Fueling the Creative Engine — Innovation for Older Adults
The most rewarding things I've done both professionally and personally have involved pushing myself to come up with a creative new way of doing something or innovating to create unexpected additional value. I've realized I have a deep drive to have an original impact, and I've developed ways of making that happen, such as through my passion for ongoing learning, collaborating with others to generate solution ideas, and experimenting or testing alternatives to improve outcomes.
My drive to have an original and positive impact is a prominent part of my personality and motivation that I feel every day. When I've denied myself that outlet, I feel like I'm demoting or penalizing myself. In the past sometimes I did that by pursuing jobs for which I was overqualified. I know I did that because I let my self-image get affected due to toxic personal relationships. So, one of the most vital aspects of this self-restoration journey I've been on is to respect my drive to have an impact, make a difference, or otherwise create and innovate, and to see it as an essential, valuable piece of my identity. As I uncovered some information on creativity and innovation I decided it was good material to summarize in an article…
I’ve spent as much time in jobs where I designed my role in contrast to most jobs where an employee fits into an established order and procedures. This was because it was either at a startup or a role leading a new product or other ‘greenfield’ initiative. In these types of jobs, I was often tasked with defining the strategy and approach for my activities, which gave me a lot of experience in the creative process to guide my work to create the most possible value. Earning employers' trust allowed me to direct my activities towards activities like forming deeper connections with customers, which gave me the deeper knowledge needed and the authority to innovate with production direction, so the structure of my roles has often allowed me to drive creative outlets with my work.
Let's see what others have to say on nourishing the creative process, particularly for older adults…
Unexpected Insight on Creativity from Gladwell, Rubin, Grant, and Others
This article includes some of the interesting stuff I found, such as an interview of legendary music producer Rick Rubin by Malcolm Gladwell about Rubin’s book The Creative Act: A Way of Being. These are two very qualified people on creativity and some of it blew my mind.
One theme in Rubin’s book is that creativity needs to be fueled by external sources when we feel a creative drought. Creativity and innovation are as common in our 50s as they are in our 20s, but they come from a different place through a different process. As neuroscientists in recent years discovered more about neuroplasticity, they dispelled the myth that after our 20s our brains only deteriorate! Now we accept the concept of lifelong learning, the ability to form new neural associations at any age, and even the ability to recover from certain brain traumas as an older adult. With creativity, a similar myth about it burning out by your early 30s has been refuted, and as you'll see in this article, many of the greatest artists in history did their best work in their 40s and 50s and they seem to have tapped into a cumulative wisdom about the process.
The other podcast episode that got me zeroed in was from season 2 of Adam Grant’s ReThinking podcast. The episode on misfits and disruptive change has stories about shaking up the status quo from Pixar to the US Navy. I also found an article in the New Yorker that covers research on creativity and innovation from economist Dale Galenson. There are many interviews that Adam conducts that touch on innovation and creativity, such as his interview with Jon Batiste in 2022.
Rick tells how the moment when AlphaGo, the AI designed to beat masters of the Chinese board game Go, made a move totally unexpected by the experts and won the match. He realized that humans brought all the assumptions and conventions and other cultural baggage to the game, but the AI was purely exploring possibilities within the rules of the game. Assumptions, conventions and norms constrained the moves of human Go players, but the AI had no such constraints so it was able to actually think more creatively! I thought about how it can be hard to generate a full range of ideas if all participants have the same mindset or company culture. It’s another lesson in the power of diversity in solving problems- and collaborating with people who don’t think like us!
Adam tells the story of Pixar’s second big hit, the Incredibles, and how they hired writer and director Brad Bird who had just failed miserably on an animated movie at Disney and been fired. In fact, he was fired from two of his first three gigs. At the time Pixar had redefined animation with Toy Story, money coming in and it seemed they had a formula for success. Yet truly innovative people like Pixar execs Ed Catmull and Steve Jobs know when their business needs to keep reinventing itself, so they rolled the dice. They decided it was the perfect time to shake things up and go all-in on Brad for their next big movie. The outside-of-the-box approach didn’t stop there. In building a team at Pixar for the project, Brad selected some of the most notorious misfits at the company. Not to be confused with losers, these were talented people but they had strong, creative ideas they felt were too often ignored by management. Brad’s team was composed of smart, creative outsiders with something to prove, and it turned out to be a highly motivated team that synched up well.
Pixar shook up other things- even where people sat made a difference. Prior to Incredibles, the developers who built the animation tools that designers used for scenes all sat together as one department. This caused tension and delays in the common scenario of a designer not being able to get a feature to work correctly. So, they moved some developers to the same space as the designers and others on the movie. This greatly improved collaboration on the animation tools.
