More Acclaim for The Creative Curve “The Internet leveled the playing field for content creators, the creatively inclined, and just about anyone interested in sharing their thoughts with others. The Creative Curve provides a learned perspective on how the structural barriers that prevent people from connecting with one another, and ultimately understanding one another, have shifted, while showing how everyone has the ability to create their own creative masterpiece.” —Alexis Ohanian, cofounder of Initialized Capital and Reddit “The perfect book for any marketer who feels that they want to be more creative but doesn’t know how. Gannett makes clear that creating hit products and campaigns is not something mystical, but rather a critical skill to learn and arm yourself with.” —Meagen Eisenberg, CMO of MongoDB “If you want to understand creativity, and cultivate and maximize your own, The Creative Curve is the book you need.” —Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class “The Creative Curve is a must-read for digital marketers. Our job is to tell amazing stories that resonate with our audience. Gannett makes it clear that honing this skill not only is possible but has a well-traveled road map.” —Beverly Jackson, vice president of social strategy for MGM Resorts International “In The Creative Curve, Allen Gannett demystifies creativity and gives readers the tools to launch more creative lives. Through a powerful combination of research, stories, and surprising insights, this delightful read makes creativity accessible for the self-identified non-creatives and empowers the creatives to maximize their potential.” —Sanyin Siang, CEO coach and executive director of Duke University’s Coach K Center on Leadership and Ethics “The Apollo lunar program is arguably humankind’s single most creative endeavor. Apollo was a personal and professional passion of mine, and I can say with certainty that it came from hard work. Now, fifty years later, Allen Gannett shows you a remarkable system to harness that same creative power for your idea or company, and he does so in an engaging, fast-paced way. What are you waiting for? With Allen as your guide, it’s time for your moon shot!” —David Meerman Scott, bestselling author of ten books, including Marketing the Moon: The Selling of the Apollo Lunar Program, soon to be a major film “Drawing on interviews with highly successful entrepreneurs, Gannett shows that the generation of creative ideas is not the result of a stroke of genius—any more than are the winning performances of Olympic athletes. Both are the culmination of years of preparation and practice. His book uncovers effective practice methods such as intensive self-study and experimentation, the search for feedback from masters and peers, and the gradual refinement of product ideas.” —K. Anders Ericsson, Conradi Eminent Scholar and professor of psychology, Florida State University; coauthor of Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise “The Creative Curve is a must-read for anyone in the business of innovation. And Allen Gannett is one of the smartest entrepreneurs and writers of his generation. His writing is fresh, compelling, and delightfully fun to get through. You’ll find yourself wishing for even more.” —Shane Snow, author of Dream Teams and Smartcuts “Can we learn to be creative? The Creative Curve demonstrates, persuasively, that yes, you can. Gannett interviewed living idols and leading researchers. From this, he paints a picture of creativity not as some mystical event but as a practical skill rooted in neuroscience. Ultimately, he delivers on the cover’s promise, demystifying how to develop the right idea, at the right time. An essential read.” —Emma Carrasco, CMO of the National Geographic Society To Harry Weller Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Preface Part I: Overturning the Mythology of Creativity Chapter 1: The Making of a Dream Chapter 2: Learning a Lie Chapter 3: The Origin of the Myth Chapter 4: What Is Talent? Chapter 5: What Is a Genius? Chapter 6: The Creative Curve Part II: The Four Laws of the Creative Curve Chapter 7: Law I: Consumption Chapter 8: Law II: Imitation Chapter 9: Law III: Creative Communities Chapter 10: Law IV: Iterations Epilogue Acknowledgments A Note on Sourcing and Methods Notes About the Author W Preface e’ve all been told a lie about the nature of creativity. For as long as anyone can remember, our culture has perpetuated the myth that creative success is the result of a sudden light-bulb moment. That writing bestselling novels, creating revered paintings, or developing viral mobile apps has a mystical quality, unconnected to rational thought or logic, that is reserved for “geniuses” rather than for the rest of us mere mortals. In fact, for centuries now we have been persuaded of this by wise men and critics who excitedly recount stories of creative genius that emphasize the individual, the subconscious, and the