001: Looking after the person who looks after the creativity

How to create a living creating for a living

I’ll only visit your inbox if I have something useful or slightly funny to tell you

There are endless books on being creative when it comes to the 'doing'. If you want to know how to have an idea or have more ideas, the resources and workshops are endless. You’ve got your problem to solve, and you’ve got your bag of tools with which to solve them. Everything is right in the world, surely? Well, that depends.

As commercially creative people, our value in the marketplace looks a little like this:

-The product we make is our ideas

-The computer that makes the product is our minds

-The data the computer requires is life experience, insight, information, inspiration, and influence

-The operating system it uses is what I call ‘the four corners of the creative person’. These are sleep, diet, movement, and cognitive stimulation/perspiration/relaxation.

Here, we come to the real crux of the matter. If the operating system is compromised, everything is compromised. What’s worse, the operating system and the data are the two things the ‘institutions’ who buy our product often ask us to compromise on. Creativity, identity, and wellbeing are mutually reinforcing and inextricably linked. So, to look after the creativity, we need to look after the person who looks after the creativity. 

In computer science ‘garbage in, garbage out’ or GIGO, is a concept that flawed input data produces flawed output. That’s without even discussing the operating system that’s running the computer. As creative people, ‘no data’ is probably worse than ‘flawed ideas’. At least you can have a conversation about flawed ideas. At least there’s something to get the ball rolling.

Creating good work is hard. But it’s a hell of a lot harder if you’re tired, stressed, hungover, in poor health, overwhelmed, over-stimulated, digitally distracted, and you just ate a nuclear family’s worth of pizza for lunch. When you combine these things, it starts to look a lot like a person who’s going to fall asleep and face plant a laptop or notepad that’s completely void of ideas. So the question ‘how do we be a dependable commercially creative person’ is a very valuable one and one that will only become more pertinent as deadlines get shorter, while the list of ways we can procrastinate and distract ourselves gets longer. It’s that question I hope to offer some guidance on in this article. More specifically - How do we manufacture our lives so that no matter what is happening in them, we can show up each day and at least be a bit creative? When we make this a priority, we begin to realise how much in our lives that aren’t our actual creative practice, affects our creative practice. Now, this article could be a bit choppy, as there’s so much I want to fit in without writing War and Peace, so, please, bear with me.

If we want to be reliably creative, day in, day out, we need to optimise what we feed our body as much as what we feed our mind. That includes sleep and movement. Trying to retain some cognitive poke as we get older is much better served by physical exercise than it is by Sudoko. What’s more, the critical factor almost always forgotten when people discuss Anders Ericsson’s study of ‘Deliberate Practice and Acquisition of Expert Performance’ (the 10,000 hours one) is that on top of racking up the most total hours spent in deliberate practice, the top performers also slept more than the other students.

Confidence is critical to creativity. More specifically, confidence in one’s ability to be creative is critical to one’s creativity. The more we sacrifice our sleep, diet, and opportunities to move and actually have a life, the more our confidence suffers. Being a slave to our desk helps no one. It’s barely even performative. Let’s consider the creative companies who meerkat over screens when someone leaves the office at 6 pm. They will be far more disappointed when someone who stays until 10 pm fails to crack the brief the following day.

The intelligent worker knows it’s the value created in their hours, not their hours, that count. Value is unlimited. Hours are capped at 24, sorry folks. 8 of those are (or should be) sleep. A further two to four are effectively maintainence. So, that leaves about 12 hours. We might wriggle a little more out of the day if we compromise on our ‘maintenance’. But if you’ve read this far, you can probably guess I don’t recommend it. We can deliver exponential value. Or we can deliver for twelve hours. But it’s highly unlikely we can deliver exponential value for twelve hours. 

When we try to, soon enough, we’re so tired, and deprived of ‘the four corners’ we’re operating at 60 or even 50 percent of our capacity. This means our 12 hour day is at most as effective as a 6 hour day if we had been kinder to ourselves. Suddenly, we suck, and we’re so tired can’t quite put our finger on the reason as to why.

From Spiritual Evolution - How We Are Wired for Faith, Hope, and Love, by George Vaillant:

‘Trust and confidence, like the other positive emotions, stimulate our parasympathetic, not our sympathetic, nervous system. The sympathetic nervous system is catabolic: fight-or-flight uses up the body’s resources. The parasympathetic nervous system is anabolic: faith, hope, and cuddling build up the body’s resources.’

