Listen Carefully

Creativity is a peculiar thing. I think most people believe it’s about making things—inventing things that didn’t exist before. But I think it’s something different. I think creativity is a skill that one develops by listening. It is the catalyst for creation.

I believe creativity is listening to the sound of all that exists.

The window through which we observe the world is limited by time, space, and our senses. We filter this world through our points of view, morality, mood, memory, and perspective. We observe things, collect them, organize them, forget them, revisit them. Somehow, all of these observations begin to form relationships with one another.

Some people seem particularly capable of perceiving relationships between things that appear unrelated. They connect the tangible and intangible—the thing in front of them with something remembered, felt, imagined, or learned. That ability to perceive relationships is, I think, a large part of what we call creativity.

I believe creation is an act of communication more than it is an act of making a thing. We create because we have something we want to say, express, understand, solve, or share. An object, an experience, a meal, a space, a painting—these are all manifestations of a desire to engage with the world and with ourselves.

So why make the distinction?

Maybe not for any particular reason other than curiosity. But I find creativity curious. I like thinking about how ideas come to be, where uniqueness comes from, and whether originality is even a thing.

Personally, I don't think originality is a thing. I know that it is.

But also it isn't.

Every human being is unique and original, while at the same time being remarkably similar to every other human being. When the world encounters someone like Leonardo da Vinci, Nikola Tesla, Basquiat, Einstein, or Elon Musk, it’s hard not to recognize their genius. Their way of observing and creating appears to be singular.

But look more closely and even their uniqueness is connected.

Musk cannot be separated from Tesla. The inventive ways of combining technologies and evolving them seem original because no one had assembled them that way before. The persistence to push those ideas past failure, again and again, is part of what makes the resulting work so singular.

Perhaps creativity feels linear because that's how we experience time: backward, forward, new, old. But maybe creativity isn't linear at all. Maybe it is more like a string that can be accessed at multiple points.

At a concert a songwriter notices the beautiful story told through music, an audiophile the perfect harmony piercing through the imperfect output of the speakers, the die-hard fan feels an emotional connection with the artist as if they were kindred spirits, the event producer notices the performance of the song is running long and will disrupt the following act. All of these people are listening carefully to different parts of the same song. The song is the same but can be heard in so many ways.

A great producer, someone like Pharrell or Rick Rubin, seems to hear broadly, absorbing a multitude of inputs, while also listening acutely to lyrics, tone, rhythm, texture, the instruments, the speed, the delivery, the space between sounds, the history of music, and the people who will eventually hear the song. What seems to make a great producer is discernment.

In great art, creativity seems less about adding and more about deciding what belongs within a field of infinite possibility. Deciding what needs to be louder, quieter, earlier, later, or absent altogether. The result is not any one of those things. It is the relationship between them.

What if, when you look closer at creativity, you discover it's not a string.

What if that string is the edge of a table?

And when you lift your gaze above the edge, you see an endless plane stretching beyond where your eyes can reach. On that tabletop rest infinite objects, experiences, memories, ideas, emotions, sensations—things to see, touch, hold, remember, and connect with.

Maybe creativity is the ability to reach across that table and gather what your arms can carry, shaping those things into something cohesive. Tesla and Da Vinci were exceptional at accessing the depth and breadth of what was available to them. They were able to reach further across that table.

As I wrap this up, I find it more than coincidental that I'm writing from a communal table at a cafe just steps from my apartment. The relationships and analogies emerged as I wrote, but I can't help but think my subconscious made the connections before my fingers could put them on paper.

This awareness before action is what I find so intriguing about creativity.

It’s the flowers on this table transporting you to those growing in a park in Paris. The smells from a plate of food stirring up a memory from childhood. The song playing over the speakers conjuring a person you haven’t thought of in twenty years. The graphic on the shirt of the guy sitting across the room leading you down a rabbit hole to contemplate a worldview, culture, politics, or philosophy developed thousands of years ago.

None of these things are isolated. Everything has existed. Everything is available.

Some people are more creative than others. But I believe creativity is a skill that can be cultivated. It’s the practice of listening with your whole self. It’s a beautiful gift we’ve all been given—one we get to share from our unique perspectives with each other.