Brainstorm, brainstorm, brainstorm, stall. In a culture that demands constant innovation and disruption, it can seem like our imaginations are wearing thin with constant calls for the new. To combat such exhaustion, how can we refresh our eyes? How can we see things in new and inspiring ways? One possibility is to turn to the metaphor of trees and the bee, whose relationship bears fruit through cross-pollination. In our work, coming into contact with the ideas of another "tree" can be just as productive.
In agriculture, cross-pollination is an important element against the environmental risks of monoculture, in which we rely too much on one type of plant; it “refreshes” the reproduction of plants with pollen from the outside. In a business or creative environment, monoculture has its own risks, as we usually look to the same sources, people and habits for new ideas. Over time, these ideas can take on an equally predictable taste. Or, even worse, switching to the old and reliable can mean disaster if something happens and disrupts your environment.
Related: Try this brainstorming exercise to come up with better business ideas
Fortunately, there are good role models of creative thinkers who have behaved like bees, going from disciplinary tree to disciplinary tree, spreading the pollen of business ideas. to each other:
Leonardo da Vinci is perhaps the most famous example of the richness offered by the acquisition of knowledge and experience in very different fields. As well as being a master painter, he was also a deeply committed scientific thinker, and the interplay between fields is clearly exhibited in his paintings which capture the human form with a level of detail and realism unusual for the time.
Equally beloved, but working on a smaller scale, Beatrix Potter was a naturalist, whose closely observed drawings of mushrooms, birds and other forms of life can be felt in the stories of Peter Rabbit, which share the feeling of a carefully rendered small fauna.
The flow does not only go from sciences to arts. Already, descriptions of code as “elegant” suggest that judgments of beauty are also circulating in the tech world. Steve Jobs, for his part, radicalized personal computing in part because of his belief that the computer could aspire to the level of art.
Even if you're not as ambitious in your quest for new exotic trees as a da Vinci or even a potter, you can develop the habit of cross-pollination through simple, regular practices.
1. Make an appointment with yourself.
In The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron suggests a weekly practice she calls the "artist date." Above all, the artist date is not a date to work on your own regular creative work. Instead, it's a date to feed your inspiration by watching something that nurtures and artistically stimulates.
So if you're someone who writes computer code for a living, you might go to an art exhibition one week or browse the independent bookstore for a new novel the next. If you're a writer, you can take a walk through an arboretum on Monday mornings or take a cooking class on a Friday every month. In contemplating a painting of a seashell, you may be inspired to solve an immediate problem, but the purpose of the artist's date is less directive. Instead, the idea is to enrich you, to fill you with varied, stimulating and nourishing materials for a creative life.
2. Read about the creative life.
Start building a library of other people who have lived inspiring and productive lives, regardless of background. Biographies and how-to guides from other fields can be wonderful sources of inspiration that also open you up to how a day and a life can be structured:what could you gain from working as Stephen King suggests in On writing or read and imitate a favorite athlete's morning routine?
In Deep Work , for example, computer scientist Cal Newport describes the inspiring life of psychoanalyst Carl Jung, who worked in a tower in the forest to develop theories away from the distractions of his day. While there's a big divide between contemporary computing and Jung's somewhat idiosyncratic psychology, Newport draws on his work habits to explain why he shuns the social media chatter of our moment.
3. Get in touch with your "beginner's mind".
It can be refreshing for oneself as a quest for knowledge to be very bad at something, to get in visceral contact with what means learning as a process, full of curiosity and uncertainty. In the disciplines we know, we tend to come to problems and projects with a sense of our approach already established. But how do you approach fly fishing? Hook? Flying trapeze? Extremely new experiences require special attention and intensely focused reflection on a type we may have lost to our most frequent yet most important work.
Experiencing the new and learning from it more about the world makes life richer and more meaningful, a gift in itself. But on a more practical level, it not only gives us material, but different ways of thinking that allow us to innovate and explore our work in exciting new ways.
Happy exploring!