So, in the notes below, I’m going to try and give you some tools for keeping your operating system in ship shape. Bonus: 18 Things Highly Creative People Do Differently

Distractions + Continuous Partial Attention

From Wired to Create:

‘Neuroscientist Richard Davidson has said that the way we live today is causing a ‘national attention deficit'. Researcher Linda Stone warns that modern life is increasingly lived within a state of ‘continuous partial attention.’ Most of us know that state all too well. We’re continually having our attention pulled away from the task at hand by notifications, alerts, calls, texts, emails, and other digital stimulation. Stone explains, ‘In large doses, [continuous partial attention] contributes to a stressful lifestyle, to operating in crisis management mode, and to a compromised ability to reflect, to make decisions, and to think creatively. In a 24/7, always-on world, continuous partial attention is used as our dominant attention mode contributes to a feeling of overwhelm, overstimulation, and to a sense of being unfulfilled.

The average American spends eleven hours interacting with digital devices and checks his or her smartphone every 6.5 minutes—which is 150 times per day. We’d do well to consider how little, everyday distractions might add up in a way that interferes with our creativity and well-being.

As we know, meditation makes your brain stronger. Specifically, “researchers saw that grey matter density increased in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), a brain region located in the frontal lobe that’s associated with self-regulation, thinking, emotion, rational deliberation, and problem-solving.” This is amazing. But, there's a but. "High-levels of media multitasking have been linked with reduced density in the ACC.” Multi-tasking, [and constant email checking and notification pinging] atrophies the very parts of our brains we rely on to consistently be creative.

Did you know research shows if emails and texts are constantly bombarding you, it literally lowers your IQ? Mental performance in an IQ test drops by 5 to 15 points. (5 points if you are a woman and 15 points if you are a man). To put that in perspective, you'd only experience a third of that IQ drop if you were stoned.

Velcro’ing Up Your Life - Taken from ‘Do/Purpose’ by David Hieatt. 

“Velcro works like this: On one side is a series of hooks going in lots of random directions. On the other side is a series of loops going in lots of random directions. When a hook meets a loop, they connect. It is in the connection business. It is the randomness of the hooks and the loops that make Velcro work, but they are also important to us if we want to be interesting. We need to have lots of random hooks and loops. If we read the same old books, we get to know about the thing we know lots about already. We need to subscribe to magazines that we wouldn’t normally subscribe to. We need to go to places that we wouldn’t normally go to, eat at places that may not be our kind of place [and, importantly, we need to give ourselves time to do these things].

We stay interesting by stepping outside our groove. We keep pushing; we leave what we know behind for a bit. This is important from the point of view of coming up with ideas. If your reference points are different to others, then guess what, your ideas are going to be different. To think different: do different, read different, travel different, eat different, etc. Velcro goes in many directions in order to make a connection. If we are interested in new ideas, so should we.”

Sleep

First, we all need sleep. We need at least 7 hours. Ideally, 8. It's more likely that lightning will strike us than it is we are in the minority of people who need less than the recommended amount of sleep. We can actually survive longer without food than we can without sleep. The less sleep we get, the worse we perform, and simultaneously, the less sleep we think we need. Our performance deteriorates without us noticing and becomes our new baseline. 

The National Sleep Foundation and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention both recommend 7 to 9 hours. After 10 consecutive days of 7 hours of sleep, your brain is underperforming whether you realise it or not. So get 8.

From Why We Sleep:

'Take an A student used to scoring in the top 10 percent of virtually anything she does. One study showed that if she gets just under seven hours of sleep on weekdays, and about 40 minutes more on weekends, she will begin to score in the bottom 9 percent of non-sleep-deprived individuals.’

For example, driving a car after 19 hours without sleep will see our performance match that of a drunk driver. Sleep isn’t lazy. Sleep is an active process that repairs and enhances the performance of our brains. 

During the night, an 8-hour cleansing process takes place. Toxins that have built up in our brain during the day, from stress, alcohol, processed foods, and the body’s metabolism, are cleaned out. This includes amyloid plaques, tangles, and tau proteins, which are all major risk factors for ageing diseases like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. Sleep is critical not just for the health of our body, but our brain too. 

Sleep loss can also mean we lose some fundamental human qualities.

