How we misunderstand the purpose of creativity

In “The Mindset of Making,” Oliver Jeffers shared a compelling invitation: “Simply make as an extension of being alive.” 

His wisdom ignited my imagination. Too often, we associate creativity with being an artist, when all of us are creators. What might the world look like if we tapped into our innate creativity? 

“The world is a result of all of us as creators and storytellers,” Jeffers shares. “All human beings are is a collection of stories: There are the stories that we’re told, the stories that are told about us, and then the stories that we tell.” 

“We’re all born with this sense of surviving and then making—that is the reason that civilization flourished in the first place,” he adds. “So, to say that creativity is just for artists—or it’s just decoration or entertainment—is to fundamentally misunderstand the purpose of creativity.”  

Jeffers is a visual artist and author, renowned across mediums from painting to performance, sculpture to bookmaking. He’s created 21 award-winning picture books, while presenting first of their kind art exhibits around the world. 

His answer reflected the spirit that he creates his own art with: an unafraid curiosity to explore both the beauty and complexity of our life on Earth. Then, an invitation to write a better story about it.  

In our conversation, Jeffers illuminates questions and a road map to begin doing so, individually and collectively. He shares how to trust yourself as a creative, master the art of simplicity, and ask questions to design a brighter future. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Fast Company: You’ve described your work as “making books about what it means to be a human being.” What questions do you ask yourself every day to uncover the heart of that? What answers have you discovered? 

If I’m talking about me as an individual, or anybody as an individual, it’s one set of questions. If we’re talking about society at large, it’s a different set of questions. 

With me, it’s: What is it that I actually want? If I can answer that question honestly, then pair it with who it’s for, it’s a unique way of understanding my own set of circumstances: Why am I doing any of this? What is it for?

The question that I get asked when I’m speaking at art colleges with young adult students is: What do you do when you’re trying to find your style? Or, when you face rejection or artist’s block? 

When you really sit down and question—Whose validation is it you’re seeking?—you probably can’t come up with an answer with a person. If you can, you probably won’t like that answer. 

You only get one crack at this business of being alive. So, the question to yourself is: What do you want to do with that time? What is it all for? Who is it all for?  

When you were talking about your books, you shared that they are “distilled down to such a pure form that I have to know what they’re saying . . . What is the fewest amount of words you can use and the sparsest artwork that fully conveys the emotion and structure of the story?” What is essential in the art of simplicity? How do you practice that discipline? 

By thinking a lot about: What is the why behind the why? What is the simpler way to say this? What is the feeling that I’m trying to convey, with as little information as possible, but with as little distortion as possible?

There’s the classic line about storytelling: Give the audience what they want, just not the way they expect it. Whenever you pander to what you think people want, you end up making work that’s derivative or dry. Making art is effectively about being very, very openly vulnerable. 

When I’m thinking about the books that aren’t simple stories, but about my observations in the world, say it’s a book about greed that’s a comment on capitalism like The Fate of Fausto. It’s not really about that. It’s about: Why do we have that in the first place? Why is more always better? What is our fundamental relationship with nature all about? 

It’s getting deeper and simpler to the point of the cogs of the wheel—the center of the wheel so to speak—where any little movement at that zoomed-in level has a massive amplification when you magnify it.

You shared a great mantra: Be the river, not the rock. What does this mean to you and how does it guide you? 

It’s the comparison between the river and the rock specifically, because the rock is unbending and unwilling to move. It seems strong and rigid. But, the water, in its own meandering way, will find a way around it and the rock will eventually get eroded down. 

Do you have other mantras? 

Another one is when I get creative block, how I get over it is to remember that I’ll be dead soon. That’s the creative kick in the arse that anybody ever really needs. Nobody is going to do the work for you. If you want it to happen, what are you waiting for?

In describing your portraiture work, you said “every time I start a new painting or go into a direction of a body of work, I say: I’m going to be loose this time. I want to be big and loose. I invariably keep getting back to being tighter at that skill. I somehow can’t find the freedom and energy that happens intuitively with the book art on a large scale painting. I’m still learning to trust myself.” What have you learned about staying loose in the creative process, especially when you’re simultaneously trying to improve? 

It was a comment on when I first set off post university. In my final years at art college, I wanted to be a painter. I wanted to be in the fine art world. That’s what I set off to do.

Then, the books were a tangent from that, but the books exploded. I wanted to prove to the art world: Look, I’m a real artist. So, the early paintings I was making, I discovered that I did have a talent for figurative painting. I used that to my advantage quite well. But, then I couldn’t escape from that, because I kept trying to prove to people that I can paint. 

The looseness and freedom is not just a visual aesthetic term. It’s about the process and the project as well. I’ve been getting that with worrying less about the outcome and enjoying the act of making. So, it’s starting to happen. A big part of it is both literally using a bigger paintbrush. But, trusting myself and trusting the right moment, because some days it flows and some days it doesn’t; And, not beating myself up on the days when it doesn’t. 

Let’s talk about your Dipped Painting Project: You paint a portrait of someone in your studio. Then, conduct a performance where you dip it into paint for a small audience. They’re the only people who ever see the painting. It evokes the nonattachment notions of Buddhist sand mandalas, when they create sand art and then destroy it. Tell us about the value of nonattachment in creativity and in life. How do you cultivate it?

A lot of people did compare the Dipped Paintings to the monks and the sand. But, there’s one difference: They intentionally said that they destroyed the work afterwards, whereas that’s not what I’m doing. There’s a fine line between creation and destruction. What I’m actually doing is completing the creation, because it was always the intention to do that. There is still a thing that you look at. It just has a very different set of expected properties. It still looks like a beautiful object in the end, as opposed to the sand, which is scattered to the wind. 

