Interview with Creativity Author Michael Michalko

By Molly Anderson-Childers

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Q: What inspires you?

A: My Godfather John Haffich was a kind, sensitive gentleman from the Ukraine who always engaged me in conversations about life when I was a young boy. He would pick a wildflower and then tell me that if I looked at it in the right way, I could see heaven in the flower; or he would pick up a grain of sand and tell me that there was no difference between a grain of sand and the whole world.

He was a poet who tried to encourage me to write poetry, which I did for a while. Some of it was published but I never felt my poems were good enough for me to seriously consider myself a poet. When he was in a nursing home and dying, I visited him and told him my thoughts about my inadequacies as a poet. He could barely whisper at the time and asked for a pencil and paper. He wrote the following poem and gave it to me with a smile.

Use what talents you have.
The woods would be silent
if no bird sang
except those that sang best.

I carry that poem in my wallet to this day as one of my most treasured possessions. It was one of those little things that changed the direction of my life.

Q: What wakes you up at three in the morning in a cold sweat?

A: The brevity and randomness of life; the knowledge that life is no more than a brief flash of light between the eternity before our birth and the eternity that awaits us upon our death.

Q: What is your favorite way to get “un-stuck” and battle creative blocks?

A: When I am stonewalled, I just start typing “O peaceful gloom shrouding the earth” over and over and over. Eventually, typing this phrase over and over unlocks something in my brain and the ideas start flowing. It’s going through the motions of writing that un-sticks my mind.

Most people presume that our attitudes affect our behavior, and this is true. But it’s also true that our behavior determines our attitudes. Tibetan monks say their prayers by whirling prayer wheels on which their prayers are inscribed. The whirling wheels spin the prayers into divine space. Sometimes, a monk will keep a dozen or so prayer wheels rotating like a juggling act in which whirling plates are balanced on top of long thin sticks.

Many novice monks are not very emotionally or spiritually involved at first. It may be that the novice is thinking about his family, his doubts about a religious vocation or something else while he is going through the motions of spinning his prayer wheel. When the novice adopts the pose of a monk, and makes it obvious to himself and to others by playing a role, the brain will soon follow the role they are playing. It is not enough for the novice to have the intention of becoming a monk: the novice must act like a monk and rotate the prayer wheels. If one has the intention of becoming a monk and goes through the motions of acting like a monk, one will become a monk.

If you want to be an artist, and if all you did was paint a picture every day, you will become an artist. You may not become another Vincent van Gogh, but you will become more of an artist than someone who has never tried.

Q: What was the inspiration for creating your brainstorming card deck, Thinkpak?

A: At one of my seminars, I noticed one participant had a set of index cards that he was constantly flipping through. I discovered he had copied the SCAMPER questions from my book onto index cards, which he flipped through while looking for ideas. I adopted his idea and created Thinkpak.

Q: What was your biggest challenge in creating Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative Thinking Techniques?

A: My biggest challenge was time. I had a lot going on, and never seemed to have the time to write. On the verge of giving up, I remembered the advice my grandfather had given me years ago. When I was in college, I went to my grandfather and told him I was going to quit. I was tired of struggling to make high grades to keep an academic scholarship. It was hard work, as I also had a full-time job to pay living expenses. I was only getting three to four hours of sleep a night. I no longer desired to go on. My grandfather told me to sit down and wait a few moments. He said he wanted to show me something his uncle showed him years back in the Ukraine. My grandfather was just drafted by the Russian army and he told his uncle he was running away. This is what he showed me.

He filled three pots with water and placed each on a high fire. Soon the pots came to a boil. In the first, he placed potatoes, in the second he placed eggs and the last he placed ground coffee beans. He let them sit and boil, without saying a word. In about twenty minutes he turned off the burners. He fished the potatoes out and placed them in a bowl. He pulled the eggs out and placed them in a bowl. Then he ladled the coffee out into a cup. Turning to me, he asked, "Tell me, what do you see?" "Potatoes, eggs, and coffee," I replied. Then he asked me to feel the potatoes, which I did and noted that they were soft and mushy. My grandfather then asked me to take an egg and break it. After pulling off the shell, I observed the hard-boiled egg. Finally, he asked me to sip the coffee. I smiled as I tasted the coffee with its rich aroma. I asked, "I don’t understand. What does this mean, if anything?"

