And they also talk about another component that is not otherwise very often discussed, and that is focus.

Okay, you have this drive and this motivation.

That is we can think of motivation as energy.

It's this you are being fueled, you are being you know, like your whole body is vibrating to go.

You want to go.

But now the question is how do you focus it?

How do you make it so that it becomes productive.

Hello and welcome to the Psychology Podcast, where we explore the depths of human potential.

I'm your host, doctor Scott Barry Kaufman, a Columbia professor, best selling author, and self actualization coach.

Today I speak with doctor Zarana E.

Fkevich Pringle on the show.

Doctor Pringle is a senior research scientist at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, where she currently serves as the director of the Creativity and Emotions Lab.

She studies the role of emotion and emotional intelligence in creativity and well being, as well as how to use the arts to promote emotion and creativity skills.

In this episode, we discuss her new book, The Creativity Choice, The Science of making decisions to turn ideas into action.

In this episode, you will learn how to make your dreams a reality, get over stumbling blocks and harness the power of your emotional intelligence and motivation to reach your goals.

I've known Zarana for many years and consider her an exemplar scientist and human So that further ado, I bring you doctor Zorana Evkovich, springle Hey, Professor Zorana, thank you so much for being on the Psychology Podcast.

Thank you so much for having me.

Scott.

Oh, We've known each other for quite some time now, and I'm so excited you finally have this book.

I finally have this book, indeed, wooo.

And it really is the culmination of so much research and hard work on multiple topics creativity, emotional intelligence, dare I say, grits.

So it really integrates a lot of things.

Let me ask you why did you write this book?

Well, I tend to be motivated a lot by frustration.

It seems to be a personality thing with me, and I started being frustrated with what I saw out there in research, in communicating creativity, research to do general audiences.

They are handful of really great books.

I loved Wuyer to Create and it was part of my book proposal.

But I also thought they were things missing that we were not talking in particular about the emotional side of the creative process, and I took that as a sign of well, should do that.

Okay, So what's the name of the book.

The name of the book is The Creativity Choice.

Okay, so you do think creativity is a choice?

Now?

A lot of people say, well, only you know, I'm not creative.

Some people don't see it's not a part of their identity.

People obviously change the extent to which is the part of their identity.

I think people that's not part of their anity, they could make the choice for it to be relevant in their lives.

I think they could.

It's when people do not have creativity as part of their identity, they are making this assumption, essentially that creativity is a trait and you have it or you don't have it.

Oftentimes there are other assumptions built in there.

I oftentimes hear, oh, you talk about creativity, well, I'm not artistic, So this built assumption that creativity is about the arts and being artistic, or even they get more specific of I cannot draw sure, I can't either.

It's fine.

So I think that these assumptions we build in about creativity lead people to, uh, to make a conclusion, Well, I am not creative myself.

But if I wonder what if we communicated better and told people what creativity really is, that it's not just about being artistic, that it's not just about being an Einstein or a Picasso, that it's something that could be learned, that's something that could be developed.

What would then the picture be what if we started with those messages early on.

Well, what is well, what is creativity?

Though?

Can you tell us what the what are the necessary features?

What counts is creative?

What doesn't count as creativity?

I think that's definitely the first question to start.

We hear the word creative and we all have a sense that we know what it is, but I oftentimes also here, well, creativity, we cannot really define it.

This isotheric thing.

But creativity researchers really agree on what creativity is.

To the point of the definition of creativity is called the standard definition, So we really agree what it is, and it includes two parts.

Creativity is something an idea product, something that we do that is in the same time original in some way and also effective or appropriate for a particular goal.

Something that is just original can be bizarre, and that would not qualify for creativity.

Something that is both original and effective is creative.

There's a lot of people talk about the link between mental illness and creativity.

You don't have to be all to be creative.

Right, No, you don't have to be meantal little to be creative.

Actually, there is some connection between mental illness and creativity.

It looks like it, especially in the artistic domains.

There's a meta analysis out there of a number of studies.

But in those cases it might be we don't know why that is, and it might be that it's even in spite of it, not because of it.

