How Frustration Can Make Us More Creative
Welcome back, incredible BookDuck fans. Did you know that our frustrations can make us more creative? Life is full of frustrations for everyone. Some people break and give up. Others, meanwhile, develop their creativity and achieve success. Today Tim Harford will demonstrate how frustration can make us more creative through several examples.
Tim started his speech with a story about a German girl and a famous musician. Late in January 1975, a 17-year-old German girl called Vera Brandes walked out onto the stage of the Cologne Opera House. The auditorium was empty. It was lit only by the dim, green glow of the emergency exit sign. This was the most exciting day of Vera's life. She was the youngest concert promoter in Germany, and she had persuaded the Cologne Opera House to host a late-night concert of jazz from the American musician, Keith Jarrett.
1,400 people were coming. And in just a few hours, Jarrett would walk out on the same stage, he'd sit down at the piano and without rehearsal or sheet music, he would begin to play.
And when he came Vera showed him the piano on which he was supposed to play and thought that everything was fine. But Keith was saying something to his producer, and he told Vera that either they change the piano or the concert is canceled. And here was the thing. The piano was in a terrible state, and it was almost impossible to play it. There was no loud music in this large hall. There'd been a mistake. The opera house had provided the wrong instrument.
It was impossible to replace the piano, and Keith left the building. But Vera did not give up, she ran after them, and in the rain, she begged Keith not to cancel the concert. Keith said one single sentence.
"Never forget ... only for you."
And so a few hours later, Jarrett did indeed step out onto the stage of the opera house, he sat down at the unplayable piano and began.
Within moments it became clear that something magical was happening.
Jarrett was avoiding those upper registers, he was sticking to the middle tones of the keyboard, which gave the piece a soothing, ambient quality.
But also, because the piano was so quiet, he had to set up these rumbling, repetitive riffs in the bass. And he stood up twisting, pounding down on the keys, desperately trying to create enough volume to reach the people in the back row. It's an electrifying performance.
It somehow has this peaceful quality, and at the same time, it's full of energy, it's dynamic.
And the audience loved it. Audiences continue to love it because the recording of the Köln Concert is the best-selling piano album in history and the best-selling solo jazz album in history.
Keith Jarrett had been handed a mess. He had embraced that mess, and it soared.
But let's think for a moment about Jarrett's initial instinct. He didn't want to play. Of course, Tim thinks any of us, in any remotely similar situation, would feel the same way, we'd have the same instinct. We don't want to be asked to do good work with bad tools. We don't want to have to overcome unnecessary hurdles.
But Jarrett's instinct was wrong, and thank goodness he changed his mind. And as Tim thinks our instinct is also wrong.
He thinks we need to gain a bit more appreciation for the unexpected advantages of having to cope with a little mess.
After this story, he gives us some more examples from cognitive psychology, complexity science, social psychology, and of course rock ‘n’ roll. Let’s listen to some of them.
Cognitive psychology first. We've known for a while that certain kinds of difficulty, certain kinds of obstacles, can improve our performance. For example, the psychologist Daniel Oppenheimer, a few years ago, teamed up with high school teachers.
And he asked them to reformat the handouts that they were giving to some of their classes.
Therefore, standard handouts should be formatted in a simple font such as Helvetica or Times New Roman.
However, half of the students received worksheets formatted in a fairly strong font such as Haettenschweiler, or such as Comic Sans italicized.
These fonts are extremely unattractive and hard to read.
However, when exams were taken at the end of the semester, those who were supposed to read the more difficult type performed better in a range of subjects.
Complex type slowed them down, made them work a little harder, made them think a little deeper about what they were reading, made them interpret it more carefully, and the more they learned.
Let’s listen to one more example.
Psychologist Shelly Carson tested the quality of Harvard students' attention filters. What does Tim mean? Imagine that you are having a conversation in a restaurant. Many other conversations are going on in the restaurant. Do you think you can do it?
If you can, then you have an excellent and powerful attention filter.
Psychologist Shelly Carson tested the quality of Harvard students' attention filters. What does Tim mean? Imagine that you are having a conversation in a restaurant. Many other conversations are going on in the restaurant. Do you think you can do it?
If you can, then you have an excellent and powerful attention filter.
However, some people are destined to fight it. Several of Carson's students struggled with this. They had weak filters and missed a lot of important information. As a result, they were constantly disturbed by the sights and sounds around them. If the TV was turned on while writing the essay, they could not turn it off. You might think that this is a disadvantage. But that's not the case. When Carson looked at what these students had achieved, they seemed to have achieved real creative success in their lives, published their first novel, and released their first album. These distractions became the seeds of their creativity. They were able to think outside the box because the box was full of holes.
To sum up, we have learned from these stories that whatever happens, whatever the situation or challenges, we can always turn negativity into positivity, fight and emerge victorious from the situation.