My grandfather laughed and explained that each of these objects had faced the same adversity — boiling water — but each had reacted differently. "Which are you?" my grandfather asked. "When adversity knocks on your door, how do you respond? Are you a potato that seems strong, but with pain and adversity, becomes soft and loses strength? Are you the egg that appears not to change but whose heart is hardened? Or are you the coffee bean that changes the hot water, the very circumstance that brings the pain. When the water gets hot, it releases the fragrance and flavor. If you are like the bean, when things are at their worst, your very attitude will change your environment for the better, making it sweet and palatable."

His lesson was that, in life, when you can’t change the circumstances, change yourself. This is what I did. I changed my attitude from “I don’t have the time to write” to “how can I budget my time so I have the time I need to write.”

Q: What did you learn that surprised and delighted you the most, while working on Cracking Creativity: The Secrets of Creative Genius?

A: While I was writing the book I concentrated on the question: "What fosters creativity?" Then I realized that isn’t the question at all, the question is: “Why in God's name isn't everyone creative?” Where was the human potential lost? How was it crippled? A good question might be not: “Why do people create?” But: “Why do people not create or innovate?” We have got to abandon that sense of amazement in the face of creativity, as if it is a miracle if anybody creates anything.

We were all born spontaneous and creative. Every one of us. As children we accepted all things equally. We embraced all kinds of outlandish possibilities for all kinds of things. When we were children we knew a box was much more than a container. A box could be a fort, a car, a tank, a cave, a house, something to draw on, and even a space ship. Our imaginations were not structured according to some existing concept or category. We did not strive to eliminate possibilities, we strove to expand them. We were all amazingly creative and always filled with the joy of exploring different ways of thinking.

And then something happened to us. We went to school. In school, we were taught how past thinkers interpreted the world. We were not taught how to think, we were taught to reproduce what past thinkers thought. When confronted with a problem, we were taught to analytically select the most promising approach based on past history, excluding all other approaches, and to work logically within a carefully defined direction towards a solution. Instead of looking for possibilities, we are taught to look for ways to exclude them. It’s as if we entered school as a question mark and graduated as a period.

Q: You’ve had an amazing career so far. What’s next on your agenda? Do you have another book in the works?

A: Yes. I am just now finishing a book that has two parts. The first part describes the common habits and behaviors of creative geniuses throughout history, and the second part describes how to get ideas by conceptually blending together two or more dissimilar concepts or subjects.

Q: Any final words of advice and inspiration for our readers?

A: I once found a cocoon of an emperor moth. I took it home so I could watch the moth come out of the cocoon. On the day a small opening appeared, I sat and watched the moth for several hours as it struggled to force its body through that little hole. Then it seemed to stop making any progress. It appeared as if it had gone as far as it could, and could go no farther. It seemed to be stuck. In my kindness, I decided to help the moth, so I took a pair of scissors and snipped off the remaining bit of the cocoon. The moth then emerged easily. But it had a swollen body and small, shriveled wings. I continued to watch the moth because I expected that, at any moment, the wings would enlarge and expand to be able to support the body, which would contract in time.

Neither happened! In fact, the little moth spent the rest of its life crawling around with a swollen body and shriveled wings. It never was able to fly. The restricting cocoon and the struggle required for the moth to get through the tiny opening forces fluid from the body of the moth into its wings so that it’s ready for flight once it achieves freedom from the cocoon. Freedom and flight would only come after the struggle. By depriving the moth of a struggle, I deprived the moth of health.

Sometimes struggles are exactly what we need in our life in order to be truly alive. Instead of avoiding adversity, welcome challenges cheerfully and strive to overcome them. It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that they are difficult. •

© 2009 Molly J. Anderson-Childers

About the Author | More by Molly Anderson-Childers
Molly Anderson-Childers is a writer, artist, and creativity consultant living in Durango, Colorado. She's published work locally, nationally, and online and welcomes inquiries about freelance writing assignments. Learn more about Molly at her blogs: stealingplums.blogspot.com and addictivefiction.blogspot.com.

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6/30/09