seemingly divine machinations behind creative achievement. My goal in writing The Creative Curve is to reveal the truth about creative success: that there is in fact a science behind what becomes a hit and that today’s neuroscience gives us an unprecedented ability to decode and engineer the necessary moments of “inspiration” to create popular work that your audience can’t get enough of. I have always been addicted to patterns. As a kid, this took the form of spending countless hours playing computer games, watching and waiting to see how the AI worked so I could destroy my virtual opponent and save the kingdom (or planet, or country—I think you get the idea). As a teenager, this turned into a short-lived (and fairly successful) obsession with getting cast on game shows. Today, this lifelong geekery has found two homes. By day, I run a company that works with large brands to help them uncover the meaning—that is to say, the patterns—within their marketing data. We help Fortune 500s and high-growth start-ups understand the marketing channels, messages, and tactics that will work the best in the future, based on the data from their past. By night, I’ve done everything possible to answer the question of whether there is a pattern to creative success. I’ve spent the last two years interviewing some of the world’s most successful creators. From culinary titans to bestselling novelists and even top YouTube Creators, I sat down, ate, chatted, and Skyped with some of the leading so-called creative geniuses of our time. In addition, I spoke to the most distinguished academics in the studies of creativity, genius, and neuroscience. What did I find? It turns out that the mythology around creativity is just that, myth. You do not have to be born with some X-Men-like superpower to achieve great artistic or entrepreneurial heights. In fact, there is a pattern that successful creative people leverage to make hits, one that’s accessible to almost anyone. It’s intuitive, but it’s also learnable. And it has nothing to do with mysticism. You don’t need to take LSD to get inspired, or pray for a moment of overwhelming insight. Based on what I found, it turns out you can intentionally follow what the world’s most vaunted creative geniuses do—and get that much closer to creating and executing your own great ideas. Let’s get started. Part I Overturning the Mythology of Creativity I t was November 1963. Paul McCartney woke up obsessed with a melody he had heard while dreaming. The twenty-one-year-old pop star stumbled over to the small piano nestled in his room on the top floor of 57 Wimpole Street in central London. What was that melody? He sat at the piano, trying to re-create the notes he had heard in his sleep. It felt so familiar. He finally put it together: G, F-sharp minor 7th, B, E minor, and E. He played it again and again. He loved the way it sounded but was certain the melody must come from some half-forgotten song he had heard before. Like many musicians, he fretted that he might be borrowing the melody of another song. Too familiar, he thought. Where have I heard this before? The melody McCartney heard in his dream would ultimately become “Yesterday,” the most recorded song in music history, with three thousand different versions. It has been played more than seven million times on American television and radio and is the fourth-highest-grossing song of all time. McCartney himself once said of his famous song, “It is possibly the smash of this century.” Indeed, “Yesterday” may well have been one of the twentieth century’s biggest hits, and, apparently, it was the result of a dream. He told an interviewer for The Beatles Anthology that the experience had a profound impact on how he viewed creativity: “It’s amazing that it just came to me in a dream. That’s why I don’t profess to know anything; I think music is all very mystical.” For creativity researchers, Paul McCartney’s sudden melodic epiphany is a classic example of creativity coming to an artist unplanned, in a flash of genius: a “moment of inspiration,” in which an idea suddenly rises to one’s conscious awareness. It is the unexpected nature of these bursts of inspiration, with no apparent origin, that gives them a supernatural quality. Anyone who has had a great idea in the shower or on a run or walk has experienced some version of these moments. Whether it is J. K. Rowling being struck with the idea for Harry Potter on a train to London, or Mozart being able to compose songs without effort, these accounts have become modern-day staples of what I call the inspiration theory of creativity: the idea that creative success results from a mysterious internal process punctuated by unpredictable flashes of genius. And our culture has embraced the idea that a self-reliant person, born with the right innate talents, can produce hits out of sheer inspiration. What’s more, this view is not confined to the traditional arts, like music and literature. Steve