美国国家公共电台 NPR Can Slowing Down Help You Be More Creative?

Can Slowing Down Help You Be More Creative?

GUY RAZ, HOST:

On the show today, we're talking about slowing down. And this...

ADAM GRANT: I can go as slowly as you want.

RAZ: ...Is Adam Grant.

GRANT: A Wharton professor of management and psychology 1 and author of "Give And Take" and "Originals."

RAZ: But you're not, like, a slow guy at all. Like, you're, like, the polar opposite of that.

GRANT: I am. I can't stand inefficiency 2. And I tend to do things as quickly as possible without compromising quality standards.

RAZ: In fact, Adam hates inefficiency so much that he's a self-described precrastinator (ph), as in the opposite of procrastinator 3.

GRANT: Guilty as charged.

RAZ: And what is that, by the way?

GRANT: You know that panic you feel, like, a couple hours before a big deadline. You're behind. Well, I feel that a few months before that big deadline.

RAZ: All right. So what happens when you can't get something done, like, way in advance? Like, what happens to you?

GRANT: I feel like I'm going to combust.

RAZ: Really?

GRANT: (Laughter) It's agonizing 4, yeah.

RAZ: Ok, I read that you finished your college thesis four months before the deadline.

GRANT: Yes, I did.

RAZ: Your Ph.D., you finished it in less than three years.

GRANT: Apparently 5.

RAZ: Tenured professor in your 20s.

GRANT: Guilty.

RAZ: These are not the signs of a person who belongs in a show called "Slowing Down."

GRANT: (Laughter) Yeah, I'm definitely the fish out of water here.

RAZ: Except that, interestingly, Adam Grant has worked really hard to prove that slowing down, even though it's harder for some of us than others, can be really good, especially when it comes to creativity.

GRANT: It was heretical to me at first. And yet, you know, I was simultaneously 6 excited about the possibility of being wrong and also deeply disturbed by the implications of it.

RAZ: On the TED 7 stage, Adam told the story that sparked this idea. And it all started a few years ago when he was teaching a business class.

(SOUNDBITE OF TED TALK)

GRANT: A student came to me and asked me to invest in his company. He said, I'm working with three friends, and we're going to try to disrupt an industry by selling stuff online. And I said, OK, you guys spent the whole summer on this, right? No, we all took internships, just in case it doesn't work out. All right. But you're going to go in full time once you graduate. Not exactly - we've all lined up backup jobs.

Six months go by. It's the day before the company launches, and there is still not a functioning website. So I obviously declined to invest.

RAZ: Yeah, like, all these things were signs that these guys weren't taking it very seriously.

GRANT: Yeah, it was like a little hobby, right? It was like, hey, we have this idea. You know, let's goof 8 around and see what happens.

RAZ: And you felt like they were going pretty slowly, like they weren't moving fast on it.

GRANT: I thought they were way too slow. I mean, they came to me with the idea in August. It's February. The company is supposed to launch the next day. They still do not have a functioning website. And, you know, like, I'm looking at them thinking, the company is a website. There's nothing else (laughter). It's just a website. And you haven't built that. What have you been doing for the last six months?

And turns out, they spent those six months just arguing about what they should name the company. And I thought, you know, kind of unproductively considering over 2,000 different names - I'm like, who cares what you name the company? You need a website or else you don't have a company.

(SOUNDBITE OF TED TALK)

GRANT: And they ended up naming the company Warby Parker.

(LAUGHTER)

GRANT: They sell glasses online. They were recently recognized as the world's most innovative 9 company and valued at over a billion dollars. And now, my wife handles our investments.

(LAUGHTER)

GRANT: Why was I so wrong? To find out, I've been studying people that I've come to call originals. Originals are nonconformists, people who not only have new ideas but take action to champion them. Originals drive creativity and change in the world. They're the people you want to bet on. And they look nothing like I expected.

A few years ago, I had a student named Ji-hae (ph) who came to me and said, I have my most creative ideas when I'm procrastinating 10. And I was like, that's cute - where are the four papers you owe me?

(LAUGHTER)

GRANT: No - she was one of our most creative students. And as an organizational psychologist, this is the kind of idea that I test. So I challenged her to get some data.

