Cherish Creative Blocks

For all the talk about overcoming creative blocks and getting unstuck, we can neglect an important reality:

A block is essential to a breakthrough! I’d like to suggest we learn to cherish them, too…

Almost every meaningful story of innovation hinges upon a hero persisting in the face of a block before ultimately breaking through. In fact, I struggle to recall a single instance of someone genuinely stumbling upon a breakthrough, completely uncaring, not looking for something.

“What about Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin in 1928?” fellow history nerds might retort. “What about when Charles Goodyear discovered how to vulcanize rubber in 1839?” I agree — these were certainly unexpected discoveries, similar to many such tales — but here’s the thing: they were on a quest! They were searching, and the discoveries they made were made specifically because of the quest, however haphazard the moment might appear.

And you know what they were before the discovery? They were blocked! They were stuck!

What is it about a creative block that prepares the way for a breakthrough? As Arthur Koestler eloquently describes in his landmark work on creativity, The Act of Creation, “When all hopeful attempts at solving the problem by traditional methods have been exhausted, thought runs around in circles in the blocked matrix like rats in a cage. Next, the matrix of organized, purposeful behavior itself seems to go to pieces, and random trials make their appearance, accompanied by tantrums and attacks of despair — or by the distracted absent-mindedness of the creative obsession. That absent-mindedness is, of course, in fact single-mindedness; for at this stage — the ‘period of incubation’ — the whole personality, down to the unverbalized and unconscious layers, has become saturated with the problem, so that on some level of the mind it remains active, even while attention is occupied in a quite different field — such as looking at a tree … or watching the rise of the water-level; until either chance or intuition provides a link to a quite different matrix, which bears down vertically, so to speak, on the problem blocked in its old horizontal context, and the two previously separate matrices fuse. But for that fusion to take place a condition must be fulfilled which I called ‘ripeness.’”

A block is what makes the mind “ripe” for a breakthrough. A block causes our subconscious to struggle and work overtime to seek a resolution. And just as hopelessness is an essential stage in the creative process, so is a creative block. I know, I know an exhortation to cherish creative blocks sure seems like a contradiction coming from a guy who studies what it takes to unleash creativity. But hey, I’m a big fan of contradictions, too.

Perhaps a better word for “creatively blocked,” is “obsessed”?

So here’s a question to consider, if you’re having trouble breaking through: what’s your block? What are you desperate to solve? Without a block, you won’t break through.

Related: Look for Connections
Related: On Hopelessness In The Creative Process
Related: Embrace Contradictions
Related: Be Obsessed

Join over 10,547 creators & leaders who read Paint & Pipette each week