So there are lots of questions about it.

But you most definitely do not need to be mentally ill to be creative.

Okay, But there are some interesting linkages there.

There are some interesting linkages.

Actually, that is those kinds of linkages where at the very origin of how I became interested in creativity in the first place, I was reading once upon a time, long time ago, when I was an undergrad looking for a thesis topic.

I was reading broadly this research from the nineteen sixties that was the first big booming creativity research in the US.

Really spurred by the space race between the US and the Soviet Union, and we knew we wanted to develop creativity.

We knew we needed more of it, but the question was, you know, how does it work?

And I came across this statement by Frank Barron, who I know that you know of and yes, both value great deal, and he said something to the effect that creative individuals are occasionally crazier yet adamantly saner than the average person.

And I love that quote, and I really wondered what that meant.

And actually, a few years ago I ran a study that directly tested.

That go on, go on, go on, Yeah.

It's so cool.

So I really wanted to he was He said this based on observations and based on interviews with creative individuals, and I wanted to do a formal study, and so I recruited a simple of professional artists.

And these were people who we really just took top art schools in the country and took all the faculty in the art schools and email them asking them to take part in research.

And we got bunch back who volunteered to take part, and then we had a general sample of population, not saying that these were not creative individuals, just that they were not specifically selected for their creativity.

And then we gave them measures of psychological strengths such as atributes of psychological well being like personal growth, meaning and purpose in life, hope.

And then we also give the measures of psychological vulnerabilities, especially susceptibility to stress, anxiety, and depression.

And we wanted to see, okay, is it that these artistic people are in the same time more sane and more insane general population.

And indeed that's what we found that if you don't just take vulnerability and strength as separate, separate attributes, if you create a profile that you say, okay, this person has some strengths and some vulnerabilities, and if you create a profile where you can see is it the case for some people that they have both?

We find that's much more common in those people who were professionally creative in this case in the arts, than those people who are not who are not professionally creative.

That's brilliant.

Can you send me that paper?

Yeah, of course I.

Would like to write about it.

I have wondered if anyone in modern day creativity research and creative modern day creative has actually tried to replicate that Frank Byron research, so that I'm really excited you did that.

I don't know how I missed that.

I really dreamed of doing that study for twenty years and it's finals impossible.

Beautiful.

Please I don't have to write about that for my newsletter.

So, the idea of the creative drive has been talked about a lot among creativity researchers over the years.

And how do you pinpoint that, like, what is that drive uniquely?

You know, compared to all their kind of drives.

You may have a drive to just enable, like you may have a talent and so you feel driven to realize that talent.

But what is a generalized creative drive?

What is that?

I love that question because it makes you kind of do distinction of what does it really mean?

And I really like the work by Giovanni Corazza and his theme in Italy, and they have developed this theory.

They called it the Da Vinci model of creativity, which I think it's clever.

It's an acronym, but also da Vinci and they say that they are two parts to the creative drive.

And that model was I think putting different strends of research together that I found very appealing.

And they say that creative drive includes the motivation for creative work, and we can ask questions what are the sources of that motivation?

And they also talk about another component that is not otherwise very often discussed, and that is focus.

Okay, you have this drive and we uh, this motivation.

That is we can think of motivation as energy.

It's this you are being.

You're being fueled, you are being you know, like your whole body is vibrating to go.

You want to go.

But now the question is how do you focus it?

How do you make it so that it becomes productive?

Uh?

And they have they were the first ones to put it like that, and I thought that was very intriguing, says I was writing the book.

Yeah, we have talked in creativity studies a lot about the motivation side, but not so much about the focus side.

Yeah.

This is this is your book.

This is this is the that's the central thing about your book is how do we go from the idea to the reality, you know, to the enactment of it.

Oh man, what do you think about what do you think make of passion?

Do you think it's something that we have inside of us as like a seed or like what kind of metaphor to use in your head when you think about pasion or do you think it's something that's developed over the course of putting in the effort and even doing hard things that you don't want to do.

You know, like a lot of great creative people have enacted their creativity through a lot of suffering.

That it's not like the passion was there twenty four to seven?

