Creativity Can’t Be Hacked
You can’t optimize your way out of the messy parts of creativity
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I know a writer and filmmaker who told me he used to hang upside down — sometimes from one of those pullup bars you can attach to a doorway, sometimes off the side of the couch — in the hope that the rush of blood flowing into his head would clear his creative blocks.
Instead, he’d get a headache and end up feeling grumpy.
Like many knowledge workers desperate to crank the ideas tap, he had been led to believe that creativity should be a series of eureka moments, and he was frustrated that he couldn’t generate them on command. When he found himself stuck, he figured he just had to prise loose a single brilliant idea and he’d be back on track.
Creating is hard, frustrating, sometimes even depressing or boring.
Creativity hacks like that headache-inducing one proliferate on Reddit threads and YouTube videos. Some come with a steep price tag. From “smart pills” to online courses offering a “blueprint for creative success” to $5,000 multiday flow-state retreats, creativity is big business.
I get it. I’ve been there. Creating is hard, frustrating, sometimes even depressing or boring. Those moments of struggling to focus, stumbling through half-baked ideas, waiting for something to click — they can be torture. But you can’t optimize your way out of the messy parts of creativity. In fact, you need them.
I’ve been tempted at times — even desperate — to find a shortcut because I needed to finish something faster (hello, this essay!) or generate more ideas on deadline. Sometimes my livelihood as a freelance writer quite literally depends on my ability to be creative on demand.
Enter creativity hacking — tricks that, we’re told, will train our brains into generating more ideas more efficiently and more reliably. In this age of hyperproductivity, in an economy built around the idea of innovation, creativity is the currency we need to succeed. And it can be easy to think that if something isn’t optimized, it’s subpar.
But that’s the fundamental misunderstanding at the root of creativity-hacking culture — and that’s why so few of these…