She goes into a bunch of companies. She has people to fill out surveys about how often they procrastinate 11. Then she gets their bosses to rate how creative and innovative they are. And sure enough, the precrastinators like me who rush in and do everything early are rated as less creative. So I want to know what happens to the chronic 12 procrastinators. She's like, I don't know. They didn't fill out my survey.

(LAUGHTER)

GRANT: And there was this almost beautiful inverted 13 U where, you know, people who waited 'til the last minute, like the chronic procrastinators, you know, they just had to rush ahead with their simplest idea because they didn't have enough time to work out the creative ones.

But the precrastinators, like me, were also less creative because, you know, we tended to rush ahead with our first ideas, which are usually the most conventional. And we also made the mistake of, you know, thinking in very structured linear ways whereas, you know, people who started early and then put it away for a while and then came back to it, they were much more likely to do divergent thinking and incubation. And that actually boosted their creativity.

And we ran some experiments to show that, in fact, like, forcing people to procrastinate or enticing 14 them to procrastinate could boost their creativity as long as they didn't wait too long.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

RAZ: Adam Grant, he'll be back in just a minute with the story of another experiment about the value of procrastination 15 where he was the test subject. That and more ideas about slowing down, I'm Guy Raz. And you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.

It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. And on the show today, ideas about slowing down. And just a minute ago, we were hearing from business school professor Adam Grant describe how, a few years ago, some students in a class of his really opened his eyes to the value of procrastinating and taking the time to work through a new idea. So he began studying people who came up with great new ideas, And he called them originals. Adam picks up the story from the TED stage.

(SOUNDBITE OF TED TALK)

GRANT: I was starting to write a book about originals. And I thought, this is the perfect time to teach myself to procrastinate while writing a chapter on procrastination. So I meta-procrastinated. And like any self-respecting precrastinator, I woke up early the next morning and I made a to-do list with steps on how to procrastinate.

(LAUGHTER)

GRANT: And then, I worked diligently 16 toward my goal of not making progress toward my goal.

(LAUGHTER)

GRANT: I started writing the procrastination chapter. And one day - I was halfway 17 through - I literally 18 put it away in mid-sentence for months. It was agony. But when I came back to it, I had all sorts of new ideas.

As Aaron Sorkin put it, you call it procrastinating. I call it thinking. And along the way, I discovered that a lot of great originals in history were procrastinators. Take Leonardo da Vinci. He toiled 19 on and off for 16 years on the "Mona Lisa." He felt like a failure. He wrote as much in his journal. But some of the diversions he took in optics transformed the way that he modeled light and made him into a much better painter.

What about Martin Luther King, Jr.? The night before the biggest speech of his life, the March on Washington, he was up past 3 a.m. rewriting it. He's sitting in the audience waiting for his turn to go on stage, and he is still scribbling 20 notes and crossing out lines.

When he gets onstage, 11 minutes in he leaves his prepared remarks to utter four words that changed the course of history - I have a dream. That was not in the script. By delaying the task of finalizing 21 the speech until the very last minute, he left himself open to the widest range of possible ideas. And because the text wasn't set in stone, he had freedom to improvise 22.

RAZ: Wow, I had no idea he was writing that speech to the last minute. So what happens in the period between when we put something away, let's say because we succumb 23 to our - the laziest parts of ourselves - what happens during that time? How does that actually get gears in our brain working?

GRANT: Well, very rarely are people lazy about everything all the time. So what we look at as laziness is actually, you know, being discouraged by something being really difficult. The psychologist Ian McGregor who has this incredibly fascinating research on what he calls compensatory conviction, which is when you're facing serious uncertainty 24, what you do is you - like, you start fleeing in a different direction and you develop all of this passion for something else that helps you escape from the thing that you're trying to get out of your field of vision.

If you take that idea seriously, what often happens when we're putting things off or you're procrastinating, you are pursuing other things that could potentially, like, be combined with the things that you're putting off. You know, you end up testing out, you know, different kinds of ideas when you're trying to solve a different problem. And then sometimes they end up feeding right back into the thing you were avoiding in the first place.

RAZ: Yeah. I mean, if you are constantly moving forward every single day without the opportunity to stop and just reflect or stop and do something completely different, you're going to be limited, right? You're going to be limited in what you're able to say or think.