Right, m oh, so.

Many important points you're raising there, And I find that I always found it intriguing the cultural talk about passion as you have to find your passion, right, and it seems to say, okay, passion is it's somewhere inside you are somewhere to be found.

You just have to find it, and and that is that is odd.

I always found that intuitively odd.

How do you know that it's already there?

What does that mean?

It's already there?

And the passion, It turns out there's some really cool research that shows it's it's not a trait like that that you either have or you don't have.

You're a passionate personal, you're not a passionate person.

It develops through time, and it develops through engaging in an activity.

There are lots of people who are passionate about a lot of things that they couldn't have inherently known that they would be passionate about.

You know, we had rec we done some work on our house.

We have a garden and there's kind of a retaining wall, so we had to hire somebody to rebuild the wall that was starting to crumble.

And the person who ended up hiring was really passionate about building walls.

He was Turkish and by background, and he would go to Turkey every year and go to different archaeological sites to see how walls were built at different times in history.

I mean, if that's not passion, I don't know what is.

And he really deeply cared about his work.

So he found the mistake in what another worker did in a previous renovation, and he asked us whether we wanted it to be corrected.

We did not see the need for it, but he could not not do it.

Was just you could see him saying, I'm gonna do it anyway.

So that is passion.

Would we ever see would we ever say that he had always in him the passion to build walls that are well built.

And I don't think so I think there's this assumption when people say passion is a trait to find the seed in you, to find that there's something artistic again it comes to that or creative or designery or one of these things, that it's somewhere in there you just have to find it.

But oftentimes you just need to try out different things, and oftentimes you can be surprised.

Oh, I did not expect this to be interesting, but it's interesting.

I'm intrigued.

Let me learn more, and it becomes a.

Passion so interesting enough.

Maybe we really need to in the field not think of passion as an emotion.

It maybe should be in the demean of cognition.

It's like, maybe we just need to place it in a different domain than it has traditionally been placed.

Ooh, that's intriguing.

We Actually it reminds me of a study we did a few years ago where we asked questions about passion at work.

We administered a scale of passion at work, and we had also a lot of emotions that were assessed at the same time.

So what we were able to do is put passion in the context of emotions, okay, and the passion scale was not focused on emotion.

It had one component of it focused on emotion, this desire component, this like burning fire of wanting to do something that is in accordance to your passion.

But it had other components too that we're closer to commitment, So components of in the long term, I want to be engaged in this activity.

Uh, it is central to who I am, to my identity and this realization and sort of yes, cognitive commitment to the activity itself and and persistence in the long run.

So this desire is more of an emotional component.

Commitment is more of a cognitive component.

And it when you made that comment, it made me think when we when we did a network analysis of all the emotions that are related to how much people are passionate in their jobs before that it was related to both positive emotions and negative emotions.

Oh wow, isn't that true?

Well that is really cool and just the whole notion as well, that we can classify emotions in the positive and negative.

I are not I don't love that.

How do we our emotions contextual?

Like?

Yeah, emotions are very contextual, and I think that some uh, some labels that now in this day and age, we wish that once upon a time, some labels were not put on particular concepts.

I know that you do lots of research on personality, and I think that now we wish that we didn't well a century ago name the traite neuroticism, but we did, and then it kind of stuck.

Yes, I think the same thing is with emotions when we call them positive and negative.

They are these connotations that people get, meaning positive is good or desirable, negative is bad or not desirable.

It's not really that it's emotions are not good or bad inherently, but really contextually depends on the context, and it can be they have different functions and they can have different effects.

Yes, with that said, it seems like there are certain skills of emotional intelligence that are beneficial regardless of the context, such as using your emotions and regulating your emotions.

Those two you've also found are important for creativity.

So tell me a little bit about these skills and how did you get into the work of emotional intelligence and what is emotional intelligence?

I think that's the best place to start.

Oftentimes I find that people have a sense that they know what emotional intelligence is, but that might be more of a sense than the true knowledge.

So emotional intelligence is a set of floor abilities.

Ability to accurately perceive emotions in oneself.