Jobs, the prototypical genius of the digital age, explained, in an often-repeated quote, that creativity is an organic process: “When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something.” The inspiration theory of creativity dominates how most people think about creative greatness today. But why do these sudden moments of inspiration occur? Is sheer IQ genius the only explanation? If we studied the settings of these creative moments, would they verify or disprove the inspiration theory? Name That Tune The morning the melody for “Yesterday” came to McCartney was a typical lazy day. As was his routine, he awoke around noon. He and his girlfriend Jane would often stay out late at London’s restaurants and clubs. McCartney worried about why the melody he woke up with was so clear, so concise. It seemed too finished, too complete. He assumed he had accidently plagiarized it. Was it from one of the classics he had heard his father play so often? “Stairway to Paradise”? “Chicago”? “Lullaby of the Leaves”? The Beatles were thoughtful about creating their hits. Lennon once described to an interviewer how intentional the band had been when writing their first number-one single, “Please Please Me”: “We tried to make it as simple as possible…we aimed this one straight at the hit parade. It was my attempt at writing a Roy Orbison song.” For McCartney, “Yesterday” was an explicit exception to his typical methodical songwriting process. The tune of “Yesterday” was like “a jazz melody,” McCartney later said. “My dad used to know a lot of old jazz tunes. I thought maybe I’d just remembered it from the past.” He went to his friends and asked if they recognized the song. First, he asked his songwriting partner, John Lennon. Lennon told him he had never heard it before. Still skeptical, McCartney tried his friend Lionel Bart, who had composed numerous hit songs. When McCartney hummed the melody, Bart drew a blank. It seemed as if the song might be original. Still not convinced, McCartney pressed on. He tried to think of someone older and more experienced, someone who might be able to clear his conscience. A few days later, McCartney visited Alma Cogan, a British singer known for the song “Dreamboat” and sixteen other hits. If anyone could recognize the song, she could. He sat down at the piano and played the melody for Cogan and her sister. “It’s lovely,” Cogan said when he was done. Had she heard it before? McCartney asked. Was it someone else’s song? Cogan said, “No. It’s original. Nice song.” Finally, McCartney was persuaded. He had seemingly dreamed a masterful melody, following the mystical nature of the inspiration theory of creativity. We can interpret the inspiration theory in one of two ways. The positive view is that a flash of genius can strike anyone. “Yesterday” came to McCartney in a dream, outside of his control. It’s possible that all of us can dream a chart-topping melody. On the other hand, most of us believe that if we lack the raw talent or innate genius, these moments will never strike. The inspiration theory of creativity is only relevant for those born with so-called genius. As a result, many of us are tempted to put aside any ambition to become the next great musician, novelist, or entrepreneur, settling instead to be a consumer or patron of the arts. Meanwhile, the optimistic ones are just waiting, hoping for a sudden flash of inspiration to visit them. The inspiration theory is supported by countless anecdotes from the creative artists of our time. Authors talk of waiting for creative inspiration. Entrepreneurs talk of waiting for a great idea to strike. Musicians talk of falling into a creative groove. There are countless books and blog posts on creativity, offering suggestions on how we can push through writer’s block or discover our “flow.” Biopics of great artists amplify the inevitability of their creativity, as well as suggesting it is the domain of mad geniuses. Meanwhile, the rest of us are left on the sidelines. But what if this entire theory is wrong? What if you don’t have to wait for lightning to strike? The Road to “Yesterday” While the sudden creation story of “Yesterday” is relatively well known, what is less known is how McCartney went from the original melody to crafting the full song. The notion that this song came to McCartney in an instant is wrong. All that had come to him in the dream was a simple chord progression. When McCartney awoke with a melody in his head, it was a long way from a completed song. For one thing, the tune had no words. He knew he needed to come up with placeholder lyrics while he continued working on the song’s structure. As he was playing the melody to Alma Cogan, her mother walked into the room, asking, “Anyone like some scrambled eggs?” This gave McCartney the temporary lyric he needed: Scrambled Eggs. The initial lyrics he came up with were: Scrambled eggs Oh, my baby, how I love your legs Diddle diddle I believe in scrambled