The creative curve

To innovate in any field, start by immersing yourself in that field. Consume as much content related to the field as possible until you have a deep, intuitive understanding of what ideas and approaches are familiar versus novel and creative.

A perfect example of this principle in action is Ted Sarandos. At age eighteen, Ted took an after-school job at one of Arizona’s first video rental stores. With few customers during the day, Ted decided to watch the store’s movie inventory. Within months, Ted had seen so many films that customers would line up for his spot-on recommendations of titles similar to what they already enjoyed. Essentially, Ted became a human search engine for movies. This passion for film led Ted to eventually drop out of community college to pursue a career in the video industry, culminating in his current role leading content acquisition at Netflix, where he still watches three to four hours of video daily.

Through interviews with successful creative professionals across various fields, I've found Ted Sarandos's focused consumption habit to be more rule than exception. Painters are constantly viewing art exhibits. Chefs eat at innovative restaurants and attend food conventions. Songwriters listen nonstop to new and old music. The most creative individuals dedicate about 20 percent of their waking hours to consuming content in their domain—not to become expert practitioners necessarily, but to develop an intuitive sense of where new ideas fall on the creative spectrum from familiar to novel.

The path to creativity often involves following patterns laid out by others. Analyzing the works of successful people in your field reveals formulas that resonate with audiences. Building off these proven templates by adding your own twist allows you to tap into familiarity while injecting novelty.

As a young writer, Benjamin Franklin struggled to write clearly and persuasively. To improve, he studied the structure and style of articles in The Spectator, a popular newspaper known for quality writing. He would read an article then attempt to rewrite it himself using The Spectator articles as a model.

Franklin compared his work to the original published pieces, reworking his own template over time to match their clarity and effectiveness. This process of carefully observing and recreating underlying patterns of successful work exposed him to what audiences expected while helping him develop his own voice.

Getting together with a creative community and brainstorming new ideas can be very helpful. It's useful to collaborate with people who have different perspectives, not just those who agree with you. Consuming and imitating existing ideas provides raw material to create new concepts that strike an optimal balance between familiarity and novelty, hitting that ‘sweet spot’ of creativity.

But taking a promising idea mainstream also requires building an effective community around it. Studies demonstrate that surrounding yourself with the right network boosts the likelihood of achieving world-class success. One study from the University of California analyzed over two thousand scientists and inventors, finding their networks predicted prominence, productivity, and career length. Another discovered diverse world-class performers had studied under an intense, veteran teacher.

An effective creative community typically has four key components:

1. A master teacher, who imparts formulas for success and constraints to work within, while supplying feedback for deliberate practice. Attracting a high-caliber mentor starts with insatiable curiosity about how things work. Ask questions of accomplished people around you. Identify where top performers congregate and go there yourself, enabling valuable knowledge transfer. Spend time where industry leaders gather to increase exposure.

Ben & Jerry's is an iconic American ice cream company founded in 1978 by Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield in an abandoned gas station in Burlington, Vermont. The two founders were hippies who had taken a $5 course on making ice cream and decided to go into business together to do something fun that involved eating, as they were struggling in their other endeavors.

Today, Ben & Jerry's is renowned for the rich and decadent ice cream flavors it creates and markets. The company launches between six and twelve new flavors every year. So how does Ben & Jerry's consistently develop successful new flavors year after year? Is it just a matter of combining tasty ingredients and seeing how they taste?

In fact, it takes Ben & Jerry's eighteen to twenty four months to develop a new flavor. The process is intensely analytical and structured:

- Conceptualization - Brainstorm potential new ingredients that will work well balanced in ice cream. - Reduction - Narrow down the hundreds of new flavor ideas to those that are novel yet familiar. - Curation - Produce some test batches and have consumers sample and rate them. - Feedback - Measure and evaluate what customers say about the new flavors.

Ben & Jerry's aims to always hit the sweet spot on the creative curve with new ice cream flavors - the tricky part is trying to predict where that sweet spot will be nearly two years later when the flavor launches, due to the lengthy development process.

As expressed by Allen Gannett, the rise and fall of popularity of creative ideas brings them “from nothingness to prominence, and back to nothingness again.” Creative iterations based on feedback are essential for developing great products. Before even starting, creative people need to grasp where their ideas will land on the bell curve of popularity. Across different creative fields, successful professionals have methods to refine ideas to end up with those most likely to resonate.