I consider those paintings incomplete until they’re dipped, not completed and destroyed. It’s all about intent and motivation. Language is a funny thing. Motivation can often be the nuance in language.  

This question may be irrelevant, given that it’s your intention. But, after working so hard on it, does it hurt when you dip it into paint?  

It doesn’t, because at that point it’s a piece of performance, almost like a theatrical ceremony where there’s a lot that I’m thinking of. There’s a poem that I recite and a speech that I give. There’s a lot of choreography. I’m not thinking about the painting. I barely look at it during the ceremony.

No photographs ever exist, but I have my moments with it during the process of the creation. I’ll be painting a hand, finger, or ear. I know it’s going to get covered. I’ve learned to appreciate that one little moment in that time. It’s like watching a sunset. There’s no point in taking a photograph of the sunset: A) Because they’re very hard to photograph; B) You never look at them again; C) That’s not what it’s about. It’s not about how it looks. It’s about how it feels.  

You talked about that earlier, where you’re trying to find these beautiful moments throughout the week. I’ve always been like this, where I see beauty all around me, all the time. There could be myriad reasons for that. I’m very comfortable with my own mortality. I’m very comfortable with having everything or having nothing. I’m very comfortable with change and other people’s expectations. Hell, I’m just along for the ride.  

Shifting gears to your mission, this Wayne Dyer quote feels reflective of your work and the questions you have us ask: “When you change the way you see things, the things you see change.” What does that mean to you and what helps you embody that? 

It’s absolutely right. It’s about perspective. There’s the theory of duality, which is a mathematical equation that shows that light, if it’s measured in particles, becomes a particle. If it’s measured in waves, it becomes a wave. How can light be both a particle and a wave? What this is really saying is: By how we choose to look at something, we define what it is. Perspective is everything. 

It reminds me of when I was doing research for Here We Are and looking into the overview effect and cosmology. The astronauts on Apollo 8—they were the ones who took that famous Earthrise photograph—when they turned the camera around and looked at Earth, what’s less talked about is that they saw this giant landmass. But, they couldn’t work out what landmass they were looking at. It was the entire bottom half of Africa, but they didn’t recognize it because it was sideways.

We’ve been so conditioned to think of the map with north at the top and south at the bottom. But, that’s a perspective. The reality is that Earth is a ball floating through space. There is no up and there is no down. Therein, if you take a map of the world, turn it upside down, and label everything the right way up, which I have done, it makes everything that seems very familiar suddenly seem very foreign. It’s an exercise that you can do at any point.

You described that your book Begin Again was saying: “Here’s a key. You can get inside yourself and turn the steering wheel a little bit.” Expand on that intention for us. 

If you go back to: What is it that you’re doing and why? If you were to take, say the division in America right now, a lot of it is about building the wall and other people—What do you want? Why do you feel that this is so important? Is it because you don’t like the people that you’ve defined as your enemy and that they might be right? Or, is this what you actually want your fight to be about?

When you think about: If this is the one goal that I get of being alive, do I want to spend my time proving somebody wrong? Or, do I want to spend my time enjoying beauty? When you think about it in those simple terms, what are these fights about? 

That’s what I mean. It was: You alone have access to that steering wheel of what your goals and motivations are. Nobody else will ever know. What does it matter that you change that? It’s not about being right and wrong. It’s about being better.  

Let’s expand on that, because you created an entry point to have a different conversation about the moment that we’re in when you said: “We prioritize being right over wrong more than anything else. But, if we replace the words right or wrong in any conflict or debate with better or worse, it suddenly becomes very clear what needs to happen. It’s not about the ego, self, or justifying the past. It’s about: What do we do now? How do we make this better?” Tell us about the power of the questions that we ask to shape our conversations and the outcomes of those conversations. 

Most people in the USA, if you ask them what is the world that they want, without mentioning anything that they don’t want—anybody who is a Democrat, Republican, or anywhere in between. No matter where they’re from, people tend to answer the same things when they talk about what they do want, rather than what they don’t want.

So, if that is where we want to be, that would be better. What are the practical ways to get there? Forgetting about right and wrong, how do we get to better? It massively changes the discourse and the route that we’re currently on.  

An important lesson you’ve learned is to ask people more questions. You said: “Ask people things about themselves and their lives, as you never know how they will reveal their story and what you might possibly learn from it.” What is your favorite question to ask people?

It depends on who it is. I got to know Brandon, who started Humans of New York. He said that he can get people to sing like a canary, complete strangers, just by asking them: What’s your biggest struggle right now? 

People are just waiting to reveal their vulnerable underbelly in a way that they feel seen and heard. That’s a nonjudgmental way to ask that question, where I’m not trying to prove you right or wrong. I’m interested in you as a person.   

Let’s bring this back to something that we talked about earlier. When you think about how many people, especially children, you have the ability to influence. Then, you think about creating like an artist, where you’re creating for yourself. How do you continue to create for yourself, without thinking about what other people are going to think, when you have that platform and success? 

Art is the one industry where the more selfish you are, the more generous you are.

I’ll take picture books, for example. If you think about—What stories do kids want to hear?—and then you try to make that story, it’s almost like what Henry Ford said about doing market research: If I’d asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse. 

What tends to happen is if you think about: What has worked? I’ll do that again. The next big thing was never a repeat of the last big thing. You end up pandering and making work that’s derivative and dull. But, if you are being  publicly vulnerable by being selfish, like: Here’s what I want to do and see. I’m going to let everybody see me do it. You end up making work that’s way more accessible than if you make work that you think people want to see, because they’re like: Yes, that’s human. There’s a human sense of motivations here that I understand. That makes sense to me now.