My Creative Approach to Mastering ML and Python
Five years ago, I went back to school at Emory and studied data science, analytics, and machine learning. After I earned my certifications, I wasn’t satisfied with my Python expertise or my understanding of emerging ML models used in NLP, image classification and other AI functions. So, for two years I would take a current event like Covid-19 or a volatile stock and I’d design an end-to-end Python project- sourcing the data through to analysis and visualizations, and I’d complete it by writing an article about what I did which I’d publish on Medium. I did five or six of these projects and each one was an incredibly rewarding creative effort. Although I did them on my own time I would push myself as hard as on any paid project- sometimes spending an 18-hour day testing and debugging.
I mentioned my Python dev track because what I did shows a rare level of drive and discipline to enhance my skills, even though I had just earned two data science certifications. What I loved about it was my ability to creatively decide what problems to solve, what packages to integrate, and what I wanted to communicate in the review article. My approach on these apps is very similar to my leadership on new initiatives that I opened the article with — Everything about what motivates me with work has to do with finding the best fit between needs and the solution, which I see as an iterative, creative approach. That’s why the material in this article is relevant, as you’ll see with the discussion on conceptual vs. experimental innovators.
Conceptual versus Experimental Innovators and Their Contrasting Methods
There’s often an expectation that people hit their creative peak in their 20s but there’s a distinction to be made. Conceptual innovators produce a bold new idea through a burst of energy, and often this occurs earlier in life but dries up. Experimental Innovators don’t have the radical breakthrough idea, but they have the perseverance to work through trial and error, testing new pathways and revealing new possibilities, sometimes over years or decades.
The New Yorker explained U of Chicago Economist Dale Galenson’s research on age and creative value and his distinction between conceptual and experimental innovators. Picasso was a pure, conceptual innovator. His near contemporary Cezanne is an example of an experimental innovator. It took Cezanne until his fifties and sixties to reach his creative peak, but now he is seen as nearly as influential as Picasso. A painting done by Picasso in his mid-twenties was worth an average of four times as much as a painting done in his sixties. For Cézanne the paintings he created in his mid-sixties were auctioned at fifteen times more than work from his 20s.
The way the creative process at Pixar was repeatedly tweaked including the structure of the team and even where people sat is a study of successful experimental innovation. When it came time to do a second Incredibles, they shook things up again, this time by moving the deadline a full year closer, forcing hard choices to chop elements or scenes that didn’t add value.
But one of the most interesting points on creativity from Gladwell and Rubin is that if we are in a creative drought, the answers almost by definition cannot come from inside of us. Gladwell has cited a Thomas Schelling quote that no one, no matter how brilliant, can make a list of things that would not occur to them! That’s pretty witty. Why do we fool ourselves that a totally new idea will come from within us? Of course, we rely on the world and the people around us to source ideas. Rubin said in his opinion there is currently a bit too much fear of copying or imitating identities, sounds, and voices (not sure why he thinks the threat is overblown).
When Paul Simon began work on Graceland, he was a depressed artist in his 40s whose marriage was falling apart and his friendship with creative partner Art Garfunkel had gone south. In an object lesson for experimental innovation, he took off for South Africa with a plan to assemble a group of black musicians whom he had never met and who played a style he knew little about! And this was a period of social tension prior to the abolition of apartheid. Sounds like so many risks he’d never pull it off!
But the resulting multi-million-selling and award-winning Graceland album was the creative peak of Paul Simon’s career. Simon took a bold, risky approach that paid off. By opening himself up to different people and environments, Simon fueled his experimental innovation. And again we see the power of diversity in expanding creative range.
In the interview, Rubin makes the point that while he focuses mainly on creative work in music and literature, the lessons apply to many business situations as well.
Women also contribute game-changing innovations later in their careers
I realized that perhaps I should take my advice from the last paragraph about selection bias! I had to add some more diverse examples. One of, if not the first true computer, the Harvard Mark 1, was invented by future Navy Rear Admiral Grace Hopper (b. 1906) in 1944. At the time she was 38.
At the age of 46, Ms. Hopper invented the first compiler that transformed programming from a human into code that a computer could run. At the age of 52, she was the co-inventor of the business computing language COBOL, which was the dominant language for corporate information systems into the 1990s, overlapping with my own career in software.
