park” from nostalgia of days past. Let’s look at a few of these…
YESTERDAY. No, not going back to 24 hours ago to read them, but the song Yesterday by the Beatles in the mid-1960s. Paul McCartney claims that upon waking one morning, the song practically wrote itself. “I woke up one morning with a tune in my head, and I thought, ‘Hey, I don’t know this tune… I went to the piano and found the chords to it, made sure I remembered it, and then hawked it round to all my friends, asking what it was: ‘Do you know this? It’s a good little tune, but I couldn’t have written it because I dreamt it.’”[1]
And today, you’d have to be a total troglodyte not to have heard of Yesterday. (I wouldn’t even let Gen Z off the hook for that one. )
On to the 1970s: a then barely-known Sylvester Stallone was at his rope’s end. He had $106 in the bank. His wife was pregnant, his bull mastiff was starving and he couldn’t pay the rent on his seedy Hollywood apartment.[2] Yet he put his head down and plowed through an incredibly inspirational script, almost as a parallel to his current make-or-break predicament, in just 3 ½ days!!! The movie itself was just filmed in 28 days, and look what it spawned after (half a dozen sequels, perhaps not canonically speaking) – a household name, with a statue of the character in Philadelphia.
Then to the late 1980s: who among us hasn’t heard of the Guns and Roses ballad “Sweet Child O’ Mine”? That iconic, piercing guitar solo opening, followed by mellower lyrics, then ending with a heavy-hitting riff and [rather ironic] verse of “where do we go now?” [Answer: UP!!] It all came about from some rather random experimentation of guitar riffs, and Lead singer Axl Rose happened to like the sound of one of the riffs, so he used it as an opportunity to write up a song about his then-girlfriend, in just five minutes flat! It happened when him and the band were on their way back in the van from San Fran to L.A.,[3] really just as an afterthought, like what the hey, but it’s simply incredible how much traction it got!
So, be it from a night of literally dreaming, or socio-economic pressures, or just killing time with nothing better to do…it is truly awesome what the human mind can produce in such a short period of time.
I’m not ashamed to admit that, on the whole, this was not the case for me on writing my first book, Diamond Min(e)d…there were just some isolated pockets where the writing just flowed and I wrote for several pages uninterrupted while barely consulting my myriad papers of rough notes. But I certainly cherished those moments, and they gave me beacons of optimism, bright lights of the prospect of repeating those bursts of creativity at the most unexpected moments.
There’s a semi-famous psychologist by the name of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced Mee-HIGH-lee Chick-SENT-mee-high.) He coined the term “flow” to mean a state of, or rather a stream of consciousness, in which ideas flow freely – perhaps from brain to paper, or in musical continuity – and phenomenal results are born. He noted how jazz improv was based largely on the notion of flow, and I’m inclined to agree with him. It was a model of “expertise-plus-release”, grounded in experience but knowing when to just “let go”.
In his book From Strength to Strength, author Arthur C. Brooks writes about “the two curves of intelligence” in one’s life: one of these is the fluid intelligence curve, more common in earlier adulthood and more to do with stronger innovation and ideas thinking (think Silicon Valley start-up whizzes). The second one is the crystallized intelligence curve, which is all about compounding knowledge from seemingly different sources, or the ability to see links between concepts and things. It is this curve that becomes more prominent in one’s 30s and beyond. (I wrote about Brooks’s concept in my own book, Diamond Min(e)d.)
So, think about how these curves might come into play in the manifestation of flow. From the examples provided thus far, the trailblazing hotshots were clearly on the first curve in high measure; they rapidly translated ideas into something enduring in pop culture.
When I think of flow and the second curve, I’m a little more hard-pressed to come up with anecdotal examples, I admit. It’s conjecture, but one might imagine that the late great Steve Jobs was relying on this second curve of crystallized intelligence when he made that stellar comeback in the hi-tech world and came up with the iPhone. You can see how this combined several concepts into one (i.e. phone, browser, camera) to achieve a quantum leap in the hi-tech market.
So, with 2025 upon us, decide where you want to channel your energy and let great things flow therefrom…
[1] The Beatles Bible. https://www.beatlesbible.com/songs/yesterday/
[2][2] The NYT Archive: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/packages/html/movies/bestpictures/rocky-ar.html
[3] 5 Shocking Facts You Didn’t Know About Guns ‘n’ Roses: https://societyofrock.com/5-shocking-facts-you-didnt-know-about-guns-n-roses/5/