Here is the full text and summary of Raphael DiLuzio’s talk titled “7 Steps of Creative Thinking” at TEDxDirigo conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
Raphael DiLuzio – Art Professor
Hello, thank you. I’m going to be talking today about things lost and things discovered. I’ll also be talking about demystifying the creative process.
To start, I have to begin with a little background story and a question. How many of you have suffered one great loss or another in your lives? Okay, it’s a room full.
Well, we are told that we’re not defined by the loss, but we’re defined by how we respond to it. And that holds true for also things that happen to us that are good. It’s not the events that happen to us, but it’s about how we respond to those events.
Our Response To Events Defines Us
I am recovering from what they call a post-concussive condition. I had nine concussions, which is a few too many in my life. I think after the age of ten, you’re only supposed to have three, and people have to collect something, so why not collect concussions? But with concussions, when you recover from it, they call it post-concussive disorder. And many of the boys that are girls and girls that are coming back from overseas are suffering from something similar called post-concussive disorder, which we’re just beginning to find out about.
Mine happened in 2008. I was hit by an 18-wheel truck that decided to park in the backseat of my car, a bad parking spot. And when I came out of the accident, about a week later, I lost a lot of things. One of the things I lost was my ability to talk and my ability to remember who I was, which may have been a good thing. I was told I’m much nicer now since the accident. I’m not sure how to take that from my best friend.
Also, I lost a superpower. When I was a little child, I started drawing, and I started studying art at the age of nine and was formally trained and could literally draw anything both in my head and in front of me. And after the accident, my hand would just go like this. My doctor also told me that I would never get my higher words back, which was upsetting as a professor, and that it would take 10 years before I could teach or recover. And I said, I’ll start tomorrow teaching.
The university that I taught at allowed me to teach one course. My students were really lovely in letting me come in. But in order to do that, I had to learn how to talk again. And I wasn’t really sure what to do because they were going to wait six months before giving me speech therapy. They like your brain to settle.
One night before going to bed, I had a sudden little flash of an idea, a little eureka moment, which I’ll talk about those in a second. I thought of reading the New York Times newspaper, listening to the audio edition of it and recording myself and watching myself over and over to retrain myself to talk. And I did that.
I did that to my girlfriends, to my girlfriends’ dismay, over and over and over and over. One word at a time, one sentence at a time until I could talk. And by the time I went to speech therapy, they said, you’re doing quite well. What’d you do? And I told them, they said, well, how did you figure that out? I said, I don’t know. I just came up with this idea.
And I want to talk to you about that process of coming up with ideas. Before the accident, people used to ask me if I was an artist. And I thought being called an artist was pretentious. And I used to say, no, I’m a painter, as if that has any less pretension. And I thought that because I was defining myself as a painter, I wasn’t attaching my creative process in the same way, which I thought was this thing that came from this mysterious place. I thought that by not being an artist and just being a painter, it was more like a blue collar worker somehow. And my creative process was more like that.
But I didn’t really understand it. And I began to study it and investigate it a little bit. And oddly, the things that came back to me in memory after the accident were things from way before the accident.
In my studies of the creative process, one of the things I came across from Plato was the dialogue, The Theaetetus, that talks about the seven stages of philosophical midwifery. And in the early 1990s, I met Murray Gell-Mann, a Nobel laureate physicist who was doing research in creativity at the Institute. And they discovered seven processes in creativity, too. And I’m going to share those with you.
Eureka Moment
The fifth stage of the creative process, which I’ll talk to them out of order, but since the brain injury, I can’t really count. So it’s OK. The fifth stage is that Eureka moment. And that Eureka moment is very important. How many of you have a little flash of an idea before you go to bed or when you wake up in the morning or while you’re driving? We have little flashes of ideas, whether it’s a song or how to fix something or how to overcome some problem at a job.
These little flashes are very important. These are our Eureka moments. And when we have these, how many of you jump out of the bed in the middle of winter and write those down or pull your car over, not do it while you’re driving, because you’ll run into me and then I’ll get my 10th concussion, and write these ideas down?
These ideas are very important, and we often don’t realize how important they are to us.
And it’s not that we don’t believe in ourselves, but we don’t believe in the validity of these little ideas, these little moments, this fifth stage. But these are important, and these are important to write down so you can get to the first stage.
Forming a Question or Idea
The first stage in the creative process is just forming a question or an idea or a problem. So if you don’t have one of those little Eureka moments, then you can begin at the first stage and try to come up with an idea or a question, or perhaps you’re at work and your boss has a question or a problem, or there’s a difficult situation you have to overcome at your work again, or if you’re working in school.
