Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Cath Duncan from Creative Grief Studio and Remembering For Good.
So you’ve just started your creative or coaching business and you’re really excited and enthusiastic. It’s now your own business and you’ve got complete freedom to decide where and when and how you work, and of course you want to create your ultimate dream office that’ll keep you inspired. You’re dreaming of brand new stationary, a sleek desk, an ergonomically-designed chair, a zippy new Mac with big screen, a wall-to-wall bookshelf with all your favorite, most inspiring books, gorgeous paintings on the wall and pictures of your mentors and High Council of Jedi Knights, and your favorite music playing in the background…
And then you start looking at office spaces, and you find that the gorgeous offices with big windows, lots of natural light, awesome views, and sleek furnishings are pretty darn pricey, and you don’t have that kind of cash. And even if you’re going to work from home, the ideal office furniture, equipment, stationary and decor is all very expensive. By this stage, you’re sitting in your stretched-out, faded tracksuit pants at your old, stained kitchen table in your small, cheap rental flat looking at your crappy old PC and grubby stationary, feeling rather sorry for yourself…
Because as a creative, you need an inspiring workspace and awesome equipment to do your best work, right?
Wrong.
You’d be forgiven for having this wrong and believing that you need a luxurious environment to do your best work. We all know that initial positive emotional rush of getting new stationary (oh God, gel pens!!!) or nifty creative tools. And even Oprah Winfrey, the queen of personal development herself, seems to have fallen for this faulty belief.
Oprah recently opened up a school for girls in South Africa, The Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy, recruiting girls from underprivileged circumstances in the townships in South Africa, in the hope of giving them the educational and life experiences and opportunities that could grow them into the next generation of powerful leaders and business women who’ll do epic shit and make a positive difference in the world. She has high hopes for these girls and is really trying to create the sort of optimal environment that’ll make the school into a talent hotbed.
One of the things she’s done to achieve this aim is that she’s created an absolutely beautiful, interior-designed boarding school and she’s spoken about how she’s specifically given these girls a gorgeous, luxurious environment because she wants to affirm them and let them know that they’re worthy of that sort of beautiful environment, and inspire them to do their best work. Sounds good, right?
What the research says about optimal learning and working environments
Daniel Coyle researched the world’s greatest talent hotbeds in a variety of different sporting, musical, academic and art contexts for his book, The Talent Code. He discovered some key similarities in the approaches used in these talent hotbeds and was able to match up these findings with neurological studies of learning and performance.
Coyle found that, contrary to the luxurious training environments he was expecting to find, all of the talent hotbeds had quite sparse, basic, even shoddy environments. Here’s how Coyle describes talent hotbeds:
“They tend to be junky, unattractive places. If the training grounds I visited were magically assembled into a single facility – a mega-hotbed, as it were – that place would resemble a shanty town. Its buildings would be makeshift, corrugated-roofed affairs, its walls paint-bald, its fields weedy and uneven…”
The Scrooge Principle
Here’s what Coyle says is going on neurologically – a phenomenon that he calls the “Scrooge Principle.” Our neurology is designed to save energy. We look for opportunities to rest and conserve our energy and whenever we can, we hold energy back, just in case we need it for an emergency. When we’re in a pleasant, easy or luxurious environment, we give our neurology the message that all is well and we can relax and conserve our energy, and then we naturally shut off our motivation and attentiveness. When we’re in a shoddy environment, then we get the signal that things are rough and we need to be more alert, get motivated, and release more energy to be able to deal with our rough environment.
When I asked Coyle about this in our Bottom-line Bookclub interview (I’ll be featuring The Talent Code in the next few months), Coyle said that Oprah would have done better to have educated her girls in the underprivileged township environments that they came from, where their neurology would get the message that they need to release all their energy reserves and give it their all. And to further ignite their motivation to learn and do their most epic work, the children should be given occasional exposure to luxurious experiences, like walking them through a gorgeous, stately university or home, or taking them on holiday abroad, to seed their vision for what’s possible for them and give them something great to aim for.
So don’t despair: this combination of having a vision of something you want to create in your life, whilst slogging away in your shitty current environment is the optimal combination for accelerating learning, developing talent and doing epic work.