-A lack of sleep signals the brain to be hypersensitive to threats. As a result, we become more emotional, argumentative, and vulnerable to anxiety and depression.

-In turn, this dials down less essential functions for survival, such as creativity, long-term planning, or sticking to our goals. We make more impulsive decisions. Given the ever-present temptations of modern life, we’re more likely to ‘cheat on our diet' or slack off at work.

-Sleep is also the process in which important information is consolidated, and more trivial information is trimmed back. This frees up space for us to learn the following day. Deep sleep actually cleans our memory banks, clearing out toxins like beta-amyloid, which can accumulate in Alzheimer’s disease.

-There is also such a thing as beauty sleep: findings show that sleep-deprived people appear less healthy, less attractive, and more tired compared with when they are well-rested. Human skin looks smooth and firm because of a protein known as collagen. As you age, the amount of collagen in your body decreases, causing your skin to become wrinkled. Several nights of poor sleep causes your body to release a stress hormone called cortisol. This hormone prevents the production of collagen and so creates unhealthy-looking skin, fine lines, and dark circles under your eyes.

Sleep is also a built-in therapist, emotionally working out the issues you're dealing with while you're out cold. REM-sleep dreaming offers a form of overnight therapy. That is, REM-sleep dreaming takes the painful sting out of difficult, even traumatic, emotional episodes you have experienced during the day, offering emotional resolution when you awake the next morning.

Sleep also helps you deal with the emotions of others. Less slumber means less emotional intelligence. By removing REM sleep, you can, quite literally, remove people’s level-headed ability to read the social world around them. Things are very different for people who obtain a full night of sleep—one dressed with late-morning, REM-rich slumber. 

Last but not least, as I’ve already noted, if you look at Anders Ericsson’s landmark 1993 study (which was popularised by Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers) there was another factor that significantly influenced peak performance: sleep. On average, the best performers slept 8 hours and 36 minutes. The average American, for comparison, gets just 6 hours and 51 minutes on weeknights.

From Hyperfocus, by Chris Bailey:

“Research shows that attentional space expands and contracts in proportion to how much mental energy we have. Getting enough sleep, for example, can increase the size of attentional space by as much as 58 percent, and taking frequent breaks can have the same effect. This impacts productivity: when attentional space is approximately 60 percent larger, productivity can grow by just as much, especially when working on a demanding task. The better rested we are, the more productive we become.”

Top Tips for Better Sleep

-No coffee or caffeinated drinks after 12 pm. Coffee has an elimination half-life of up to 9.5 hours. Let’s say at 1 pm, you drink a coffee with 100mg of caffeine in it. That means at 10:30 pm, half of that (50mg) is still active in your body, artificially keeping you awake.

-You need at least 7 hours of sleep. You just do. 

-Try to have a consistent sleep and wake schedule, including weekends. Every cell in the body has its own molecular clock. It is these clocks that program your body’s Circadian Rhythm, and it’s your Circadian Rhythm that makes you tired and wanting to go to bed at the same time each day.

-Avoid alcohol, it doesn’t help you sleep. What it does is actually more akin to anesthesia, which is not "real" sleep. Because it's not the real deal, your brain can't do its memory consolidation work properly. Alcohol also decreases the percentage of deep wave sleep you enjoy.

-Have a wind-down ritual, feel calm, feel safe. Stress inhibits sleep. To both brain and body, stress suggests a threat. The body will fight falling asleep if it thinks there is an imminent threat. We’ve made ourselves pretty smart as a species, but our limbic brain doesn’t know the difference between work stress, and a bear trying to make us its dinner. Think about how secure you feel in bed on nights you sleep well. Deep-seated stress and fear can wreak havoc with your unconscious mind. Consider ways of alleviating these worries by, for instance, fitting an especially secure door or window locks, or installing a new smoke detector or burglar alarm. For stress, try a simple meditation such as a body scan before bed.

-Keep your bedroom cool. A bedroom temperature of around 18.3°C is ideal for the sleep of most people. (This is assuming standard bedding and clothing.) For super sleep, take a hot bath an hour before bed. Your body wants its core temperature low when you sleep. This is why you often see people's feet or arms sticking out from under the covers. A bath dilates your blood vessels, which helps the body rid itself of the heat its core is producing. This can boost NREM sleep by up to 15%.

