John Cleese and creativity.
The Monty Python/Fawlty Towers genius says creativity requires......
What is creativity?
I’m not a Twitter follower or contributor but somehow (I’ve no idea how) I receive feeds of John Cleese’s Twitter posts. Given the greatness of his comic genius his post on ‘what is creativity’ has gotta cause us to pay attention.
Probably most of us don’t consider ourselves ‘creative.’ Life is normally, well, ‘normal’. There’s repetition to life’s chores and activities. We’re so often caught up in daily things that need to be done. Clean the house. Cook the meals. Shop. Deal with family issues. Groom the dog. And on and on and on.
Most of us probably think that creativity belongs to others, artists, and people like, well John Cleese. But in his Twitter feed he links to an interview he did, (looks like years ago). John (I think I can call him John) responds to his own question, ‘Why was I more successful at writing funny scripts than other collaborators in Monty Python? His answer? ‘Stickability’.
John describes how he’d write a script along with others on the writing team. He said that others would produce scripts with good humour but then stop. However, he’d never be satisfied. There would too often be a ‘niggle’ in him that just said ‘not good enough.’ He’d kept working on the idea and lines, refining, changing, rejecting, redoing until the niggle disappeared, and ‘bingo’ he was happy. Stickability John says is the key to creativity.
Take this example
There’s a BBC production Fake or Fortune. The show investigates whether paintings found by someone say in a nick-nack store, are works by great masters and worth huge sums, or fakes, duds, or just good imitations. The show centers around a well-known art dealer and a television personality who have the paintings investigated by experts including the use of high-tech analysis of the painting/s.
One of the key tools used is to x-ray and undertake light-spectrum analysis to look ‘underneath’ the top layer of paint that the human eye sees. This enables insight into the structure of the work/s to expose how the painter created the work from scratch. What’s fascinating is the extent to which great masters rework their paintings. The Mona Lisa was not just painted in one go. It was constantly reworked. Like John Cleese, the evidence of the painting reveals ‘stickability’ by the great painters, or any painter until they achieve a result that satisfied them.
The message, I think, is that we all contain within us creativity. Few of us are creative geniuses that stand out above the crowd. But all of us are creative. What we need to have if our creativity is to blossom, is something that’s available to all of us, the ability to stick to something and to not give up until we are satisfied.
My intense interest is self-employment that is, the act of being your own boss. And I think that self-employment requires, no, ‘demands’ creativity. But to achieve that we need stickability.
Being your own boss means carving out a work situation that you’re happy with. You’re looking for a work situation that you feel fits you. In comparison, when you’re ‘employed’ in someone else business, you no longer ‘own’ yourself. You are there to perform to someone else’s requirements and demands. There’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, a larger percentage of people work in an ‘employment’ environment and like that. And yes, given the circumstances of the particular business in which you work, there can be lots of scope for creativity.
But to me, being your own boss launches you/us into a different level of creativity because creativity is totally necessary. That is if your/our self-employment is to be successful in giving you an income you have to be creative. You have to think of yourself and what you can do and turn that into something that other people will appreciate, want, and are willing to pay for.
Take this example. Some would say perhaps that being an accountant is not a ‘creative’ profession. I disagree. Particularly if you are a self-employed accountant, creativity is essential. No, I’m not talking about being ‘creative’ with dodgy tax schemes. But I am talking of the level of creativity you need, to understand and respond to your clients. It’s no different from John Cleese. He has to communicate with his audiences. He’s playing with humour. An essential part of a comics’ skill and creativity is in understanding people. That requires creative effort I would say. An accountant needs the same thing. The creativity might not be of the same level or as stand out obviously as John Cleese’s creativity. But creativity it is, none-the-less.
I found John Cleese’s Twitter post really thoughtful. We are all creative or can be. It’s just that we need to stick with it!