Using creative tension to drive your epic work
If any of you are familiar with Peter Senge’s model of creative tension, you’ll recognize how this fits with the Scrooge Principle and Coyle’s advice. In Senge’s model, when there’s a gap between your vision and your current reality, this gap creates creative tension that motivates you to solve problems and create a bridge to bring your current reality up to meet your vision. The greater the gap between your current reality and your vision, the more motivated and creative you’ll be in finding a way to close that gap, and it’s this tension that accelerates your movement forward.
Beating sneaky creative resistance
I’ve done this and I know you have too…
I have a big, creative, and exciting project I’m going to start working on. In celebration and by way of inspiration, I decide that I need to first buy new gel pens (oh God, gel pens!!!), clean my workspace, upload new software updates, fill out a nice, pretty planner with my project schedule, buy a new plant for my desk, alphabetize my bookshelf, fluff my cushions… you see where this is going?
Creative resistance is super-sneaky and it’ll use any way it can to get you procrastinating on your creative work and rationalizing your procrastination on top of that. If you believe the story that you need a posh workspace to be able to do your epic work, then not only are you mistaken from a scientific and neurological perspective, but you’re also opening the door and letting creative resistance in with a big fat welcome sign.
Now, be honest…
Have you been putting off doing and being your best because you thought you needed a better workspace and fancier equipment?
Are you spending time and money faffing with making your ideal space so that you can delay actually doing your epic work? Don’t buy that line from your creative resistance.
Your shitty workspace and crappy equipment will do just fine for your epic work. After all, the epicness comes from you, not from your equipment.
Wow. This one really made me sit up and think … thanks, Cath!
We’re moving in June, and I have to admit that a lot of my daydreams are currently about my study-to-be … my long desk, my bookshelves (right up to the ceiling!) … what I’ll have on the walls … scented candles … minions to attend my every whim …
*ahem*
I suspect that what works for me is a clear, blank sort of environment where I can just concentrate on what’s at hand. I fear that luxury cushions and creative toys would just distract me from actually working.
The Scrooge Principle is an interesting one. I started out in freelancing with an emergency fund and few jobs, and I was definitely motivated to keep costs low and profit high. 😉 Which I think has helped me build good habits.
I’d only very tangentially come across the idea of creative tension before, and would love to see a bit more about that here on PF (whether from you or Charlie).
Thanks for a post which really stood out today. From the title, I was expecting something good but run-of-the-mill about creating a nice decluttered inspirational workspace … and so this really caught my attention. Ta!
Thanks, Ali! And thanks to Daniel Coyle for the great interview he gave me and inspiring this post – it sure changed my thinking. It’s really liberating to know that we don’t need a bunch of nifty tools and work-kit to do our epic work.
Creative Tension is a concept I learned from Peter Senge and, as someone who’s always been very sensitive to anxiety and sought to relieve anxiety, it’s helped me to learn the important creative role of anxiety. It’s really useful stuff. I’ll ponder a post – and feel free to drop me some questions about it to stoke the creative juices!
Cath is a crafty one. I knew something was up because I know her well enough to expect some shenanigans, and you’re right – it’s a perfect hook and turnabout.
Shenanigans…? Who me?
Hi Cath.
This is a great message that I agree with. My best material comes from rugged hardness or some frustration or something. Writing or producing in perfect conditions with everything set is not so applicable.
Hunger is where good comes from. There aren’t other sources. We are simple as people. If there does not seem to be some pressure or frustration involved, we don’t put in the effort. It isn’t evolutionarily efficient to do so. We are like electricity in that way.
I like the way you wrote this as well.
Thanks for sharing, Armen. I found it really empowering to hear this message – it runs totally contrary to all the media/ marketing/ consumerism that says that we need more stuff to be our best selves.
Hi Cath – thanks for sharing this different view of how a workspace can affect our creativity. The last line sums it all up perfectly. Great reminder.
@Lisa: You got it 🙂 I’ve read so many articles telling us what nifty workspace stuff, tools and equipment we need. And while some of that stuff might be nice or useful, it’s not essential for doing your epic work, and often those articles telling you that you need all that stuff are just sneaky salespages.
Well done. It completely explains what I call the ‘prima donna’ complex – if everything is just so, all tidy, it somehow stumps us creatively.
I like just the right amount of creative disorder. I also found that when I was a nomad traveling and working for a year, I was able to work just fine in pretty much any environment – that had strong wifi that is!