Many of us have many problems at school. Students have to go through every day, being given challenges. But you take these problems and you form a question around them. You try to frame a question. And then what you do is you engage in the process of research.
And research comes second nature to us. Think about when you give a child a rattle. The first thing they do in their research is stick it in their mouth. Actually anything goes in a little baby’s mouth. That’s a process of research and engaging the world. We’re curious creatures. We do this by nature. And research can manifest itself in many different ways. You can, as an artist, look at things and look at different visual things and sketch them. If you’re a chef, you taste and smell things.
But what you do is you go into the world and you experience the world and gather information from the world around that question you form.
“Basta” Stage
Now, the third stage is very interesting. I call it the Basta stage, the Italian stage, where you say enough is enough. You can research for a long time. You can be at 20,000 feet where you’re looking out over everything and seeing just the generalities of it. Or you can be down in the weeds, lost in the particulars. And we can research to death on things. So you have to know when to say enough is enough. And as students, as some of you are students, you don’t get that choice because you have these deadlines.
Gestation
And then comes the fourth stage, and this is a very important stage. This is, and I say that about every stage. I have a friend who’s got this little daughter over in Germany who says, Raphael, what’s your favorite thing? And I name three. She goes, you can have only one favorite. I said, I’m lucky. I get more than one.
So the next most important thing is the fourth stage. And this stage is a stage of gestation, where you hold that question. Now, in this stage, there are three activities that can occur that are part of the creative process. When you hold the question, you enter into a state of detachment.
When I was 16, I studied Zen Buddhism. I grew up in Southern California. I was a little weird. I had a sensory deprivation tank in my garage that I went into every night instead of sleeping. Very different lifestyle than Maine. But from 16 to 25, I went to a Zen center and studied Zen Buddhism.
And one of the things you do in Rinzai Zen is you get koan study, where the roshi gives you an impossible question, one that we know from almost every movie and TV show is, what is the sound of one hand clapping? Or how do you manifest your Buddha nature at this sound? These are questions that can’t be answered. In logic, we call these wicked questions, not a Maine thing, which are questions that are very informal. They can’t be answered very directly one way or another, but they have multiple answers.
And the idea is to hold on to these questions and keep them in the back of your mind and do a divergent behavior, something different, go sweep, go mow, anything else. It’s important to do that. Or think of other things.
Another thing is to, while you’re holding that question, approach the question through metaphor. If you’re working on a mathematical equation, ask yourself what that equation would look like if it were a tree. How would it be if it were a herd of geese? Things that are so crazy and might seem so far away from the question that they’ll take you to a new place.
Now, artists do this all the time because we operate with this kind of fearlessness of imagination. And there are these two worlds that have to come together. We all live in the world of operations, the day-to-day world where we have to do all our organizational life, putting a toothbrush and toothpaste together, going to work, punching the time clock, which I don’t think they have anymore, driving to and fro. And all these operations draw us away from our true nature, which is our inventive nature. They say that necessity is the mother of invention, but I really think that invention is second nature to us. It’s a very primal aspect of our being.
And our inventive nature comes through our imagination. And our world of imagination is very important. So you have this world of operations over here, the day-to-day world. Then you have this world of daydreaming and imagination. And you don’t want to do this too much because people will slap you and say, hey, wake up, stop daydreaming.
But it’s important to do that because you have to go away from this world of operations and through divergent behavior or through metaphor, imagine and think of things differently. Visualize the problem. Imagine what that calculation might look like. Imagine what that thing, that answer you have, might seem like if it were something else. And mesh these two worlds together. We call in science the world of empiricism and in artist intuition. And you have to weave the fabric of both together.
And in doing so, you can get to, again, the most important stage, the fifth stage, the Eureka moment, the big Eureka, where you get the idea again, but now you have an answer to it.
Making and Overcoming Fear
And then comes the sixth stage, where a lot of people fail. And that’s the process of making. When challenged with having a good idea and bringing it into being or birth, actually making it is very difficult for us because we’re afraid of failure. We’re afraid that it won’t look good. We’re afraid that people won’t like it or us. And you have to operate without fear. You have to accept that you might fail and in fact, failure might actually be good.
I tell my students, I’d rather have eloquent failure than boring success. And this failure is really important or this success that you have. But if you don’t know how to make the thing, let’s say you’ve imagined a new process for renewable energy, but you’re like me, you’re just a dumb painter.
Well, then you get people around you that can help you make that thing. Or if you can’t find them, you write it down. You describe it in detail. So eventually, you can either patent the idea, which is always a good thing, or you can find the people who can help you bring that idea into being.
