Creativity times craft

On my window sill sits a select collection of books. I wouldn’t say they’re my “favourites”. That’s the wrong word. More like, “the most impactful”. They’re the texts that I keep coming back to, the ones that stay in my thoughts despite all attempts to expel them. Mostly, they’re non-fiction. There’s Robert Caro’s The Power Broker and The Years of Lyndon Johnson series. There’s Robert Greene’s books on mastery, power and war. There’s Venkatesh Rao’s Tempo, Robert Coram’s biography of John Boyd, Nassim Taleb’s Incerto, three books by Dan John, Montaigne’s Essays, Keith Johnstone’s Impro and Jay Griffiths’ A Sideways Look at Time. Conspicuously, there’s also Tolkien’s The Lord of the The Rings, Douglas Adam’s five-part trilogy, The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and if I had space for them, I’d put Rowling’s Harry Potter series there too. 

The latter three works of fiction are there for different reasons than the non-fiction. The non-fiction books have each affected me profoundly, but in different ways. The fiction books on my prestigious window sill are all there for the same reason: they’re a reminder of the power of imagination. Every time my eyes come to rest on them they nudge me into a reverie concerning the vast energy and creativity that lies latent in the mind of every human being. 

They also underscore the dividing line between creativity and craft. The former is something inherent in everybody’s being. The latter is something purchased by proliferate spending of one’s time, attention, energy and love. To further discern the difference, consider an idea of Derek Sivers’: ideas are just a multiplier of execution. As he says:

Sivers’ formulation of idea-times-execution is just a derivative of creativity-times-craft. Both make it apparent that anybody can have a good idea, but not just anybody can manifest it in reality. This is perhaps what those works of fiction on my shelf really teach me; it’s easy to be creative, but hard to create.