Another, so be able to tell that you are feeling frustrated and not just this generalized bad.

Then the ability to use emotions to facilitate thinking and problem solving, Ability to understand emotions where they are coming from what might be typical causes or consequences.

And the ability to manage or regulate emotions in ourselves and in others.

So those are the four.

And how does that differ from like Daniel Goleman's emotional intelligences components, because that was all the craze in the eighties and on the nineties and in the nineties, and we said that was crazy in the nineties.

A big part of why I got into the field of psychologist.

I loved the book Emotional Intelligence.

I was in high school.

Yeah, I loved the book too.

The book came out in nineteen ninety five and it was bigger than a big hit.

It was one of the biggest psychology books of baby all times.

And what that book is is talking about all the different traits and attributes that could contribute to how well we do in life.

It's just that that book is talking about motivation and self concept and lots of traits and lots of things on the personality side of humans, and not so much about abilities or ways of thinking that that we think of as emotional intelligence in contemporary research.

Okay, so okay, we think you talked about what was important.

It's just not not how we think of emotional intelligence in the in the sense of and ability and different kind of intelligence.

So you see these as abilities or skills that anyone can develop.

Anyone can develop to a large extent, you know, it's there are certain things that come easier to some people than others, and we definitely have to acknowledge that it will be easier for some people to learn these skills then it will be to other people for lots of different reasons.

I am five to one.

I'm never going to be a basketball player.

You know, there are people for whom it's going to be difficult to learn them.

But we have now good data teaching these skills to children through school based programs, to adults through work based programs, and there are meta analysis showing that yes, they can be learned.

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Okay, now back to the show.

Well, why do you think that using emotions and regulating emotions is why are they important for creativity?

I don't know if when people think of creativity they think of the importance of regulating emotions.

I think they think of jumping in, you know, being impulsive, you know, being crazy so so, but you're you're kind of like, no, let me, let me tell you how it really is here.

Hmm.

Oh.

I love this question, especially how you put it, because it gets again to those to those assumptions we have about creativity.

And we have this assumption of creativity being spontaneous, fun, free, flowing, get messy with colors, wild, wild, and you know there is something to it that is not fully ridiculous because and that's why it persists.

I think there is a part of the creative process, especially when we are coming up with ideas that can be a little bit wild, that can be things are coming out of the blue, we are finding connection that other people have not seen before, and so it is very much like that.

But I in my book, I very specifically talk about creativity in a broader sense, not just as coming up with ideas, but doing something with them.

So imagine just as a as a thought experiment.

Imagine that you had an idea and you don't act on it.

So maybe you have invented a great technology.

Maybe you had an idea for social media before it ever existed, or you had an idea for who knows what else.

But if you didn't develop it, if you didn't build it into a performance or a product, it is just something that stays in your head.

It it is not creative.

It is fantasy, It is imagination.

It is interesting as imagination.

But I want us to talk about creativity that that results in something new, that it's not just just something that we talk about over coffee with a friend.

Yeah.

Well, well, do you think innovation is a different concept than creativity?

Hmmm?

That is my favorite controversial question.

I don't.

I actually think they are the same thing, and that is very unpopular opinion.

And actually, in in organizational behavior research, there's a very explicit definition of creativity is coming up with ideas and innovation as doing something with them.

But you know scientists, and you are scientists, you know that we like parsimony.

If there is this simple solution, it's better than a complicated one.

So why have multiple terms that this distinction only really works in the case of business or you know, organizational studies, but it doesn't apply to other areas.

So think if you wanted to apply this distinction of creativity versus innovation to art, right, the stereotypical domain of creativity, it wouldn't work.

You don't say that, you know, Monet painted this amazing painting, you say that it's creative.

You don't say that it's innovative.

Right, it doesn't.

It doesn't apply in different areas.

It kind of applies only in this one specific place.

And and so why then why do we need that?

It may be just.

Because of these stereotypes of creativity is artistic.

Therefore we are just going to put it on the side of ideas.

Yeah, we have so many stereotypes.

Yeah, you're saying all of these stereotypes are wrong.