When you’re totally engaged in your work, you enter that flow state and the pretty space around you dissolves.
Thanks for your excellent writing.
@Cynthia: For traveling folks, who are sometimes staying in very beautiful or very interesting places, or very unstructured, chaotic environments, it can be hard to be focused enough to get into the flow – clearly you’ve developed that skill of being able to shift gears to focus on work and then shift gears to focus on travel. Great to have that mental flexibility!
Really fascinating, Cath, thank you. I wonder how this relates to the reasons why some children raised in very luxurious physical surroundings are challenged with motivation and commitment in their own lives.
It’s always enlightening to read your work. Thanks for getting us all thinking in new ways.
Tara
@Tara: There are many factors that go into shaping our motivation and ability to commit. This may be one of them. And I’m sure that, while it can have big benefits in the first few years of life (in shaping our ability to trust the world for example), being over-protected from experiencing adversity or struggle in later life probably does more damage than good.
So what you’re saying is – quit my whining and just DO MY EPIC SHIT?
Okay. Point taken. 🙂
@Rachael: lol! yup. ‘Fraid so.
This is so illuminating! It just shows how much our inspiration depends – in fact thrives – on the contrast and the struggle between our humble craptastic stuckeggio (that will be a real word one day) and our full-blown desires. It’s the annoying reason why our failed relationships seem to inspire our most powerful poetry.
Brilliant Cath, thanks!
@Natalie: I think creativity definitely thrives on the “craptastic stuckeggio” – perhaps because there’s much more paradox and uncertainty in the struggle, so the left-brain is forced to hand the task of problem-solving over to the right-brain. Having said that, I’m not one for drama and I think a lot of creatives get stuck because they create unnecessary drama for themselves.
Hmm…well, wait a minute.
My office is freaking awesome and supportive and when I’m in it, I’m able to get great work done.
I needed to make my office a nice space because I see clients in it. I needed it to be welcoming and comfortable, because the clients I see are usually at a crossroads and need a place where they feel safe.
I spent a few weeks figuring out the experience that I wanted to have, and to share with my clients. I think that was time well spent.
It’s also a beautiful room to work in, and it has the things that I need to support me.
What if my brain wants me to know it’s safe for me to work, that I’ve checked my fear at the door?
Couldn’t my space reflect and support that?
@Bridget: If your office is a space that you bring your clients into, then it makes sense to also consider making it a nice-looking space for them. And if it works for you, then don’t fix what ain’t broken!
And I think you raise an important point about fear. With fear there’s a sweet spot. A bit of fear raises our game, but too much fear kills our thinking and performance. I saw that someone tweeted about this post and said, “The shoddier your workspace, the better the work you’ll do…” and that’s not really true. I think we need some basic safety and functionality in place first, and there’s a point at which an environment can be too shoddy for us to do epic work.
For example, I worked with kids in schools in South Africa for a few years and many of them struggled with learning because they were living in a tin shack with a family of 5, no personal space for working and they were faced with violence and substance abuse in their daily lives. That’s not a “shoddy” environment. That’s a war-zone and many of them can’t learn because their brains are jammed up with post traumatic stress disorder.
For most people reading this blog though, they have a basically safe and functional workspace, and so my main message was, “Don’t buy into the hype about needing a fancy workspace in order to be able to do your epic work because research shows that when we allow a bit of struggle – whether it’s in giving ourselves more challenging work, or getting on with our work in a slightly challenging environment, we often produce our best work.”
I’m so glad you said this, because all along I was thinking, “This is fine for us nice, middle class types for whom “shoddy” means “not perfect, but good enough”, but I know that a poor environment = stress = worse cognitive functioning”.
I volunteer for local branches of a couple of charities which deal with people who are often in a state of distress.
In one, the majority of the work is done in an old building which has been poorly renovated. The place is teeming with clients with usually urgent practical legal problems, and though there are lots of volunteers, the queue is down the street at least 3 days a week. The poor renovation means that each “private” interview room is not soundproof, so that the distressing details can be overheard in the waiting room. The computers and furniture are second hand and less than perfect, the phones have a tendency to conk out because they’re so old, the carpet’s practically pointless by now, and there’s mould on some of the walls that the landlord is dragging his heels over dealing with. The volunteers are brilliant and do a fantastic job. They’d do a lot better if they weren’t over-worked, under-funded, and there was enough money to soundproof the rooms and get the place nicely refurbished. And the clients would feel less vulnerable, safer, and more relaxed and able to talk.
