Distraction is necessary for creativity

A little divergent sidetracking now and again might be every bit as important to the creative process as actually doing the bloody work.

There are certain times in the creative process when it’s incredibly tempting to find any excuse to keep from doing the bloody work.

Whether it be other projects, business deadlines, family obligations or merely the ceaseless march of daily life, there’s a seemingly endless cavalcade of ostensible reasons to postpone our creative pursuits when the going gets difficult. We tell ourselves we’ll start writing that book next week; we’ll get back on track with our painting after the “busy season” dies down; or that a few months from now we’ll finally have the downtime to tackle that big project we’ve been putting off…

And then, before you know it, we’re little more than “a non-writing writer” (as Franz Kafka might describe it) feeling as if we’re incapable of making progress.

“A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity."
[Letter to Max Brod, July 5, 1922]”
— Franz Kafka

As I’ve often said, much of the creative process is an arduous slog to summon up the motivation necessary to keep moving forward. In writing, I call it “pushing through the block,” but the truth is that it exists in all creative endeavors. The sensation of an ominous blank page staring at us is all too familiar for anyone who’s endured the creative process — and the temptation to step away from it often feels more like a surrender than a reprieve.

When trudging through such challenges, however, it’s worth remembering that we’re not alone in our struggles. Even the most celebrated artists, writers and designers have similarly felt as if they’re unable to manifest great things. Consider, for example, these entries from Kafka’s personal journal:

January 20, 1915: The end of writing. When will it take me up again?

January 29, 1915: Again tried to write, virtually useless.

January 30, 1915: The old incapacity. Interrupted my writing for barely ten days and already cast out. Once again prodigious efforts stand before me. You have to dive down, as it were, and sink more rapidly than that which sinks in advance of you.

February 7, 1915: Complete standstill. Unending torments.

March 11, 1915: How time flies; another ten days and I have achieved nothing.

Dates aside, this looks remarkably similar to the sort of depressing entries I routinely scribe into my daily journal. And I imagine the sentiment is uncomfortably familiar to anyone who has routinely worked — professionally or as an amateur — on any sort of large creative project.

So, how do we overcome this Kafkaesque creative depression? Do we just sit down and blunder through it?

In terms of writing, doing so would mean giving ourselves permission to “write badly” just so long as we’re writing something. As Jerry Seinfeld once put it, “sit down and realize you’re mediocre and you’re going to have to put a lot of effort into this to make it good.”

Indeed, buckling down and just doing the damn work is the only way to move forward in life, which is why Ian Fleming refused to edit any of his writing until well after he had poured all of his ideas onto the page. Ernest Hemingway behaved similarly by reminding himself that all he had to do was craft “one true sentence” — one sentence from which he could generate the motivation to continue.

However, banging one’s head against a typewriter until something useful begins to leak out is more daunting than it seems. As the sensation of failure grows with each uninspired sentence, there’s a temptation to begin searching for meaningless distractions that sidetrack us from the torture of the creative process.

And make no mistake, there’s no shortage of distraction in this world.

Between social media, an infinite library of streaming multimedia entertainment options and handheld portals to the worldwide interwebs in everyone’s pocket, maintaining focus is a difficult task in the 21^st century. Even without the agitation of modern technology, it doesn’t take much to peel a creative individual away from the arduous work of actually getting shit done.

In A Moveable Feast, for example, Hemingway explained that he would often “sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made” rather than struggle through his writer’s block. Someone facing the stagnant challenges of creative endeavors will almost always find some way to delay the torturous effort needed to get their work accomplished.

Despite how it feels, however, not all those distractions are inherently injurious to progress. In fact, many of them might even be necessary.

Strangely enough, one of nature’s most productive lifeforms provides a powerful illustration of just how true this can be. Honey bees are notoriously busy workers — and with more than 120 million years of evolution under their belt, one would think they would be exceptional specimens of maximum efficiency and focus as well.

And in many ways, they are. The honeycomb shape used to build their hives, for example, is often cited by scientists as the most stable, efficient and maximizing shape found in nature.

Nonetheless, as Ogilvy’s Rory Sutherland points out, each colony has quite a large number of bees that don’t appear to be nearly as “efficient” as the rest. While the majority of bees diligently follow orders to retrieve nectar found by other members of the hive, around 20 percent have apparently no interest in such mundane tasks. Instead, this sizeable chunk of the colony’s population basically “fucks off” into random directions and spends most of the day flying around aimlessly looking for their own (new) sources of flowery goodness to exploit.