And when you were you know, when you were saying before, of well, what about managing emotions?

Datability comes into play when we take creativity as not just coming up with ideas.

We are if you're just coming up with ideas, you can let it flow.

But if you and you can go wild and you don't have to, you don't have to manage anything.

But if you take creativity as a long term process, then they are going to be things that are boring.

Right.

We are scientists.

Nobody likes nobody likes revising a paper, but you have to.

And it's boring and it's annoying, and you don't want to do it, and you have to make yourself do it, and you have to do something with these feelings.

Yeah, yeah, I mean these skills sound boring, though, but you're saying we have to be boring sometimes in order to be creative.

We have to deal with those boring things because in order for that paper to be published.

In this case, right, you submitted the paper, you have written it, and you think the paper is in great shape.

But reviewers say, how about this question?

How about that question?

Did you consider whatever?

Right?

And you have to deal with those comments before the paper can be published.

We don't like it.

It's unpleasant.

In the ideal scenario, the paper really gets better because of this process and stronger.

But even if that is not the case, and it's not always the case, we have to jump through these hoops and lots of dealing with emotions there.

Cool what happens when people experience a creative block?

Do you have any advice for people and how to overcome their blocks?

I think of the first thing that is really interesting to me, Scott is when I started writing a chapter on creative block, I expected that there will be a lot of research on creative block.

There wasn't.

No.

You know, Joe sell Singer did some of that work.

Yeah, there is.

There are few things out today.

But because it is so important and it's such a universal experience of people who do create the work, that I expected much more work out there.

Wow, And there actually wasn't.

So it was it was a challenging chapter to write, but it became one of the most meaningful to me.

You know how things are sometimes like that that what is challenging really stretches you to the end of your abilities and you end up creating something really really important.

And I thought said, Okay, what happens when we are experiencing a creative block?

And are what are all the things going on in the mind and cognitively, emotionally, and if you take it all together, I think we need to start with that emotional part.

I did a study a few years ago where I asked a group of people and so called creative industries.

I don't like that term because it implies that other industries are not creative, so you know that aside.

So these were designers and composers, choreographers, sculptors, painters, writers, you name it.

And I asked them whether they ever experienced creative block, and you could.

You could even in written responses.

You could almost hear the chuckle.

Yeah, of course we do.

And then I asked them what is that experience like emotionally?

And you know, those word clouds were the size of the word proportional to how often it is mentioned.

This is a really funny figure because the word frustrated is gigantic.

It is like a cloud over everything else.

And then some people mention also anxious, having self doubt or self consciousness.

Some people say that they get angry.

So other things that happen emotionally in experience of creative block probably differ by personality of an individual, but frustration is dominant and it can be overwhelming.

So I think that the first place to start in dealing with the creative block is self compassion, and I know that that's something that you would identify with it's And this is also a technique of emotion regulation.

Imagine that you are talking to a friend and the friend is telling you that they hit the wall and they're not making any progress.

What would you tell them?

Yeah, what would you tell them?

Well, chances are you wouldn't tell them all those things that you say to yourself and we say to ourselves, you should have known better, what were you thinking?

Why are you in this place?

Come on?

Chances are you would not say any of those things, and that you would tell them to cut themselves some slack, and maybe to take a break, to look at it from a different perspective, maybe to share with it somebody else, to get a fresh set of eyes on it.

And those all happen to be good tips for what to do when you are in a state of creative block.

So you think that that can actually help you get past the block, like I've seen examples of Like I've heard things like getting your mind off the task, you know, like go take a shower or do something else.

But you think showing self compassion can get you out of a run.

It's not directly it can It can take the emotional edge off so that you start being that you start being able to approach it in a different way.

If we are so overwhelmingly frustrated, we cannot see anything else.

Essentially, we keep hitting a wall, hitting our head against wall, and doing it continually.

Imagine that you are writing, you're a writer, and the words are not coming.

Everything that you write makes no sense or it seems not to make sense to you.

If you continue doing it, it really is like banging your head and it becomes it becomes overwhelming.

Right, So the first step is to take the edge off or those emotional of emotional parts of the block.

