[askRich]

I think the author of the article is describing a false dichotomy. The purpose of deliberate practice is to build the underlying knowledge that leads to the creativity and also unlock the intuitive sense that comes from mastery.

[anigbrowl]

There's great creative power in not knowing what you don't know and trying out random things because you have yet to acquire the knowledge of how things are 'supposed' to be done. Knowledge is valuable but at the same time I am so over the mastery movement, which is as much about excluding people from the club by making them think they're never ready enough as it is about giving them to tools to succeed.

I started painting 3 months ago at age 45 while in the throes of a massive personal crisis, out of a purely selfish need to express myself emotionally rather than accommodate other people. Turns out that I'm good at it, have original ideas, and am already getting unlooked-for interest from other people in loaning or purchasing my artwork. It's not that I have some tremendous natural talent; I work hard at it and when I can't paint I study, plus I had years of self-development in other parts of the arts that allowed me to develop my own aesthetic philosophy. But frankly the most valuable factor underlying this unexpected productivity is an uncharacteristic Not Giving A Shit about other peoples' feelings. Giving myself permission to be a less nice person has been an enormous boon to creativity.

[gnaritas]

> There's great creative power in not knowing what you don't know and trying out random things because you have yet to acquire the knowledge of how things are 'supposed' to be done.

That's something people who don't want to learn how things are done like to say, but isn't really true and is most often simply an excuse to avoid having to learn anything; it's commonly heard from amateur musicians for example in an attempt to avoid learning anything labelled "theory". The reality is that what you're likely to do without looking at what other people have done isn't going to be very creative and is likely way way inside the box and simplistic.

You're not really breaking the rules if you don't know the rules you're breaking; flailing around wildly in the dark isn't creative, it's just dumb luck if you happen to do something new. People who are truly creative, know exactly where the box is and ends and why they're breaking outside of it.

[anigbrowl]

I guess you missed the bit where I mentioned that I considered study as important as practice, and that I've already got a lot of professional experience in other branches of the arts, so the notion of deliberate practice is fine with me. What I'm doing differently this time is giving my own taste equal priority with received knowledge instead of beating myself up for failing to meet some external standard. Accepting that many paintings will vary from their original goals as the price of enjoyable experimentation has proved to be a good bargain. I just got tired of being my own worst critic in hopes of pre-emptively avoiding possible disapproval.

[walod]

I think that people who are creative have to know the history and repertoire in order for their brain to make the new connections to make the new thing, but I think that creative leap when your brain makes those new connections is not something an artist controls directly. It comes from experience and being "into something", and random accident from experimentation.

The artist doesn't necessarily know why something is new though, even if they have a lot of experience, it's just a primal response they get to a new piece of music they are working on for example, and then they can try to analyze it after the fact. Most artists I know aren't as methodical as the way you seem to describe, it's a lot more intuition and experimentation, and then because of their vast listening experience their brains are adjusted so that they aren't satisfied with existing stuff

[gnaritas]

I agree. I'm not saying they're methodical, I'm saying you have to know the rules before you can forget the rules and let your real creativity come out.

[alphonsegaston]

While I'm sure there is some of this mentality among unpolished artists, I think you're wrongly conflating reproducibility of quality with creativity itself. A creative solution is often arrived at by the ability to generate a large number of ideas, iterating upon each or combining them in a novel fashion. The simplicity or lack of inhibition in the approach of an amateur can allow for this volume, because the amateur is not limited by the constraints of a more formal practice. These purposely hem in what is possible in exchange for useful constraints that result in work of a reliable quality. Successful artists have to learn balance the pursuit of technique without being stifled by its preciousness, in the same way that amateurs have to balance novelty with reproducibility. Excess in either case tends to result in poor work.

[gnaritas]

Neither is the pro limited, understanding other's idioms is not a constraint; knowledge is not a handicap to creativity. People who complain about losing their creativity if they know too much are just uncreative people lying to themselves in order to explain their lack of creativity.

[Retric]

10k hours has a lot more to due with human lifespans than it does anything else. 4h a day 5 days a week 48 weeks a year for 60 years is only 57,600 hours. Sure, after someone has been doing something for 10 years they hit diminishing returns. But that's in context of a relatively low lifetime limit.

If people lived 1,000+ years people would be talking about 100,000 hours.

[granfalloon]

"...and also unlock the intuitive sense that comes from mastery."

To me, unlocking that aesthetic intuition is the essence of creativity. The other component -- which I recognize most people lack -- is an open-mindedness and willingness to experiment and find art in unexpected places. But even if you have that, you still need the mastery, at least in most disciplines.

If you create lots of sculpture, you'll encounter lots of "problems." And if you persevere, you'll discover lots of "solutions" -- whether they are intended results or happy accidents. Mastery in the arts is simply accumulating a sufficiently large library of problems/solutions, and encountering them often enough that they become mental muscle memory, so that you begin to see potential high-level solutions in the world around you. I believe the art we find most "creative" is, counterintuitively, the art that is discovered or stumbled upon by masters who have developed the skill to spot, excavate, and refine it. (Like Michelangelo seeing his sculpture "emerge" from the marble -- I don't think it was the mystical process it's often made out to be, but rather him recognizing the maximum potential of each quirk of the marble, and intuitively seeing how those potentials might combine into an image.) Contrast that with an artist's attempt to make something "from the ground up," based solely on the application of learned principles. The result may be beautiful or masterful, but probably won't have that true creative spark.

Great art often makes people think "I never would of thought to do that," which to me is kind of tragic, because they may get discouraged from pursuing art, without realizing that the artist never "thought to do that," either. The artist just had the open-mindedness to look around, the developed intuition to spot it, and the technical skill to build it out.

[ben_jones]

Agreed. Ten years ago what could we achieve at say, a hackathon? What could we achieve in the same amount of time today? I don't think our creativity has increased, but our ability to express it probably has, and that's why deliberate practice is a component that expands the whole process.

[aclissold]

Our ability to express our creativity. I'll have to think about that for a while.