I worry about the romanticising of poverty and adversity. We need to be emotionally resilient enough to deal with hardship and turn the experience into something creative and good, certainly. We also need to be aware of the fine line between some adversity and real hardship which causes serious problems. And to bear in mind that some of the greatest inventions and discoveries were made by seriously monied people with all the best equipment and supplies at their disposal.
It’s all about falling on the right part of the spectrum, I suppose.
Karen, I’m glad the comment discussion clarified this. I don’t like it when people romanticize poverty and adversity either, but I do love to hear stories of the resilience of the human spirit and how we’re capable of thriving in spite of adversity and poverty. I love the message that we’re capable of so much more than we realize, and I think us middle class folks often don’t realize how much we’re capable of because we’re so molly-coddled (myself included!) It’s a challenge to talk about those inspiring stories without romanticizing the adversity and poverty, isn’t it? Because they’re often truly compelling stories.
Cath:
Once again, I want to thank Charlie, above all, for bringing you on board. Cheers!
Your post is thought-provoking and I appreciate your contribution.
With due respect, however, I beg to differ.
Your model, unfortunately, is based on the one-size-fits-all mindset that is all too common these days–quite ordinary.
There are so many exceptions to this rule that I don’t even know where to begin.
I agree that you need “fire in the belly” to move forward or make progress. Maybe.
However, to suggest that progress can only be achieved by living in a less than hospitable (mediocre) environment is to play the ostrich game. You are way off base here.
I know of an individual who was raised with a silver spoon in his mouth. This guy lived in the lap of luxury and his parents catered to his every whim and fancy: he was spoiled for choices. Well, guess what?
This so-called “spoiled brat” went on to graduate from MIT and Harvard and today is a high-achiever: he earns a dollar salary that would make you and I turn green with envy.
There are plenty of people out there who have achieved success even without a deprived background. So, it really depends.
Let me give you another example. There are millions of entrepreneurs who failed as self-starters. They had to declare financial bankruptcy. People laughed at them.
So, they joined the family business and built an empire based on what their predecessors had done: they just needed a little helping hand and guidance, that’s all.
But they worked just as hard as any entrepreneur who shot to fame and fortune through the “school of hard knocks,” digging the trenches, and working on the front-lines.
You will find all kinds of creative people, such as artists, entrepreneurs and scientists, who can do their best work only if they are surrounded by luxuries, such as gifts, medals of honor, trinkets, expensive gadgets, etc. Human personality is complex.
You really should try to avoid getting your theories to fit the personality profiles of people. We only see them as people when they are actually individuals. And every individual is unique and different.
Just as Oprah Winfrey’s decision would prevent some kids from giving it their best shot, for others it could work as a catalyst to do every greater work. It depends.
Some people need their Baluga caviar on toast, champagne, diamond-studded watches, designer clothes, mistresses, and expensive paintings to do their best work.
By contrast, others have experienced the rags-to-riches story. Think about it.
@Archan: Glad that you and Bridget raised an alternative perspective – I always love a good debate!
You say, “There are so many exceptions to this rule that I don’t even know where to begin.” Yes. There will always be exceptions to every rule. Reality is diverse. And as you say, we are all unique. There will be examples of people who’ve excelled in luxurious environments and people who’ve tanked out in luxurious environments, as well as examples of people who excelled in shoddy environments and people who tanked out in shoddy environments. In Coyle’s research, he studied talent hotbeds around the world. Not everyone in every talent hotbed was excelling – because we’re unique, as you say, but the reason they’re called talent hotbeds is because they produced an unusually high number of exceptionally talented people. While it’s useful to recognize that we’re all individuals, and to ask your own questions and think for yourself in applying and using any ideas like this, its also useful to look at the big picture and notice this pattern in talent hotbeds.
