The Art of Creative Thinking
Rod Judkins, 2015
Salvador Dalí once answered “yes” to almost every question about his profession, and it was the truth. Rod Judkins, an artist who teaches at Central Saint Martins in London, gathered stories of artists, scientists, designers and entrepreneurs to show that creative thinking can be trained like a muscle. Inside are techniques that help you come up with new things in any job and in everyday life.
Who it is for
For anyone used to thinking creativity isn't for them, and for everyone stuck in familiar ways of working who wants to start inventing again.
Students enter schools as question marks and leave as full stops.
The man who said “yes” to everything
On the American TV game show What's My Line? blindfolded celebrities asked a mystery guest questions and tried to guess what he did for a living. Once the guest was Salvador Dalí, and the game quickly hit a wall: he answered “yes” to almost every question. A writer? Yes, he had three non-fiction books and a novel. Does he perform in front of an audience? Yes again. In the end one of the panellists gave up and exclaimed that there was nothing this man didn't do!
And it was hardly an exaggeration. Dalí designed furniture, jewellery and perfume bottles, made films, designed his own house and drew the Chupa Chups logo, which is still in use today. He didn't split activities into important and unimportant ones. If something looked interesting, he simply tried it.
Rod Judkins, an artist who teaches at Central Saint Martins in London, believes anyone can live this way. At school he felt that creativity was suppressed, as if it were something dangerous. At art college, he felt at home for the first time: mistakes were seen as useful, and trying and failing was normal. For many years he has carried that spirit into companies and offices, running workshops for accountants, engineers and entrepreneurs.
His book is made up of 89 short essays, and the author suggests opening it on any page. Here they are gathered into six threads: where “talent” really comes from, why experience sometimes gets in the way, what to do with mistakes and criticism, how to work with ideas and where to look for them. Judkins's main point is simple: creative thinking isn't a profession, it's a way of approaching your own life.
Michelangelo had a crew
In 1550 the biographer Giorgio Vasari called Michelangelo “divine”. In his view, talent was a gift from God, and such a gift went only to the chosen few. Judkins believes this story started the cult of the genius, which still convinces many people that creativity isn't for them.
Vasari left out the main thing. Hundreds of bills for assistants' work survive in the archives, and on the Sistine Chapel ceiling alone a dozen craftsmen worked constantly. On top of that, Michelangelo grew up among stonecutters and held a chisel from the age of six, had spent thousands of hours carving stone by twelve, and became a painter's apprentice at fourteen. As the author sees it, this was less a gift than a skill grown over a long time. He compares Michelangelo to a modern director like Francis Ford Coppola: a huge achievement, but not a superhuman one.
It's the same story with the Beatles. To America they looked like a sudden miracle, but Lennon and McCartney had been playing together since 1957. In the clubs of Hamburg the band played eight hours a day, seven days a week, and by 1964 they had about 1,200 performances behind them. How they rehearsed matters too: they didn't repeat other people's hits until they had an exact copy but experimented with them until the songs became their own.
This is the distinction the author insists on. Bad practice, for Judkins, is mindless repetition for the sake of polish. Good practice means inventing something every time. When Matisse painted a series of pictures of the same model, what grew with each work wasn't his precision but his inventiveness.
Judkins invites everyone to his company workshops: accountants, secretaries, technicians. By the end the “uncreative” staff are surprised by what they can do. He compares creative thinking to a muscle that gets stronger with exercise, and sets tasks of five or ten minutes, as you would for an athlete getting in shape through short workouts.
About the author
Rod Judkins is an artist, writer and teacher who has taught students at Central Saint Martins in London since 1999. His paintings have been shown at Tate Britain and the National Portrait Gallery, and he runs creativity workshops for companies around the world.
All books by this author: Rod Judkins
Terms from the book
- Picasso
- Gates
- Jobs
- Michelangelo
- Beatles
- Wright
- Dyson
- Louis
- pop art
- Kelley
- Samuelson
- Dalí: Salvador Dalí, Spanish surrealist painter. Besides paintings, he made films, furniture, jewellery and advertising designs.
- Central Saint Martins: Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London, one of the best-known art schools in the world. The author has taught there since 1999.
- Vasari: Giorgio Vasari, Italian painter and author of the lives of Renaissance artists. In 1550 he called Michelangelo “divine”.
- Coppola: Francis Ford Coppola, American film director who made The Godfather trilogy and Apocalypse Now.
- Lennon: John Lennon, musician and songwriter, one of the founders of the Beatles.
- McCartney: Paul McCartney, musician and songwriter, who wrote most of the Beatles' songs together with Lennon.
- Matisse: Henri Matisse, French painter, one of the great masters of twentieth-century painting.
- Guggenheim: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of modern art in New York, opened in 1959. Inside the building a spiral ramp rises upward.
- cyclonic vacuum cleaner: A bagless vacuum cleaner: the dust in it is separated from the air by a swirling, spinning airflow.
- Benedictus: Édouard Benedictus, French composer, writer and artist, the inventor of safety glass.
- cellulose nitrate: A chemical compound based on cellulose. It was in Benedictus's flask and held the pieces of glass together.
- Chandrasekhar: Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, astrophysicist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics. His model of how stars evolve became a foundation of the theory of black holes.
- Lichtenstein: Roy Lichtenstein, American artist, one of the creators of pop art, known for his comic-strip paintings.
- Murch: Walter Murch, American film editor and sound designer who worked with Coppola on Apocalypse Now.
- Hemingway: Ernest Hemingway, American writer, author of the novel A Farewell to Arms.
- McKim: Bob McKim, creativity researcher and teacher who, in the 1970s, studied in depth how people come up with new things.
- Maclaren: Owen Maclaren, British aircraft designer, inventor of the lightweight folding baby buggy.
- Spitfire: A British fighter plane of the Second World War, the key aircraft of the Battle of Britain.
- Fleming: Alexander Fleming, British microbiologist who discovered penicillin, the first antibiotic.
All terms
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