Our days can be a stream of never-ending emotional busywork and social obligations.
Meetings, emails, and time-sensitive demands from others fill our digital inboxes. Requests for help, guidance, feedback, and involvement overflow our emotional inbox.
On top of all that we’re supposed to be able to achieve “flow”: a timeless, effortless, joy-filled quasi-state where research gushes out of us. Cue the climactic Instagram background soundtrack.
Flow states do exist. But sometimes we don’t need another guru telling us to get into flow on top of all the other research skills we’re juggling.
We just need a small perspective shift to help us bring a little more creativity to the parts of our research we really care about, even in the midst of all the life noise.
Four Nano Mindset Shifts for Scientific Creativity
Here are four nano mindset shifts to use when you need to dig your scientific creativity out from under the pile of big rocks and little rocks cluttering your week:
- Scientific creativity is an act of craftsmanship, not inspiration.
If you follow our Instagram page (@insightfulscientist) you might have seen our Quotable Scientist post about poetry and discovery from economist and computational psychologist Herb Simon (1978 Nobel Prize winner in economics) and Co. They point to something we all get caught up in: thinking scientific creativity is an act of genius instead of an act of craftsmanship, like poetry or pottery.
Scientific creativity is about working the technical process and coming up with tiny solutions to keep making progress every time we encounter an obstacle. Every bit of code we jury-rig, every mathematical model we bootstrap, and every piece of hardware we conjure out of leftover scraps is creativity in action. Crafting a tiny solution to a tiny problem before tackling the next tiny problem and stacking all those tiny wins leads to our big research breakthroughs.
- Creative scientific ideas flow through your mind all the time, you just ignore most of them.
That idea you almost brought up in conversation and then held back because you realized there was an obvious technical flaw? Or that time you fantasized about having all the research resources in your dream research set up? That’s your mind conjuring up creative ways to fulfill your science ideas.
Yes, many of the ideas may be wrong.
But guess what, literally everyone else in history was wrong until one person came along and found the right idea and made a discovery. Wrong but novel ideas is the norm. That means you are doing scientific creativity right.
- Size doesn’t matter to creativity.
Crafting tiny solutions to tiny problems on repeat. Acknowledging all the creative ideas that pop into your head around a project. We dismiss these as tiny wins. But these tiny wins are what pave the way for the big breakthrough down the line.
The more little pieces you work on and the more ideas you consider and discard, the deeper into the heart of the project you get. And that depth is what lets us see things no one else has noticed before, because they didn’t dig that deep.
- Sometimes your scientific creativity is tweaking your life, not your research design.
Humans don’t have a choice to be creative. We just are. It’s survival. We need to think up news ways to find food when we lose our job, or get healthy when we fall sick, or cheer up our loved ones when they get sad.
Sometimes, your scientific creativity is busy trying to cobble together solutions to your irl problems: broken home goods, failed personal developments plans…strategies to manage multi-timezone jet lag from working and stanning at the same time.
It’s not that you don’t have creativity. It’s just that it’s preoccupied with something your brain thinks is more important. Be patient. As soon as the red-alert-level problems are handled, your brain will free up a few resources to let you use that technical creativity on other things.
Pick Just One Perspective Shift
Scientific creativity isn’t something we need to add to our to do list.
It’s like breathing.
Sometimes we just need to notice that we are already doing it.
That reminds us that we always have an immediate way to tap into it. Sure, we might have had grand plans to block out two glorious hours of “flow” time and “deep work”. But bosses, spouses, students, errands, and deadlines left us with 5 minutes, while walking to the bathroom, and wondering where it all went wrong.
In that five minutes we can choose to focus differently: on one tiny thing and all the creative little ideas that pop into our mind to handle it.
Give Yourself a Mental Break and Trust Your Scientific Creativity to Appear
Discovery will happen someday. But sometimes we have a lot going on right now in this moment. Your scientific creativity will be with you every step of the way. You don’t need to find it.
Just let it find you. After that five-minute bathroom break.