-Keep your bedroom quiet. When you sleep, your unconscious brain is still listening to your environment. This is in case of any sounds that signal danger. But what if you live near an airport, or in a bustling city? Research shows playing the sound of crashing waves helps cover up these disturbances. (White noise works equally well.)

-Have a strategy for how you use light throughout the day. Bright light (particularly sunlight) helps us feel more alert. But dimming lights triggers the release of melatonin, the sleep hormone. Try to match your lighting indoors to the sun outside. If you watch television or use devices, turn on Night Shift or F.Lux. You can also wear blue-light-blocking glasses. Whilst you won't receive light stimulation, you’ll still receive digital stimulation. This excites the brain and is most intense if using social media, which triggers massive releases of dopamine. (So you might want to cut out social media after a certain time each day, too.) When you head to bed, make sure your bedroom is as dark as possible. (So dark you are not able to see your hand in front of your face.) This is a survival mechanism thousands, if not millions of years old. In the darkness, our ancestors could not see predators. But many predators could see our ancestors. The body’s response is to bring on sleep. This way, our ancestors retreated to a safe place to sleep until the light was present again.

-Use the power of association. (Search: Pavlov's dogs). You can use this same concept to help you fall asleep. Choose a soporific piece of music that you like, and ensure that it’s playing quietly as you fall asleep. Over time, your brain will associate the music with sleep. So, listening to the music will help you nod off. A great song to use is ‘Weightless’, by Marconi Union. I'd also recommend switching on a diffuser with some lavender essential oil in it. (You could also sprinkle a few drops on your pillow. A study found lavender does actually improve sleep quality.)

Supplements for better sleep

Do your homework to ensure you are using safe, effective doses of these supplements. Otherwise, you are risking your health and your finances. A good resource for doing this is examine.com. Also, remember, the clue is in the name. Supplements are supposed to supplement a healthy diet and lifestyle, not replace.

-Ashwagandha

-Magnesium

-L-Glycine

-L-Theanine

-Valerian Root

-Apigenin

-Tryptophan

Health, Fitness, Movement

Exercise is the best defense you have against anxiety, stress, depression, and a whole host of other diseases. It helps cells repair themselves, and it quite literally heals the effects of stress through the release of something called brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF. Researchers have found, not surprisingly, that when students exercise regularly, their stress levels drop. Studies have found regular exercise is just as effective as drugs for controlling panic disorders. As John Ratey tells us in Spark, ‘exercise is like taking a little bit of Prozac to boost your mood and a little bit of Ritalin to focus your attention.’

From Alden Mills:

“What if I told you of a pill that makes you smarter, helps you lose weight and build muscle, fights off depression, improves your ability to work longer and harder, and prevents numerous life-threatening conditions including heart disease and diabetes? What would you pay for this pill—$10, $50, maybe $100? Now, what if I told you this pill could change your destiny by making you successful. And what if I told you this pill could give you more confidence to do the things you put your mind to? How much might the pill be worth to you now? $1,000? Maybe $10,000?” 

From Exercised:

‘Back in the 1960's they did a study where healthy twenty-year-olds did nothing but lay in bed all day for three weeks. Afterward, the subjects' health metrics didn't even look like those of twenty-year-olds anymore. They were indistinguishable from forty-year-olds. Three weeks of lying around watching Netflix seemed to age them two decades in three weeks. So, next, the scientists put them on an eight-week exercise regimen. Boom. Their health metrics Benjamin Button'd back to twenty-year-old levels. How did lead researcher Bengt Saltin sum up the results? Humans were meant to move.

30 years later the researchers got the same group of subjects back to study them again, now as fifty-year-olds. The decades had not been kind. So the researchers put them on a six-month exercise regimen. What happened? Boom. From a cardiovascular perspective, they pretty much became twenty-year-olds again. After six months of moderate exercise, the average volunteer’s blood pressure, resting heart rate, and cardiac output returned to his twenty-year-old level.

“The majority of the health problems we attribute to ageing these days are not the direct consequence of age. They're due to modern behaviours and lifestyles. They are "mismatch diseases" - the result of a mismatch between how we were designed to live vs. how we actually do. Type 2 diabetes? It's virtually unheard of in hunter-gatherers. But it's now the fastest-growing disease in the modern world, increasing more than sevenfold between 1975 and 2005. Guess what? Exercise reverses insulin resistance.