Then you can take a break.

Then you can take a break, and then you know, taking a shower, It actually is that stereotype is actually true.

Taking a shower does help something.

And the reaching out to others, somebody who can provide a fresh perspective.

Sometimes even describing it to somebody else.

Describing what you are facing and what your problem is to somebody else can can lead to an insight even before they say anything to you, because you are using different words and describing it to somebody else than you would in your you know, staring at the screen yourself.

That's so valuable.

Well, you said earlier that positive and negative emotions can be correlated with creativity.

What are what are some quote negative emotions that that are conducive to creativity?

What?

What can you give me more?

Can you be more specific?

The research shows that it seems they unpleasant.

The other word for for negative is unpleasant.

It really is how that positive versus negative The better labels are unpleasant versus pleasant.

But energized feelings can be beneficial for creativity.

So those feelings might be being frustrated, or being angry, or being annoyed by something that those could be productive and you can think of examples.

I know that personally, I happen to be very much aware that I am motivated by frustration and that frustration can come from you know, I'm a scientist.

So I read something and then I disagree with it.

I think, oh, you shouldn't have done it like that.

It is really wrong question to ask.

That's how we ended up studying creativity and emotions.

To be honest with you, I was reading contemporary research and creativity and the question being asked was what emotions are good for creativity and what emotions are bad?

For creativity.

And if we set the question like that, and if we think of creativity and if we study creativity as coming up with ideas, we get a reliable answer.

After thirty five years of research, it's a very reliable answer that happy, energized moods are beneficial for creative thinking.

But that was frustrating to me because it seems, and oftentimes it's translated as advice you have to be happy to be creative, and that goes against any creative person I know in real life, not that they are miserable, but it's not just about being happy.

There's something missing here, and so I started wondering whether that's the right question.

I was frustrated with the state of affairs in this research, and I came to different questions.

I came to a question of, well, it might not be really about what you are experiencing, but what you do with the feelings you have, which is that idea of emotional intelligence and the abilities of what you do with emotions.

So one thing of what you do with emotions is Okay, you are frustrated, like in my example, but you can do different things with that frustration if you use and emotion scientists consider that emotions are information.

They are telling you something about the state of your mind or the state of the world, something in the environment around you, and that information can be used just like we want different information and making any kind of decisions.

This is another kind of information to use.

So you can say, Okay, I'm frustrated.

What is that telling me?

Well, I concluded that it's telling me that this question that was traditional and the research was not the best one, and I wanted to do something about it, and I thought of what might be another question?

And then did you know, research about it and then died up building a career out of it.

That one could say, well, maybe that was creative action there.

But another thing you could do is to say, well, I don't like feeling frustrated, so I am just going to distract myself and make myself feel better.

Well, you are going to feel better, but you're not going to do anything creative.

Oh darn, darn.

Oh.

Yeah, there's some tough love here in your book, isn't there.

There is a little bit, but.

It's a really necessary book.

I've got to ask you, what do you think of the concept of grit and what role does grit play in creativity.

Oh, I think that the idea of grit is very appealing.

It's very popular, it's.

Very popular, it's very appealing, and it's very important because I think and it's also if you know the history of the research in grit and how it came to be, it came from this realization that oftentimes in our culture, and in particular with children, we sort of support or give permission for kids to give up.

You know, they try something for a new for a few few weeks and then they just said, ah, they're gonna give it up.

Try something else, Try something else.

And I am all for having multiple interests and trying different interests, but you also have to give it some try.

You have to give it a chance to learn something and potentially develop an interest.

So it's a very appealing concept.

And the concept of grit guest has these two parts, one of persistence in the face of obstacles and also another one that is more of stay with that interest.

You say you're interested in this, stay with it, don't just let it go.

And it turns out that for creativity, the persistence part of creativity is super important.

It really makes a difference between just having an idea and doing something with it you it helps you transform it into performances, products, whatever it might be.

But that consistency of interest aspect of great actually could potentially hurt creativity.

Row Uh.

Yeah, it is interesting because ideas can come from anywhere, but for the ideas and connections to happen, we need we need to be exposed to different things.