At first, it would seem as if this rather large portion of independently minded bees would be a hinderance to the wellbeing of the colony. After all, they often return with far less to show for their day of “work” than the more compliant and subservient members of the population. However, the “randomness” of these bees is actually critical to the long-term sustainability of the hive:

“There are ‘explore bees’ and ‘exploit bees,’ and the ratio between them varies. But here’s the key: you need a certain percentage of bees focused on exploring. These bees serve a dual purpose. Without them, you can’t get lucky. You can only become marginally better at what you’re already doing, but you’ll never discover a new source of pollen or nectar… you miss out on positive, serendipitous opportunities.”

In other words, if all the bees were as focused as the most productive members, the hive would doom itself to eventual extinction. It’s the ability of those “explorer” bees to become distracted and fly off in random directions that ensures the hive’s prosperity by discovering new flowers and fields to exploit.

And in this sense, our creative efforts are not too different from the social habits of those little black and yellow pollinators. Creativity is highly dependent on our ability to break away from our focused tasks and explore the world around us — and what better impetus is there for exploration than distraction?

The creator of Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson, once explained this phenomenon brilliantly while describing how he cultivated ideas for his daily comic strip:

“The trick to writing a comic strip is to cultivate a mental playfulness — a natural curiosity and eagerness to learn. Like Calvin, I head out into the yard in search of weirdness, and with the right attitude, I make discoveries.”

Indeed, I’m eminently convinced that opening oneself up to such distraction is the fuel upon which our creative engines run. (And I’m not saying that merely to justify the three hours spent learning about bees when I should have been writing this essay instead.)

This is why creativity so often doesn’t look particularly productive — nor are creative breakthroughs necessarily related to the effort we put into it.

After all, there’s a reason great ideas come to us at 2 am when we’re trying to lull our restless minds to sleep rather than at our desk as we’re scrambling for an answer to some unorthodox challenge. “New” or creative ideas are developed by exposing ourselves to divergent ideas and letting our minds wander — a process that inherently requires getting away from our work and delving into the world around us with curiosity.

Allowing ourselves to get distracted can be a highly effective method by which we can encourage such exploration — and this is true outside our creative endeavors as well.

Just look, for example, at how easy it is to erect cultural echo chambers in today’s world — denying ourselves the benefit of wandering into and exploring divergent social circles, alternative political perspectives or fringe professional opinions. All too often, we build for ourselves a catalogue of likeminded friends, limited sources of “information” and narrow libraries of entertainment options — all of which artificially restricts how much of the world we experience on any given day.

Never is this more obvious than in the realm of modern politics, where members of partisan tribes seemingly refuse to curiously examine the intellectual frontier of their political “others.” All too often — thanks to self-selecting prejudices combined with social media’s algorithmic impulses and clickbait news cycles — we instead remain blissfully ensconced behind the turrets and medieval walls of our own preconceptions.

We behave like those diligent worker bees: following the predetermined path to known sources of ideological or intellectual subsistence rather than behaving as random “explorers” who venture off into the unknown.

How much better would our social, political and creative worlds be if we encouraged ourselves to drift afield from our preconceived notions, from our prepackaged tribal prejudices, and into the wilderness of social cliques unlike our own? Whole new perspectives open up when we allow our distractions to take us beyond a looking glass or down a rabbit hole — perspectives that give us deeper understandings of the world around us and may even broaden our horizons in the process.

So, for the sake of our creative, professional and social wellbeing, we should embrace the sort of distractions that so often seem unproductive or avoidant at first blush. When the creative juices aren’t flowing, don’t shy away from kicking over a few rocks, wandering into the backyard in search of weirdness or squeezing the zest from orange peels into an evening fire.

Not all distraction, procrastination or avoidance is evidence that we’re monstrously “courting insanity” or wasting our potential. Sometimes, far from postponing our creative accomplishments, it’s actually a way for us to rummage around for the inspiration, courage or resources needed to manifest them.

Indeed, like a colony of honey bees, a little divergent sidetracking now and again might just be every bit as important to the creative process as sitting down and actually doing the bloody work.

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Michael Schaus is a communications and branding expert based in Las Vegas, Nevada, and founder of Schaus Creative LLC — an agency dedicated to helping organizations, businesses and activists tell their story and motivate change.

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