I knew if I dug around I'd find another great example . Queens, NY Nurse Marie Brown was worried about staggered schedules with her husband, an electrician, and being home alone in a neighborhood with a rising crime rate. With her husband doing the wiring, Brown came up with a system with a movable camera that connected wirelessly to a monitor in their bedroom. A two-way microphone allowed conversation with someone outside, and she could sound an alarm or remotely unlock the door. The Browns received a patent for their security system in 1969, and Brown received an award from the National Science Committee. She came up with her idea at the age of 47 and it became the basis of all home security systems from that point forward, and it wasn't even in the domain of her daily work!
The Lawyer Turned Novelist — an Experimental Innovation Case Study
Ben Fountain was an associate in the real-estate practice at the Dallas offices of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, just a few years out of law school, when he decided he wanted to write fiction. He had only written one article for a law review and had taken a couple of creative writing courses in college. He tried to write at night after work but was usually too tired, so he quit his job, and had a momentary freak-out! “I felt like I’d stepped off a cliff. Nobody wants to waste their life, and I had been doing well as a lawyer. Ben disciplined himself to write in the first half of each day, knowing that if he didn’t things would slip and he’d end up feeling horrible about himself.
He wrote many short stories and started to sell a few successfully. His confidence grew. He spent a few years writing a novel, but after doing an honest review he realized it wasn’t very good and he put it in a drawer. His confidence ebbed…
He related how he was brutally honest about his deficiencies and made a plan to overcome them. “I had to create a mental image of a building, a room, a façade, haircut, clothes — just really basic things,” he says. “I realized I didn’t have the facility to put those into words. I started going out and buying visual dictionaries, architectural dictionaries, and went back to school.” This fits with a theme I have that the most important skill a person can build in this era is an effective approach to lifelong learning. With the pace of change, we can’t predict what we’ll need to know, but we can practice our skills at being able to learn it quickly once we do know!
Eventually, Ben put together a collection of short stories titled “Brief Encounters with Che Guevara,” and Ecco, a HarperCollins imprint, published it. The Times Book Review called it “heartbreaking.” It won the Hemingway Foundation/pen award. It was named a №1 Book Sense Pick, and many other great regional book reviews.
Ben Fountain quit his job at the law firm in 1988 and “Encounters” came out in 2006. His resilience and discipline helped him to adapt and keep practicing his craft, and he finally gained acceptance in the literary world at 48.
Mark Twain, Experimental Innovator
Galenson says that Fountain’s explorative trial-and-error approach is a characteristic of experimental innovators. He traveled to Haiti almost 30 times for research and while he had a list of some details he knew he needed for his book, he explored many different aspects of the country and its people and only some of them provided useful knowledge for his writing. Galenson relates that it took Mark Twain almost a decade to complete Huckleberry Finn. He says Twain began novels with a rough plot structure in mind, but as he developed it he would find something defective in it and scrap what he had done. It then took time to seek out inspiration for a better plot structure. Once a promising new plot hit him, Twain would start over. Having to repeat this cycle multiple times on Huck Finn, at times he reportedly nearly gave up on the project.
I find it inspiring that one of the greatest American authors was essentially exploring uncharted terrain, learning from mistakes, and occasionally just hitting reset, just like the rest of us! It’s not some innate creative power that bursts forth but is much more akin to Rick Rubin’s concept of creativity needing to be regularly refueled from sources outside of ourselves. The process Galenson describes with these authors is familiar to me. In the early stages of projects I often intensively study details of various components and crunch data and at some point, I have an a-ha moment where solutions suddenly seem so clear to me. It’s like I break through to a new level of understanding and I have a handle on the conceptual model, cause and effect, etc.
The New Yorker article also found that of the top 11 poems by American authors, according to a poll of scholars, 5 were written by authors in their 40s or 50s. Robert Frost wrote 40% of his anthologized poems after he turned 50. And Alfred Hitchcock made his run of seven of the greatest suspense movies in history between the ages of 45 and 61. Creativity seems to be a process that works best when you know yourself and the settings and dynamics that are most supportive. Rubin says artists are often very aware of where and with whom they are most likely to get their creative fuel. I’ve noticed I alternate between intensive exchange of information with others but also solo time to organize my knowledge and allow insights to percolate. I’ve known for years that I tend to alternate between extroverted and introverted modes of work, but I hadn’t previously seen it as a process for fueling creativity.
As an ending note, since I made the point that diversity of inputs seems to fuel the creative process, it is good to always consider any selection bias you may unintentionally apply that limits your exposure to a range of creative inputs that could help you solve a problem better or faster. For example, we tend to have a similar type of friend or type of business contact. Is there a way you can mix that up? Or join a new group or association where you could get feedback from a person who is not someone with whom you would typically interact? This also applies to the source of information or news that we utilize. If you are seeking ideas for a project, can you expand your source of information?
