"No guards time, the thread from which we weave our creations. The math of time is simple: you have less than you think and need more than you know. We are not taught to say 'no.' We are taught not to say 'no.' 'No”' is rude. 'No' is a rebuff, a rebuttal, a minor act of verbal violence. 'No' is for drugs and strangers with candy. Creators do not ask how much time something takes but how much creation it costs. This interview, this letter, this trip to the movies, this dinner with friends, this party, this last day of summer. How much less will I create unless I say 'no?' A sketch? A stanza? A paragraph? An experiment? Twenty lines of code? The answer is always the same: 'yes' makes less."
From "Creative People Say No."
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14 comments:
You have to say no to yourself too. Sometimes that's the hardest part.
I guess that's why my Mom always said my brother was the creative one.
Interesting that a post on the subject of why creative people should just say "no" more often to preserve their own precious time would, for the first time I've ever seen in a blog, enable people to comment on each goddamn paragraph in the post.
Well, as with any bit of pop psychology - and make no mistake, this is just the latest in a long line of pop psych - that's oversimplified.
Yeah, you say no for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is to guard your creative time. But if your version of creativity flourishes best when in collaboration, saying "No" everywhere is the equivalent of refusing to create.
As with anything, moderation is the key. The power of "No" is in knowing when to say it, and when to say "Yes", when to make "No" a guardian of your time and creative power, and when to realize that "No" is indeed a limitation and denial of the possibility of finding something new through someone else. But there are times pop psych is not supposed to be about nuances, so we get this stuff instead of common sense.
“No” makes us aloof, boring, impolite, unfriendly, selfish, anti-social, uncaring, lonely and an arsenal of other insults."
Ah, but for the fruits of creativity!.
Those aren't insults; they are facts.
Creativity IMHO is not bound by time and generated by inspiration, often doing something non-creative or among leeches who would steal our precious time. Horrors!.
I look at the creative writers who balance creativity with life. John Williams wrote four novels in his life, each brilliant. If it were only one, as John Wright says "this book will be someone’s absolutely favorite book of all time, and it will come to him on some dark day and give him sunlight, and open his eyes and fill his heart and make him see things in life even you never suspected, and will be his most precious tale, and it will live in his heart like the Book of Gold."
Did I want to read the link? No.
Saved time.
I object to the quotes around "no." It's indirect speech, not a quote.
I asked the boss for a raise and he said no.
But you can't say no to creating art in celebration of queer or degenerate (in your view) weddings. Got it.
To say "no" to any sort of time commitment or effort or commercial activity is to practice discrimination.
Proust, in the second volume of In Search of Lost Time, asserts that friendship is a waste of time, or worse, at least for an artist.
"Saying 'no' has more creative power than ideas, insights and talent combined."
No. It doesn't.
But if your version of creativity flourishes best when in collaboration.
I guess that movies fall into this category. First I was going to call BS.
When I was doing business in Japan part of my cultural training made me understand that saying "No" is considered very impolite in Japan.
This led to my coworkers saying, "Yes, we can do that!" when the impossible was asked of them, with the requirement of extreme efforts at great expense, when a simple, "Yes, we can do that if and only if the following is provided..." which puts the onus on the idiot requesting the impossible to provide something equally impossible.
Alternately, a hissing intake of breath by everyone around the table, followed by someone saying something along the lines of, "That will be very hard to accomplish successfully, please let me tell you why...." worked on the less stubborn among management.
"No" is great. "Yes, but" is harder but also works. "Wow, really?" is also useful.
Sure, you can sacrifice your life to be "creative." Don't expect people to love you for it.
Creativity is fundamentally selfish. That's the part people don't like to talk about.
Who cares? In the first place, a lot fewer people are actually creative than think they are, and in the second, even genuine creativity is overrated. Creativity doesn't feed the baby, doesn't keep the traffic flowing or the lights on, doesn't nurse the wounded, encourage the beset, or comfort the dying. The least creative thing one human being can say to another is I love you, which has pretty much been said in just the same way by every human being to draw breath these past 2 million years. But it's much more important -- those trillions of trite phrases -- miniature lamps that illuminate with warmth and companionship the weird path we mortals trudge from dark to dark -- than even the opera of Mozart or general relativity.
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