But it’s important to remember that we have to bring these ideas out. We have to share these ideas because if we don’t, then the world doesn’t move forward. We don’t innovate and we don’t create.
Testing and Sharing
And the last, most important stage, I keep saying that, is the stage of testing and criticism or when we share things. When we bring them into the world, in the world of science, it’s testing. In art, it’s criticism. In the real world, it’s just sharing and asking what people think and not being afraid whether people like it or they don’t like it, whether you’ve made something that’s wonderful or in the Theaetetus, what they call a wind egg, which is a philosophical platonic word for a fart. They call it a wind egg. Sounds better in the Greek.
But this idea of bringing things into the world is really important and very critical. So I sort of want to kind of go back over these to make sure we understand everything.
There are seven stages in this creative process, and these stages do not come in any particular order. But you have to learn to recognize these stages. The more that you recognize them, the more that you’ll be able to enter in and out of them fluidly. So it’s not like you start in one and now I’m going to two and now I’m going to three. But allow yourself to maybe journal and keep track of when you’re in the state of research, when you’re in the state of gestation.
I have my students write down the feeling states that happen while they’re around it. How do you emotionally feel when you get a great idea or when you pop into an idea or when you’ve researched so much your brain is just exhausted? Keep track of those feelings.
The other thing is that when you’re in these states, and especially the fifth state, these little eureka moments, capture these ideas. Don’t think that they’re worthless. I’ve had some really crazy ideas. I was in Chicago 15 years ago at, oh, which university was it, the Chicago Institute of Technology, and this German doctor, Professor Epps, called me upstairs because they were going to hire their first artist. And he goes, why would we hire an artist? What can you invent or imagine?
I said, I don’t know. What about a cell phone data projector? Now, this is way before we had the technology. And he said, absolutely impossible. That’s a dumb idea. It can’t get that small, the battery power, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. When the first white paper was released by this, and by the way, I wrote the idea down and sent it to Nokia, Samsung, I’m not taking credit for it, but I sent that idea out into the world.
But when the first white paper came out, I sent it to Dr. Epps, and I said, crazy idea, huh? These ideas are really important that we have, and we don’t know how valid they are or how invalid. But what is important is to know to keep them, to make them, and to share them.
So I ask you before I leave, the most important thing that you take away from this talk is to value your ideas and be fearless in your ability to bring them into the world and make them and share them with one another.
Thank you very much.
Want a summary of this insightful talk? Here it is.
SUMMARY:
This talk by Raphael DiLuzio is about the creative thinking process. He discusses the first five stages of the creative process as outlined. Here’s a breakdown of the main points covered in this talk:
1. Introduction and Background Story: Raphael DiLuzio starts by discussing the idea of things lost and discovered, as well as demystifying the creative process. He asks the audience about their experiences with loss and introduces the concept that our response to events defines us.
2. Personal Experience: DiLuzio shares his personal experience with a post-concussive condition caused by multiple concussions. He lost various abilities, including speaking and drawing. He highlights the importance of how we respond to such losses.
3. The Eureka Moment: DiLuzio introduces the concept of the Eureka moment, where people have flashes of creative ideas. He emphasizes the importance of recognizing and valuing these moments.
4. The Creative Process Stages: DiLuzio outlines the first five stages of the creative process, which he discusses out of order due to his brain injury. These stages are:
Stage 5: Eureka Moment: These moments are crucial sparks of creativity, often occurring before sleep or while engaged in routine activities. He encourages capturing these ideas.
Stage 1: Forming a Question or Idea: If you don’t have a Eureka moment, start by forming a question or idea. This stage involves identifying a problem or topic.
Stage 2: Research: Research involves gathering information and experiencing the world to understand the question or problem better.
Stage 3: “Basta” Stage: Knowing when to stop researching is important. One must recognize when they have gathered enough information.
Stage 4: Gestation: This is a stage of holding onto the question or idea. DiLuzio suggests approaching the question through divergent behavior or metaphor to stimulate creative thinking.
5. Balancing Two Worlds: DiLuzio discusses the balance between the operational world (day-to-day activities) and the imaginative world (daydreaming and creative thinking). He emphasizes the need to weave these worlds together for a holistic approach to creativity.
6. Making and Overcoming Fear: Making an idea into reality is a challenging step, as fear of failure often hinders progress. DiLuzio encourages operating without fear and accepting the possibility of failure. He also discusses finding the right people to help bring ideas to life.
7. Testing and Sharing: The final stage involves testing and sharing your creations with the world. This stage is crucial for innovation and progress.
8. Reflection and Encouragement: DiLuzio wraps up by encouraging the audience to value their ideas, to be fearless in pursuing them, and to share them with others.
