218. Respect The Four Stages of Creativity

<p>When I was writing my first book, <a href= "https://designforhackers.com"><em>Design for Hackers</em></a>, I developed a ritual. I would lay all of my research materials on the floor. Graphic Design history books were splayed out. I had research papers or articles printed out and stapled. There were highlights and sticky notes everywhere.</p> <p>In the center of all of this, I had a whiteboard. Well, it wasn’t actually a whiteboard. Whiteboards were too expensive. It was a piece of tile board -- tile board is what you would use for the wall inside of a shower. A whiteboard can go for more than $100. I bought this piece of tile board at The Home Depot for $11.</p> <p>It looked like a scene from a movie. I was the detective, trying to catch the killer. Where had the killer struck before? Is there a pattern to the killer’s behavior? Where will the killer strike next? My living room looked like a detective’s office.</p> <p>If a friend invited me out to do something, I would tell them a lie. I would say I couldn’t go out.</p> <p>But that wasn’t the lie.</p> <h3 id="writingdoesntalwaysmeanwriting">"Writing" doesn't always mean writing</h3> <p>Saying I couldn’t go out while I was kneeling over my research material on my living room floor wasn’t the lie. I really didn’t have much time for socializing while writing my first book.</p> <p>The lie was that I would say that I was writing. In actuality, I would do little, if any, writing during this evening ritual.</p> <p>I might scribble a note here or there. I’d write one or two-word concepts on sticky notes, and arrange them on the whiteboard by feel. I’d draw lines amongst the sticky notes. I might even sloppily squeak an outline onto the whiteboard with a marker.</p> <p>But nothing I produced on these nights had any hope of showing up in my book. My computer was nowhere to be seen. I hid it in another room. Writing? I wasn’t really writing, per se.</p> <h3 id="thespeechthatchangedthewayweseecreativity">The speech that changed the way we see creativity</h3> <p>In 1891,