Report
Creativity Is Much More Than 10,000 Hours of Deliberate Practice
Creators are not mere experts. Instead of deliberately practicing down an already existing path, they often create their own path for others to follow
blogs.scientificamerican.com
Great share and thanks! I have personally experienced and vouch for the #2 point - Creativity is created messy. My daughter is most creative when she makes a mess of her room :) After all doing same thing over and over again leading to expertise becomes mechanical after a while without inducing any new creativity.
I think the idea of expertise is to have something engraved as mechanical in your brain, so then you can focus and explore new territories. For example, playing the piano, once you can find any key automatically and don't have to think to play a specific chord, you can use that brain power to think what chord would sound good next or quickly try various chords. Once the chord-choosing part becomes mechanical, you can focus on creating/predicting themes, phrases or melodies. Once that becomes almost mechanical, you have the brain power left to think of harmonies and what to play on top of the existing melody.
The idea of deliberate practice is simply to create habits that free up your brain power to be used for other new and creative tasks.
"Deliberate practice is really important for fields such as chess and instrumental performance because they rely on consistently replicable behaviors that must be repeated over and over again. But not all domains of human achievement rely on consistently replicable behaviors. For most creative domains, the goals and ways of achieving success are constantly changing, and consistently replicable behaviors are in fact detrimental to success."
I guess programming fits into the "highly developed fields" category, so I would say, the more practice the better. But I don't necessarily see a clear division between "highly developed fields" that benefit from repetition and creative activities. I think anything that requires an element of problem-solving, including programming, or activities like chess, for example, also involve an element of creativity. So, I think there's an overlap. Yes, the more practice the better. But I would disagree with the premise that (i) these aren't creative activities, and that (ii) creative activities don't benefit from practice - repetition doesn't mean there's never scope to change direction.
I also disagree with the article, as it isolates too much the idea of creativity as something that's simply innate.
There are programming, and then there's PROGRAMMING. Some are just to get things to work. Some are art.
try 0 a variable. then there's the correct way: xor ax,ax