And I love how in your Buyer to Create you put openness to experience as the central part of what creative individuals are like.

And why that openness to experience is important.

It's because you will be open to trying different things and you will then have broad knowledge base.

You will be interested in science but also art.

My son is doing performing arts of all kinds but also robotics.

And we know from research of Nobel Prize winners in the sciences many of them, a remarkable number of them have hobbies in the arts and arts and crafts, from playing musical instruments to staying glass and good working and whatnot.

And it is and if we even look at different examples of creative individuals, they have really broad interests.

So they don't have this find one thing and then just stick with it.

They there is a little bit of jumping around that becomes in the service of creative work.

It seems related to David Epstein's work.

Did you have you read his book?

Yes, about the importance of cross specialization.

That's actually a phrase that I think Dean Keith, Dean Keith Simonton would use cross specialization.

But but David Epstein has you know, shows that that a lot of really high performers, creative people, high achievers, they did not only stay in their own lane, so to speak, they really were very curious and uh, and we're very curious about many different topics in many different fields.

Yeah, yeah, and I love that work, especially because our culture is pushing towards hyper specialization is value and the well, why Zeron.

I have one more question for you.

You talk all about importance of social networks in your book and different types of relationships for creativity.

Can you can you expound on that a little bit for our listeners.

As we are talking about creativity in a way of not just having ideas but doing something with those ideas.

And if you think of creativity with the goal of not just doing one thing, you write one book and then well you don't do anything anymore.

If you want to make creativity more sustainable and reliable, something that repeats.

We have to talk about the social side of creativity.

Yeah, and it creates sort of an infrastructure, ecosystem, whatever analogy you want to use that makes it possible if we just go beyond a single thing we create.

And it has two purposes.

Really.

One is to help us come up with ideas, new ideas, not just that one that we already done.

And it also is there as support when we need it, as emotional support, but also support in developing an idea and saying, Okay, here's an idea.

Now we have it, but how do we build on it, how do we elaborate on it, how do we move it along?

How do we how do we There was this wonderful study by Jill Perry Smith at Emory and her colleagues where they paired people so that some people were working to generate ideas and some people were working on elaborating on an idea and developing it, and then some of them were paired with what they called weak ties and somewhat strong ties.

So weak ties are those relationships with people that we do not talk often with the kind of people you connect with on LinkedIn here and there, but they are not.

They are not.

They don't know things that you are working on and you kind of know them, but only kind of know them.

And this strong ties could be people on your team or close colleagues, those who you check in regularly with and who tend to know how you think about something like I regularly talk to this very close colleague of mine, like James Kaufman.

Yes he knows how I think.

I know how he thinks, and we are kind of on the same page.

So in the study they were able to see what happens when you are generating ideas and working with different kinds of relationship, or you are working to elaborate on ideas and when you are paired with week or strong ties.

And what they found is that when you are coming up with ideas, talking to somebody who you haven't talked to in a long time or who is you know, somebody at the edge of your social network is great, very helpful.

They don't know how you think, you don't know how they think, and there could be sparks there because you're going to have different perspectives.

But the flip side happens when you have to develop an idea, and they found that when you have to develop an idea, those people who are weak ties just want to talk about more new ideas.

They do not really pay attention that you already have something that you're working on, because they don't they don't have the emotional investment in you or your idea.

But those that are strong ties have the emotional investment and they are saying yes, and they are saying, oh, that's a great thought.

Have you also considered so there's an elemental support and then starting with that and building on it.

I love it.

I love it.

I don't think a lot necessarily a lot of things you talked about today, I don't think people are really thinking about necessarily are related to creativity.

And I think you probably caused a shift in a lot of people's thinking today.

And I know that was one of your goals.

So thank you so much, Sarana on being on my podcast and Concrat, huge congratulations on your new book.

I hope it does really really well.

Thank you so much.

And I know we've been thinking and talking about these issues for a long time.

And publishing papers together.

And publishing papers together.

Yeah, yeah, so it couldn't be more proud of you.

Thank you so much, Scott