GRANT: You know, the experience I had while while writing was so revealing on this. You know, I put off the chapter. I couldn't get it worked out. I came back to it, and all of a sudden, I remembered this research on the Zeigarnik effect. You know, almost a century ago, this German psychologist wrote about how we have a better memory for incomplete than complete tasks. So you finish something, you check it off your to-do lists and, like, it's erased 25 whereas incomplete tasks, you know, they have to stay active so that, you know, we don't have to redo them. We remember how to pick up where we left off. It reduces getting-into (ph) time.

And all of a sudden, I was like, wait, so this is what's going on. When you put something off instead of finishing it, it stays partially 26 active in the back of your mind, and that allows you, you know, to keep going back to the well. And, like, the (laughter) you know, ironically, right, I left a task incomplete and then I remembered the Zeigarnik effect about the benefits of leaving the task incomplete (laughter) and I was like, OK, this is really annoying. But I think that that is one of the things that really happens when you slow down is you keep it active in your working memory. And it can be really good for the task that you haven't quite solved yet.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

RAZ: Adam says this is why truly original ideas are quick to start but slow to finish. They take time, and the people behind those ideas often have a lot of doubts and often a backup plan in case the original idea doesn't work out.

(SOUNDBITE OF TED TALK)

GRANT: And this is what I missed with Warby Parker. They had backup plans lined up, and that made me doubt that they had the courage to be original. Now, on the surface, a lot of original people look confident, but, behind the scenes, they feel the same fear and doubt that the rest of us do. They just manage it differently. Now, in my research, I discovered there are two different kinds of doubt. There's self-doubt and idea doubt. Self-Doubt is paralyzing. It leads you to freeze. But idea doubt is energizing 27. It motivates you to test, to experiment, to refine, just like MLK did. Instead of saying, I'm crap, you say the first few drafts are always crap, and I'm just not there yet.

So how do you get there? Well, it's about being the kind of person who takes the initiative to doubt the default and look for a better option. And if you do that well, you will open yourself up to the opposite of deja vu. There is a name for it. It's called Vuja de.

(LAUGHTER)

GRANT: Vuja de is when you look at something you've seen many times before and all of a sudden see it with fresh eyes. It's a screenwriter who looks at a movie script that can't get the green light for more than half a century. In every past version, the main character has been an evil queen, but Jennifer Lee starts to question whether that makes sense. She rewrites the first act, re-invents the villain 28 as a tortured hero and "Frozen" becomes the most successful animated 29 movie ever. So there's a simple message from this story. When you feel doubt, don't let it go.

(LAUGHTER)

GRANT: What about fear? Originals feel fear, too. They're afraid of failing. But what sets them apart from the rest of us is that they're even more afraid of failing to try. They know you can fail by starting a business that goes bankrupt or by failing to start a business at all. They know that in the long run our biggest regrets are not our actions but our inactions. The things we wish we could redo, if you look at the science, are the chances not taken.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

RAZ: When do you know - when do you know that, like, the procrastination is productive and when do you know that it's just destructive?

GRANT: Tomorrow I hope.

(LAUGHTER)

GRANT: I think that probably the easiest way to think about it is to say procrastination can become creative when, you know, you've actively 30 grappled with a problem. And that's why I like the idea of being quick to start and slow to finish. Being quick at the beginning and trying to, you know, accelerate a little bit of progress as you're generating lots and lots of ideas and trying to do that at a rapid pace, that's good. And then, at that point, you want to slow down. You want to give yourself access to lots of different, you know, new insights and then move back into productivity mode. And getting skilled at toggling between those two modes is probably what ultimately gets the best balance of creativity and productivity.

RAZ: Yeah. I mean, it makes a lot of sense, but the world we live in today requires instant feedback because everyone seems to have that information available at their fingertips, you know, that we actually live in a much, much faster world than ever before. And that trajectory 31 is just moving in one direction. Like, it'll be faster in 20 years and faster in 40 years.

GRANT: Yeah. I think that's a serious risk that we're facing is that the faster we move, you know, the less carefully we tend to reflect on things. I think about it in some ways as, you know, the difference between being smart and being wise, right? Being smart is all about, you know, the speed at which you can process complex information. And you actually may get it right a lot of the time, but if you never take a step back and pause and ask what if this isn't true, what if all of my assumptions are going to be wrong, then, you know, you're going to end up winning a bunch of battles and losing a lot of wars.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

RAZ: Adam Grant - he teaches at the Wharton School of Business. He wrote a book about this idea. It's called "Originals." You can see his entire talk at ted.com.