Creativity in Isolation

There’s been a lot of talk in the last few years about the benefit human interaction lends the creative process. The thinking goes that experts in one field, when interacting with experts in some other field, will find new ways to look at their problems, and come up with new ideas. This makes sense, and is allegorically backed up by lots of examples of this actually happening.

So, of course, the message that was carried away was to get out and interact. Network outside your field. Discuss. Engage. Nevermind the fact that nearly everyone tends to remain in their own comfortable circles, this advice overlooks something even more important. First, you have to be an expert. And, to be an expert, you need to slog through lots of hours of study and practice, often alone:

Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me — they’re shy and they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone — best outside of corporate environments, best where they can control an invention’s design without a lot of other people designing it for marketing or some other committee. I don’t believe anything really revolutionary has ever been invented by committee… I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone… Not on a committee. Not on a team.

– Steve Wozniak, iWoz

Woz might seem to be going directly against the “creative interaction” hypothesis here, but I don’t think he is.

Doing work alone and interacting with other experts are not mutually exclusive. You can interact and share ideas all day long. That doesn’t have to turn into designing by committee. You can then go home and use the new ideas you’ve gained, in the privacy of your own thoughts, to make something great. Great work requires both.