How to be creative (without taking drugs)

No substances required.

A wealthy man walks into a bank in New York.

“I’m going away to Europe on business for two weeks and need to borrow $5000”

The bank officer says the bank will need some security for the loan. The man hands over the keys to a new Rolls-Royce, which costs $250,000. The bank officer is shocked but agrees to accept the car as collateral for the loan.

After the man leaves, the loan officer, the bank’s president and all their colleagues enjoy a good laugh at the man for using a $250,000 Rolls-Royce as collateral against a $5,000 loan.

One of the employees drives the Rolls into the bank’s underground garage and parks it there.

Two weeks later, the wealthy man returns, repays the $5000 and the interest, which comes to $15.41.

The loan officer says, “Sir, I must tell you, we’re all a little puzzled. You’re a multi-millionaire — why would you need a $5,000 loan?”

The man replies, “Where else in New York City can I park my car for two weeks for only $15.41?”

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The mistake people make is treating creativity like productivity. They try to work harder and expect creativity to appear. Instead, sprinkle in new inputs and watch new outputs appear.

Here are 12 inputs that help increase creativity. Let’s turn some bank vaults into cheap parking spots together:

1. Translate aggressively - Got a written idea? Draw it. Got a visual idea? Write it down. Calculating an equation? Explain it out loud. As you translate an idea from one language to another, creativity leaks out in the migration process.

One of my favourite examples is that Christopher Nolan drew the plot of Inception.

2. Scroll for anti-social proof - Go to YouTube or Substack, scroll through the explore page, and click only on content that has under 5,000 views. You’ll find niche ideas that haven’t yet mimetically spread. 90% will be a waste of time. Like a successful venture capitalist’s portfolio, the 10% of hits cover the 90% of misses multiple times over.

3. Avoid content made after 2016 - Something happened in 2016. The internet became less weird, less creative. Whatever the cause, pre-2016 content has a distinct flavour of strangeness that has vanished. My favourite hack for this: Find a book or essay you love. Open up ChatGPT deep research. Ask for 50 similar books or essays, all created before 2016.

4. Create your own time zone - Most people peak creatively whilst others are asleep. At 2 p.m., your brain tracks what others think. At 2 a.m., nobody’s watching. The ideas that seemed too weird at lunch suddenly seem worth exploring. Your brain fills the silence with ideas you’d normally censor. If creativity is your main goal, wake up absurdly early or go to sleep ridiculously late.

5. Increase time in the bathroom - Aaron Sorkin, the writer behind A Few Good Men and The West Wing, takes 6-8 hot showers per day when he’s writing. Another hack is to be slightly overly hydrated. You may only have shower thoughts once per day, but you can increase your bathroom thoughts by drinking more water.

6. Fight an evil twin - Imagine there’s an evil identical twin of you whose sole job is to out-think you. What are they thinking? This thought experiment allows the mind to explore dangerous ideas because you can blame it on the twin. If the twin produces any useful ideas, you can steal them. You have no skin in the game.

7. Spin wheels - Collect the best questions you find. Add them to a spinning wheel app. Spin the wheel before bed. Leave the question with the subconscious overnight. Brainstorm on the question first thing in the morning, before any inputs.

8. Take a sakoku - When I ask friends which country they want to visit, the most common answer is Japan. When I ask why, it’s because Japanese culture feels so unique compared to anywhere else in the world. One of the major historical reasons is that Japan practised an isolationist policy for 265 years called Sakoku. They cut off the outside world, whilst most countries traded ideas and customs.
Once every 6 months, practice a Sakoku for a week. Consume no inputs. Sakoku is intermittent fasting for the mimetic mind. Our thoughts feel like our own -- but it’s often society’s voice echoing. When you spend a week alone with zero external inputs -- the echoes disappear and you hear your own creative voice

9. When creativity hits you, sprint to your garden shed in your boxer shorts at 3 am - Christopher Nolan bolted across to his garden at 3 a.m. in his boxer shorts. He’d been stuck on the final scenes of Oppenheimer for weeks. Then, mid-dream, the entire sequence materialised. He grabbed paper and pen in his shed and wrote it down before it vanished. The 3 am idea never changed and was the finale of the film.

10. The creativity faucet - One fun way to spark creativity is to ask: What’s the worst idea possible? Set the bar so low and then just keep improving it. Self-inflicted pressure is the single biggest killer of creativity. My friend Julain Shapiro visualises creativity as a backed-up pipe of water. The first mile is wastewater that needs to be emptied. After emptying the bad ideas, you begin to spot patterns as to why they are bad.

11. Avoid dramatic people - Good news: Your brain is the most powerful supercomputer in the known universe. Bad news: It can only have one conscious thought at a time. Every minute you spend ruminating on someone’s manufactured crisis is a minute you’re not solving your actual problems. Dramatic people eat your supercomputer’s RAM.

12. The Swedish House Mafia Technique - Get a room with friends away from the outside world. Two to four friends is the sweet spot. Throw ideas back and forth like a tennis rally. Keep iterating away. When you’re playing idea tennis with creative people, 1+1 does not equal 2; it equals 11.

Here’s Swedish House Mafia creating the iconic One from a hum and a table tap to performing it on stage. It’s one of my favourite videos on the internet.

If you enjoyed this, share it with your Swedish House Mafia friends.