Anuj Rastogi

This is one of the greatest displays of the creative process I've seen. It perfectly demonstrates something known as the "Creativity Faucet." When you go to the studio, John Mayer was asked, what do you do to generate ideas? “Well, I don’t always do it,” he admitted, “because it requires a stupid bravery all the time.” He strums a couple chords without singing. A nice melody begins to form—“you can sit here all day [doing this] and go, ‘Okay, maybe that’s something.'” “But if you don’t go,” and then he improvises vocals, “Sunlights beating on the corner of the walls / and I’m a Mr. know-it-all / heaven calls / get yourself right / get yourself right,” he stops playing, raises his finger to his mouth, and explains, “if you’re not ouija boarding immediately, you’re wasting time.” “You just stare at the corner of the wall,” he says, before he improvises some more, “Stare at the corner of the wall / try to get it going on / but I can’t sometimes / you just keep going 'til you get something / maybe I’m a little bit shy / maybe someday I’ll tell you why,” he stops singing, “you gotta keep forcing it, forcing it, forcing it.” “It doesn’t matter [what comes out of your mouth]...You gotta get fearless, fearless, fearless, fearless…It’s hard to do.” Takeaway 1: In the clip, we see John Mayer's ability to generate vocals steadily increase. It's a perfect display of what Julian Shapiro—who (among other things) is incredible at deconstructing how things like creativity work—calls the “Creativity Faucet.” Essentially, creativity works like “a backed-up pipe of water,” Shapiro writes. “The first mile is packed with wastewater. This wastewater must be emptied before the clear water arrives.” At the beginning of a creative session, almost always, bad ideas come out of the faucet first. The John Mayers of the world have the discipline and “a stupid bravery,” as Mayer said, to get through the backed-up pipe of bad ideas, to empty the wastewater, to “just keep going 'til you get something,” as he sang. Takeaway 2: To let out bad ideas, to empty the waste water, Mayer said, you have to “get fearless, fearless, fearless.” In another interview, Mayer was asked how he defines writer’s block. “Writer’s block,” he said, “is when the two people inside of you—the writer and the reader—when the reader doesn’t love the writer. Writer’s block is not a failure to write. It is a failure to catch the feedback loop of enjoying what you’re seeing and wanting to contribute more to it.” A creative block is not a failure to create. It is a failure to accept that you must empty a lot of bad ideas before good ideas can flow. It is a failure to get fearless, fearless, fearless, fearless. - - - “You gotta keep forcing it, forcing it, forcing it...You gotta get fearless, fearless, fearless, fearless.” — John Mayer Follow @bpoppenheimer for more content like this!