How to think for yourself

A couple weeks ago we published this video for mymind.

Watch it before you keep reading, it's only a minute long.

Alright, now that you have watched the video, here's my take:

Today's professional world is a mess.

We've been driven to such high levels of collaboration, there is almost no escape.

Cursors are following our every move. Comments, likes and reactions decorate every corner of our work, finished or not.

Open plan offices invite everyone to come to our desk and chat. A glance at your screen is just a turn of the head away.

Meeting invites, all-hands and morning stand ups fill our calendars, ensuring we don't have a single waking minute alone to think or actually... do the work we're talking about in the meetings.

Today, "working together" means something much different than it used to. It's like we no longer trust our own brains to think autonomously. We need the comments, the reactions, the hand-holding, to feel like we're accomplishing something.

But what are we actually accomplishing?

I believe this age of collaboration is lessening the quality of our work, along with our personal sense of creative capability and accomplishment. How can we possibly be doing our best work when we don't have a minute of solitude in our day to actually think? To actually WORK?

This is not the creative process. This is not even collaboration. It's a dance of cursors, a volley of words around the table, that amounts to not much at all.

Creativity requires time alone. Ask any writer, artist, designer who's ever lived. They'll tell you their best creative work happened in solitude. Where they could actually think. Where no voices were interrupting, no eyes were watching, no cursors hovering. Where the fragile embers of an idea could be stoked, get air and grow into a warm, burning fire.

Think of a theater performance, a true work of collaboration. The play didn't start with everyone in a room tossing ideas around and critiquing each other's work. It started with a solo writer with an idea. They wrote their script. They probably wrote a dozen scripts before they shared one with anyone else. A director sat with the script on their own before meeting with the writer to give feedback. The actors read the script, studied and memorized it, on their own as well. Only AFTER all of that did they meet in the same room and bring it all together. Only by the solo efforts of many, at the beginning, did they create their play and put it on a stage for others, together.

Solitude, solitude is where it should all begin.

You first have to spend time with yourself, with your own thoughts, to bring anything of value to the table with a team.

The natural desire to reach consensus inside a group tends to eliminate both bad and great ideas. It's a filter for both the terribly bad, but also the incredibly good. Consensus likes to settle somewhere in the middle — something we like to call the mediocre. (Literally, the word comes from the Latin "mediocris," which means "moderate" or "in the middle.")

Don't get me wrong, I do believe collaboration is necessary, to a degree. And it's of course inevitable for most of us working in an agency or company setting. We do need meetings. We do need collaborative software. These things are necessary for one part of the creative journey. But we've put so much priority on them, we've left out another, very important part of that journey: YOU.

In my world, the design and tech community, I see the impact most with our software and tools. It started with helpful and much needed collaborative features, like comments or shared canvases, that allowed us to more easily hand off project phases and files to each other. These were meant to solve organizational problems (remember telling everyone you saved presentation_final_FINAL.pptx to the server with your additions, which would then become presentation_final_FINAL_reallyfinal and so on?).

Then it evolved to live collaboration features, where we could literally put a live view of our face inside our cursors, allow others to live-follow those cursors, and talk in real time while we worked. Then it turned into twelve cursors flying around a board working on the same project at the same time. Which again, isn't all bad. I enjoy jumping in there having a jam session with my team now and then when we've reached a certain point of a project. But it's certainly not where I begin.

When you use a tool that only you have access to, you're naturally using it differently. A tool that doesn't allow you to share or collaborate, naturally invites you to be more honest with it. To be more open, more free of judgement and societal norm.

“The mind is sharper and keener in seclusion and uninterrupted solitude. Originality thrives in seclusion free of outside influences beating upon us to cripple the creative mind. Be alone—that is the secret of invention: be alone, that is when ideas are born.”

— Nikola Tesla

The moment we invite people to our canvas, it turns into a performance. You're now modifying your behavior for someone else. You're consciously or subconsciously editing yourself, and overly aware of yourself, because you're considering how others might perceive you. Your free thoughts and ideas are being edited in real time, by you.

While on the other hand, if you're doing this alone, you're be allowed to be weird. You can let your entire multi-dimensional personality flow into it. You can cast your net wide. There is no judgment, nobody to comment on your half-baked idea, nobody to put their emojis on your work.

And this brings me back to mymind.

I like the idea of it being my sacred place. It's one place where I don't have to perform for anyone else. I do not need to curate it because no one ever sees it. And simply because of this, I'm saving more interesting things in there because they don't need to adhere to my carefully crafted image online (which most of us have).

mymind is my private oasis of ideas, notes and references. It's the place where I can be weird, fun and serious at the same time. It's a place for the many facets of my personality can come out to play, all in one place. As a designer, this is incredibly valuable because it contributes to a more well rounded ME.

And while this article may be partially about mymind (which inspired me to write this article), consider the contents of it to be universal. It doesn't matter what tools you use. It doesn't matter where you work or what systems your company has in place. We all have to carve out a space for our creative selves to run wild, in whatever form that means for us.

A place we can go back to, just by ourselves. A place where we can start with our creative journey, and when we're ready, take those ideas to a more collaborative space.