“…You will find all kinds of creative people, such as artists, entrepreneurs and scientists, who can do their best work only if they are surrounded by luxuries, such as gifts, medals of honor, trinkets, expensive gadgets, etc. Human personality is complex…” Yes, you will. And if you look, you’ll also find all kinds of people who have been able to do not just their best, but some of the best work in our societies, and they didn’t have all those luxuries. People like Nelson Mandela and many of the other leaders who worked with him to lead the ANC and successfully transform South Africa into a democracy come to mind. Much of that leadership work was done under severe constraints when they had to work secretly – both before and after he was imprisoned.
“… to suggest that progress can only be achieved by living in a less than hospitable (mediocre) environment is to play the ostrich game….” The message I was wanting to communicate was more subtle than this. The quality of our motivation, creativity, thinking and performance in our work is shaped by many things – not just our work environment. So there are many ways that we can make changes, in order to make more progress in our work. Considering that you don’t need to have a luxurious work environment is just one of the ways that you might choose to free yourself to do even more epic work.
Because of all the consumerism we’re exposed to, we tend to see and hear more of the messages that are about how you need more and nicer stuff in order to be happy/ do great work, etc. This post was to raise an alternative perspective on how much stuff you really need in order to do your epic work. Is your work environment the only thing that you need to pay attention to if you want to do more epic work? Is it a one-dimensional cause-effect relationship? No. It’s just one factor.
This was really interesting, thanks! Shenanigans indeed.
I would also be interested in hearing more about creative tension. Does it mean you need to be basically unhappy with your work or situation to do epic shit?
@Willie: No, creative tension doesn’t mean being unhappy and being driven by unhappiness. I think I will write a post about this – sounds like there’s interest. Basically, our minds don’t like the cognitive dissonance of having a gap between where we are and where we want to be, so it seeks to close the gap. This drive to close that gap is called creative tension and it helps to release your best thinking and performance, in its drive to close the gap. But most of us close the gap by lowering our vision so that it’s closer to our reality, rather than holding the tension of the big gap between reality and vision. Ideally, you want to be able to cast a big vision and hold it with some non-attachment, rather than beating yourself up and getting stuck in frustration because of the gap. Having a playful attitude can help with this.
Great post as always Cath! If anyone saw my workspace, along with my old XP computer with a tube monitor….well…..they’d know what you’re talking about. My files are unorganized which I need to do something about. But as you pointed out, my time is best spent on getting the most important work done.
I hate to admit however, that I did catch myself drooling over new laptops (which I can’t afford at the moment) the other day when I should have been doing other things.
An old hammer can pound a nail in as well as a new one.
@Mike: drool away… Coyle says that having a vision of something you want, when you don’t yet have it, can be incredibly motivating and help to accelerate our learning 🙂
These articles about creativity are really mind-blowing and completely make sense. Although I don’t worry too much about my workspace I do tend to overinvest in equipment when I could be just doing epic things on my 7 year old Gateway Linux machine. The concept of this creative tension is excellent, I feel as though thats exactly the zone I’m in these days. I aspire and envision great things – and without this tension I’d go back to my lethargic ways.
Great post.
Hey Cath,
This was very cool post.
Recently I’ve began noticing similar things myself. The more hopes I put into tech solution for creativity problems the more struggle there is. In the end I simply go back to pen and paper.
This reminds me about the concept of lizard brain that Seth Godin talks about.
The further you go out of your comfort zone the more freaked out the lizard brain is. And if he wins you end up labeling your files, shuffling papers.
Also thanks for pointing Daniel Coyle’s work it looks very intriguing. Need to read more about.
Love some of your references. Daniel Coyle fascinated me and I wrote about the “myelin highway” a while back. Willingness to fail and keep practicing – even, maybe especially, bad practice – really is what makes excellence.
Oh God – gel pens!! I SO understand this kind of reaction.
Love the point of the piece, that I need to be hungry enough for “success” to do the epic work I need to do, to get out of the crappy place.
Thanks!
Dear Cath,
I found myself laughing outloud at the description of creative tension that has regularly played out in my life! Beautifully succinct and to the point – it gently calls your **** what is really is – simple.. but deadly… procrastination (Oh God, gel pens!!)- while giving the gentle message to SIMPLY GET ON WITH IT!! 😀
Thank you for the heads up and the gentle shove 😉
Angela
Brilliant post! I taught myself a mnemonic regarding correct usage of stationery and stationary. The stationery we use for writing ends in Ery. E as in pEn, which is used to write on paper.