How about heart attacks? Before World War 2 they weren't nearly as big an issue. Medical science barely even felt the need to study them. In 1946, researcher Jeremy Morris said you could go to the Royal Society of Medicine library and read all the literature on heart attacks before it was time for tea. But now cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death. How do you prevent heart attacks? Take a guess.

People who don't want to go to the gym act like figuring out the proper workout plan is a mystery on par with dark matter. Truth is, this is one area where there's a clear answer that nearly all the studies agree on. Engage in at least 150 minutes of moderate or 75 minutes of vigorous exercise a week and weight train at least twice a week. Epidemiologists have calculated that this level of activity will reduce my risk of dying prematurely by 50 percent and lower my chances of getting heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and certain cancers by roughly 30 to 50 percent.’

Health, Fitness, Movement - Top Tips

-Eat less sugar. Please trust me. And if that route to you trusting me takes too long for your liking, trust me in this way.

-Supplement with Vitamin D3. If you live in the UK or anywhere climatically similar, you are likely deficient.

-If you are looking to build muscle or strength, take Creatine. It also has life-extension properties.

-Exercise in the morning, fasted, and outside, amongst nature, when possible

-Play a team sport. Not only will it help you make friends, but you’ll also enjoy a feeling of belonging. This is not to be underestimated. But more than that, exercise is infinitely more likely to happen when there is social accountability. As James Clear says, ‘the key, if you want to build habits that last, is to join a group where the desired behaviour is the normal behaviour.’

-Centre your training around being able to sprint as fast as you can. Strength, power, conditioning, health, longevity, and athleticism will all be best optimised by a program designed to sprint as fast as you can.

-Try to do some form of meditation. But don’t formalise it or try to be good at it. For example, intense exercise, where I’m grunting like a warthog, everything is burning, and I can’t catch my breath, is my meditation.

-Mouths are made for eating. Noses are made for breathing. Breathe through your nose as often as you can. Trust me. And if you don’t trust me, read a book called ‘The Oxygen Advantage’. The only time we used to breathe through our mouths thousands of years ago was when we were in a true emergency situation. Now, some of us always breathe through our mouths, essentially living in a constant state of fight-or-flight stress. That’s not a good idea.

-Stop using products that contain the ingredient ‘fragrance’. Watch the documentary ‘Stink’ to find out why. Learn which essential oils combine well and make your own fragrances. It's cheaper and more unique than anything you can buy from a shelf. Buy natural soaps and solid shampoos. This will also result in you creating less plastic pollution.

-Use Fluoride-free toothpaste. Fluoride interferes with melatonin production, which reduces sleep quality and makes it harder to fall asleep.

-Take 100mg of L-theanine with each cup of coffee.

Lifestyle

In The How of Happiness, Sonja Lyubomirsky tells us 12 Happiness Activities that’ve been scientifically proven to increase our happiness levels:

-Expressing Gratitude

-Cultivating Optimism

-Avoiding Overthinking and Social Comparison

-Practising Acts of Kindness

-Nurturing Social Relationships

-Developing Strategies for Coping

-Learning to Forgive

-Increasing Flow Experiences

-Savouring Life’s Joys

-Committing to Your Goals

-Practising Religion and Spirituality

-Taking Care of Your Body: Meditation + Physical Activity + Acting Like a Happy Person

The How of Happiness, by Sonja Lyubomirsky

‘We found that the happiest people take pleasure in other people’s successes and show concern in the face of others’ failures. A completely different portrait, however, has emerged of a typical unhappy person—namely, as someone who is deflated rather than delighted about his peers’ accomplishments and triumphs and who is relieved rather than sympathetic in the face of his peers’ failures and undoings.’

In 1932, weighed down by the sorrows and agonies of his self-absorbed and aimless clients, an Australian psychiatrist named W. Béran Wolfe summed up his philosophy like this: ‘If you observe a really happy man you will find him building a boat, writing a symphony, educating his son, growing double dahlias in his garden, or looking for dinosaur eggs in the Gobi Desert.’ He was right. People who strive for something personally significant, whether it’s learning a new craft, changing careers, or raising moral children, are far happier than those who don’t have strong dreams or aspirations. Find a happy person, and you will find a project.’

Diet

I’m passionate about this topic. I could riff on this topic long enough you could actually die of starvation while reading it. So, I’m limiting myself to two sentences. 

1

Green things are good, lean things are good, and beany/leantil’y things are good (but soak them overnight before you eat them).

