The Days of Greatness, The Days of Pain.

I wish creativity were less painful. I wish I could wake up in the morning in a good mood and have a great, groundbreaking idea all day.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that. Creativity is the other side of the same coin as Weltschmerz.

Two weeks ago, I stood up with my left foot. Life seemed pointless, and I saw my current situation and future in very dark colors. This lousy mood lasted for the whole morning.

The weather was beautiful outside, and I had no urgent duties. I could take a walk in the park.

But that thought annoyed me even more. “Yet another pointless walk to the park!”—I frowned.

I stayed home alone with my black thoughts instead. These few hours allowed me to spoil the day for many friends by complaining to them that life makes no sense.

The Switch.

And then, by noon, something switched on my mind. I sat at my computer and started producing texts, book chapters, business ideas, and connections I hadn’t considered. I wanted to forget about all this pointlessness of life so much that I focused on some problems I could solve instead. 

By 4 p.m., I had already had a very productive day. Much more productive than usual—and my mood had turned awful to excellent. I was in a mood to dance and sing.

For the following week, I was restlessly producing, and I made it with much better speed and quality than usual. The good mood has lasted until now.

The Cycle.

This was not the first time such an incident had happened. It happens regularly (but is uncorrelated with the monthly cycle, if that’s your question).

The cycle is always the same: I wake up with strong emotions, feeling helpless and miserable and feeling deeply that any action is futile. In that state of mind, I usually also become obsessed with time.

So, I started analyzing all the mistakes of my life and all the occasions when I lost a substantial amount of time. I see life bars in front of my eyes, similar to the ones you can see in your character panel in video games.

There is a separate life bar showing my total life-burn bar (which starts at zero and ends at ~85-90), professional career bar (which starts at 25 and ends at ~65-70). Then, there is the “time to build a family” bar (which starts at ~25 and ends at ~45). Finally, there is the “energy-burn-during-the-day” bar (which is relatively high at that point as it’s morning).

Why Do I Torture Myself With Time?

I just torture myself with this time analysis. I blame myself for the fact that time has passed and perhaps I’m not at the stage I’d like to be.

According to Neff (2003), self-compassion is a healthier alternative to this kind of harsh self-judgment. Whoever meets me in that phase is unlucky.

Not only because I emanate pessimism and decadency but also because I can be persuasive and successfully convince others that life is pointless. It’s almost like a wicked game.

But then, during the day, things start to get better and better. By the evening, all my life energy is back. I have plenty of new ideas (some excellent ones!).

And I usually embark on a rollercoaster of new projects or quickly go down the to-do list with the projects already lined up. And that’s how it goes: the days of greatness always start from pain for me.

How Is Creativity Born?

So, do you need to get into a painful state of mind and completely reset your brain to start producing creative content? I searched the literature to see if other people had experienced the same problem. This phenomenon is not reported in the research literature, though—or at least, I didn’t find any mention of it.

The determinants and catalyzers of creativity are an overlooked research topic. According to Gruber, Gelman, and Ranganath (2014), states of high curiosity measurably enhance learning and memory.

However, there are many examples of famous people, such as Frida Kahlo, Ludwig van Beethoven, Edvard Munch, Sylvia Plath, Mark Twain, and J.K. Rowling, who successfully channeled their pain—either physical or existential—into their creative work.

According to Andreasen (1987), a study of 30 creative writers found a substantially higher rate of mood disorder among them than among matched non-writers. The connection also appeared in their first-degree relatives.

Can We Measure Creativity?

I conducted some studies on creativity ten years ago as an undergraduate student in Psychology (specializing in Psychometrics). Namely, together with my Master’s thesis advisor, we tried to standardize a test that he had designed. The test aimed to measure so-called divergent intelligence, in other words, creativity.

It was supposed to parallel the Raven’s Progressive Matrices test, which measures a so-called fluid intelligence, IQ. Namely, similarly to Raven’s test, it was based on just one language-neutral task based on visual information.

According to Guilford (1950), creativity is best captured through divergent thinking tasks. These involve generating many varied, non-redundant categories or uses for the same stimulus. This is opposed to the single-right-answer reasoning that classic IQ tests like Raven’s measure.

The subject was given a set of 25 weird shapes and asked to classify them into as many classes as possible within ten minutes. The subjects had to use their creativity to create new classes independently.

The classes could not be repetitive. For example, classes such as “an object with three sharp edges” and “an object with four sharp edges” would be counted as just one.

The premise was good, but in the end, we failed in standardizing this test. The primary reason was that to standard a psychometric test, you need to assume that you measure a feature that has a Gaussian distribution. This assumption makes perfect sense—in the human population, any psychological trait should have been Russianized by evolution and gene mixing.

What Separates the Creative From the Rest?

However, in our case, the distribution of results turned out to be highly non-Gaussian. I can say even more: it was bimodal.

The study had two separate groups of subjects: those who could create 20 or more categories and those who could barely make 3-5. There was no one in the middle!

What could this result mean in practice? It was yet another example showing that it’s hard to grasp creativity. Our test measured something else.

Maybe it measured two distinct features at a time. What features? No idea.

Do you know any methods for characterizing or catalyzing creativity? If so, please share them with me!