Creativity is a skill, not a mystery

As a society, we still treat creativity and idea generation as a mystery. New ideas come from "creative", or "non-linear" people. Under this understanding, people are either gifted with creativity or they are not in a very binary way. This statement is so widely believed to be correct; it is hard to overstate how wrong it is.

Occupied Ideas

If you were alive last year, you probably remeber the Occupy Wallstreet movement. Although the movement never had a clear set of demands, one thing was clear, people were (and still are) very angry about the distribution of wealth in the country.  Clearly this blog is not about debating social issues or political groups. People tend to have very strong opinions about Occupy, and I don’t really want to change anybody’s mind. I do however, want to bring up one aspect of the movement that I think has been completely overlooked and is well aligned with the blog’s purpose. The extremely uneven wealth distribution of the United States hampers technological development, especially disruptive development.

Catchy Tech by Carly Rae Jepsen

If you follow it, you may have noticed that “Call Me Maybe” by Carly Rae Jepsen was the number one downloaded single on iTunes this week. If you have never heard this song, it falls squarely in the catchy pop musical category. It is not good pop, or even bad pop; it is the worst kind of pop. It’s the type of pop song that you just can’t seem to completely convince yourself has no musical quality and will be forgotten in 6 months.

This is why the word catchy describes it so well. Nobody justifies its popularity with a “oh hey, that song is really well composed”, or “that song is really incorporating a new sound”. No, it’s a catchy pop song and just like a cold, it’s in our nature to be susceptible.

Catchy pop is far worse then terrible pop because terrible pop can be ignored. We can change the radio station, visit someone else’s website, or give it the thumbs down when it comes up.  Most importantly, we don’t need to buy the single. When a catchy song comes up on Pandora though, you find yourself drawn in. It is engrossing and sounds like the next big thing. Before you know it, 2 months pass without hearing anything else but this song: its everywhere.  During this period, the song sucks up all the time that we could be spending listening to good pop, or even newer types of music currently disrupting pop.

In the end though, the song just disappears without a lasting impression. If you return to the single later, it sounds just like every other pop song you have ever heard. It does not move the pop genera forward by introducing something new; it simply exists, absorbs our time and money, and then vanishes.

It is hyperboli to say that this is dangerous. But it is a great analogy to something that really is: catchy technology. Just like music, technology can be irrationally seductive. To those listening, catchy technology sounds like the next big thing. It is engrossing and seems to hold the solution to boundless problems. We see countless startups appear touting their tech and we see large companies start their own internal development efforts or make huge acquisitions to get in on it. But then, 5 or 10 years pass and people look back and ask “why were we investing in that?” or “how does that improve on the state-of-the-art?”.