2

There are essential fatty acids, there are essential amino acids, and our brains, livers, and muscles all require some carbohydrate - worry less about which food group is demonic and focus more on eating real food, with one ingredient, like avocado, for example, which is 100% avocado. 

Sentence 2 was long, admittedly, but I did do it. Well done me. In addition to the above, I’d recommend reading/listening to this, this, this, this, and this. (Each requires 25 minutes or less). If you enjoy the condensed versions, consider reading the full books.

The power of thinking prolifically

Below is a wonderful example from ‘Art & Fear’ of how the ability to think and work prolifically will always trump the ability the produce one killer idea. Thinking prolifically also takes the pressure off. It’s about having an idea, writing it down, and then having another. It becomes a game - i.e. ’how many ideas can I come up with? Can I come up with more ideas than yesterday? How many can I come up with in an hour? Can I beat that in the next hour?’

From Art & Fear, by David Bayles and Ted Orland:

“The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class, he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pounds of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an “A. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work — and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat theorising about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.”

The Power of Accumulative Advantage

Even working marginally harder than others around you will still see you reap the majority of the rewards. James Clear shows us why in his discussion of the Accumulative Advantage.

'The Amazon rainforest is one of the most diverse ecosystems on Earth. Scientists have cataloged approximately 16,000 different tree species in the Amazon. But despite this remarkable level of diversity, researchers have discovered that there are approximately 227 “hyper-dominant” tree species that make up nearly half of the rainforest. Just 1.4 percent of tree species account for 50 percent of the trees in the Amazon. But why? Imagine two plants growing side by side. Each day they will compete for sunlight and soil. If one plant can grow just a little bit faster than the other, then it can stretch taller, catch more sunlight, and soak up more rain. The next day, this additional energy allows the plant to grow even more. This pattern continues until the stronger plant crowds the other out and takes the lion’s share of sunlight, soil, and nutrients. From this advantageous position, the winning plant has a better ability to spread seeds and reproduce, which gives the species an even bigger footprint in the next generation. This process gets repeated again and again until the plants that are slightly better than the competition dominate the entire forest. Scientists refer to this effect as “accumulative advantage.” What begins as a small advantage gets bigger over time. One plant only needs a slight edge in the beginning to crowd out the competition and take over the entire forest. The margin between good and great is narrower than it seems. What begins as a slight edge over the competition compounds with each additional contest.’

This doesn’t mean ‘swinging dicks’. God, please, no. It doesn’t mean shouting louder or being the biggest voice in the room. It means working smarter, more proactively, and harder, in that order, specifically. It means asking more questions and more frequently seeking feedback to help you grow and improve. This can become a self-fulfilling prophecy where being more naturally competitive (even if only self-competitive) allows one to develop at a greater rate than the mean, and often be referred to as “naturally talented”.

It’s hard to score without a goal - from ‘The Art of Learning’ by Josh Waitzkin:

‘Our Vague intentions need to become strictly-defined Implementation Intentions. Some students set a vague goal while others set what [Peter] Gollwitzer calls an ‘implementation intention.’ As he explains the term: “Make a very detailed plan on how you want to achieve what you want to achieve. What I’m arguing in my research is that goals need plans, ideally, plans that include when, where, and which kind of action to move towards the goal.” In other words, if a student’s vague goal was to [find a job at a creative agency by the time they graduate] their implementation intention could be [‘I will put together a list of my top ten favourite agencies. I will then find a Senior creative agency that has made at least 3 pieces of work that make me jealous. I will then email each Senior Creative 6 months before I graduate’].

Comparing Gollwitzer and Brandstätter’s two participant groups is where things get interesting. A remarkable 62 percent of students who set a specific implementation intention followed through on their goals. The group that did not set an implementation intention fared a lot more poorly, following through on their original intention a third as often—a paltry 22 percent of the time. This effect, which subsequent studies validated further, was positively staggering. Setting specific intentions can double or triple your odds of success.’

People who caught the bus earlier than we did can tell us where and when to catch it. They can even tell us how they got such a great seat. The only thing they can’t do for us, is make the journey to the bus stop, wait for the bus, get on it, and fight for a seat. I hopped on the bus almost ten years ago, and I’m still some way from my destination. But I hope the tools I share in this article can help people find their way. If there’s one thing to take away from this article, it’s this:

If you want to look after the creativity, you have to look after the person who looks after the creativity.