eggs. From there, it took almost twenty months of grueling work to complete the song. McCartney became obsessed. While he worked on it, the people around McCartney became sick of hearing about his ever-changing song in progress. As George Harrison told an interviewer about that period, “He’s always talking about that song. You’d think he was Beethoven or somebody…” Even when the Beatles started filming their second movie, Help!, McCartney didn’t waver. He worked on the song during breaks. At one point, the film’s producer, Dick Lester, was so fed up that he said, “If you play that bloody song any longer, I’ll have the piano taken offstage. Either finish it, or give it up!” Later, on their first tour through France, Paul had a piano placed in their hotel room so that he could continue working on “Yesterday.” It paid off. When producer George Martin first heard the song, he was mesmerized. It was different. In fact, it was so original that he was worried that it wouldn’t fit into a Beatles album. McCartney realized that the song needed melancholy lyrics (scrambled eggs were not a valid topic for a brooding song). “I remember thinking that people liked sad tunes; they like to wallow a bit when they’re alone, to put a record on and go, ‘Ahh.’ ” He finally finished the song, sketching out the final lyrics, on a trip to Portugal in May 1965. A month later he went to the studio with George Martin to record “Yesterday.” According to Martin, McCartney came into Studio Two at EMI and played “Yesterday” on an acoustic guitar. The only change Martin could think of was adding orchestral strings. Paul, however, thought that was too much. In response, Martin suggested a quartet, and with that melodic but dark addition, “Yesterday” was born. The iconic song that is remembered as the result of a flash of genius was, in fact, a nearly two-year odyssey—one that at times wore McCartney (and his friends) down. While the mythology behind the Beatles celebrates the story of “Yesterday” as one of sudden creative genius, as we’ve seen it was hardly a linear path from dream to recording. “Yesterday” was not a pure product of a light-bulb moment. It was hard, grueling work. But couldn’t you argue that it began with an initial moment of divine inspiration? How do we account for that? There is a cottage industry of researchers who are fascinated by the origin story of “Yesterday”: academics interested in creativity, music historians, and avid Beatles fans. All have worked to answer the question of where the melody really came from. The most enlightening theory of the origin of “Yesterday” comes from Beatles expert Ian Hammond, who points out that the song “is a direct evolution of the melody from the Ray Charles version of ‘Georgia on My Mind.’ Not only does ‘Yesterday’ share a chord progression with the earlier song, but it also mirrors the bass lines of ‘Georgia on My Mind.’ ” True enough, the Beatles and Paul McCartney were big admirers of Ray Charles. They kicked off their career playing his covers in the bars and clubs of Hamburg, Germany. John Lennon said that when they started playing their own songs, it was a “quite traumatic thing because we were doing such great numbers of other people’s, of Ray Charles and [Little] Richard and all of them.” For Paul McCartney, what looked like divine inspiration was in fact likely the result of subconscious processing of music he loved. Like most music, it was an evolution of the chord progressions that already existed. In fact, as Hammond points out, Ray Charles’s version of “Georgia on My Mind” was an evolution of Hoagy Carmichael’s original version of the song. This type of ingestion, reinvention, and influence is common in stories of creative success. When McCartney reflects on how he wrote “Yesterday,” he tends to focus on his sudden inspiration for the tune. But, in at least one interview, he acknowledged that there was something more mechanical at work: “If you’re very spiritual then God sent me a melody, I’m a mere vehicle. If you wanna be a bit more cynical, then I was loading my computer for millions of years listening to all the stuff I listened to through my dad and through my musical tastes, including people like Fred Astaire, Gershwin, and finally my computer printed out one morning what it thought was a good tune.” The things we view as unexplainable genius often have a genesis of some sort. The inspiration theory of creativity has been around for thousands of years, since the era of ancient Greece. While the theory is still breathlessly recounted in the press, modern research that I’ll discuss demonstrates that creative potential is within all of us. However, if our perception of McCartney and other creative artists is flawed —if they are more accurately described as tireless and intensely focused—that still does not explain how they achieved commercial success. Plenty of artists toil away for years at their craft without recognition or acclaim. An endless