Creativity Isn’t a Magic; You Just Need a System

I was once speaking to a friend who said she was feeling in a rut.

Part of my advice was to be more creative, to spend some time each day drawing or writing or whatever takes her fancy, to express what she was feeling and how she sees the world. What I found interesting was the knee-jerk reaction she had. Almost instantly, she replied “I can’t do that, I’m not creative.”

It wasn’t until later, thinking back on the conversation, that I realise most people think they already they know if they’re creative or not. They decided, somewhere between school and adulthood, that they either do or do not have the “creative gene.” There could be any number of reasons for this, like a drawing that got laughed at, or a story that went unread, or just the persistent comparison to someone who seemed to effortlessly produce brilliant things.

I think if you were to ask the average person about creativity, they’d say people are either creative or not, or that they were born with it or born without it.

Bur that verdict is wrong. We’re all creative, and we can all harness that creativity for personal expression and our own wellbeing. The evidence of this has been accumulating for decades, and in this essay we’re going to explore some of this evidence, as well as look at ways you can build your own system that helps you find your creative spark – even if you don’t think you have one.

The Myth That Holds Everyone Back

Before the system can be understood, the myth that only those born with some innate talent can be creative must be dismantled.

The idea that creativity is an innate gift (that some people simply have it and others do not) is one of the most persistent and damaging beliefs in modern culture and self-actualisation. Research has consistently found that while there may be weak genetic contributions to certain aspects of creative cognition, these account for only a small fraction of the variation in creative output.

The overwhelming conclusion is that non-creative behaviour is learned, not inherited.

The most striking evidence comes from George Land’s famous 1968 study (commissioned by NASA) that assessed the creativity of 1,600 children and sought to answer the age-old question of: where does creativity come from?

The results of the study were fascinating. At the end of various tests, 98% of four-to-five-year-olds scored at “genius” level. But by age ten, that figure had dropped to 30%. And then, by age fifteen, the results had dropped once more to just 12%. The same test, given to 280,000 adults, returned a result of just 2%.

The conclusion of the study was as unambiguous as can be: Non-creative behaviour is learned.

The study tells us something essential about creativity: that children are not born uncreative, but instead they are taught to be uncreative as they go through life. The school system, the workplace, and the social enforcement of “norms” train us to self-censor, conform, and stop generating ideas that might be wrong, weird, or premature.

Many of us think that only the lucky few are born creative, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. We’re all born creative, without nurturing this creativity, we gradually lose it as time goes on.

However, there is a silver lining to this: if non-creative behaviour is learned, the opposite is also true, that creative behaviour can also be learned and implemented in our lives.

Creativity as Combinatorial Process

At the heart of the system for creativity we’re going to discuss (and at the heart of what researchers have been saying for years) is a deceptively simple idea. It says that consistent creativity is not the generation of something from nothing, but rather the combination of existing things in new ways.

It is, according to cognitive scientist Margaret Boden, a formal description of how human creativity works. Boden, a pioneer in the scientific study of creativity, described what she called combinatorial creativity: the process by which ideas emerge from recombining existing concepts in unexpected ways. According to her research, the creative act involves “synthesising concepts such that emergent properties arise – features not predictable from the properties of the constituents alone.”

The practical implication of this is powerful; you do not need a mysterious gift to be creative. You need raw material – a rich, diverse, carefully curated store of experiences, ideas, images, concepts, and influences – and the willingness to let those materials collide. We can boil this theory down to three simple words: Nothing is original. The best ideas don’t come from isolation; they come from studying, borrowing, and reworking what inspires you.

With this in mind, let’s explore the creativity system, how you can build one for yourself and, more importantly, how you can start using it in everyday life.

The Three Part Creativity System

This system is not my own creation. But, in the spirit of what we know about combinatorial creativity, something come about from the borrowing of other systems I’ve seen online. This is a perfect example of the nothing is original ethos.

The barebones of the system is a three-part loop that allows for three distinct stages of the creative process: Input, Process, and Output. Each step in the system is necessary, as none of them work independently.

Part One: Input – Feed the Machine

As we’ve established, creativity is combinatorial, with the blending together of distinct parts to create something new. This means the quality and diversity of your inputs (the individual ingredients you’re pulling inspiration from) directly determine the quality and novelty of your outputs (your creative product, project, concept, etc).

Put directly, you cannot draw inspiration from what you have not consumed.

It’s for this reason that many creative people are, almost universally, voracious collectors. As Austin Kleon observes in his book Steal Like an Artist, “The artist is a collector. Not a hoarder, mind you, there’s a difference: hoarders collect indiscriminately, artists collect selectively. They only collect things that they really love.”

The writer Sebastian Junger, in conversation with Tim Ferriss, put it more bluntly: “Writer’s block just means I don’t have the ammo.” The Nobel Prize-winning novelist Junot Díaz is also quoted as saying: “Read more than you write, live more than you read.”

All three are making the same point: creative output is downstream of input.

The key to this is intentionality. Passive consumption (scrolling, grazing, absorbing whatever the algorithm serves up) is not the same as active curation. To get the most out of your inputs, you should be aggressive about what you spend your time reading, watching, listening to, etc. You should reading widely across fields, studying the work of practitioners you admire, exposing yourself to disciplines you know nothing about, and keeping a record of what you find compelling and why.

Storing Your Inputs

It’s fine watching and listening to a bunch of things that interest you, but if you’re not actively storing that information somewhere, you’re going to quickly forget it all.

There are any number of ways you can store your creative inputs, ranging from the simple to the more complex. Two of these are:

• Commonplace Book: This is a notebook where you store all your inputs. The benefit of this is that physically writing things down can help with information retention. The downside is that once something is on the page, you can’t then further organise it, like pulling pages out and putting them somewhere else.

• Second Brain: These function the same way as the commonplace books, only they’re digital versions, typically built in tools like Notion or Obsidian. The benefit of this method is that digital systems are infinitely customisable, organisable, and searchable. However, the downside is that there’s always the risk of data loss, something not applicable to physical notebooks.

My personal system is to capture quick notes in the small black notebooks I carry around everywhere (see image above) and then, at the end of a week, I’ll go through the notes I’ve made and add them into a bigger Second Brain built with Notion. I’ve found that this gives all the benefits of physically writing whilst also allowing for content tags and dynamic searching.

The actual method you use to do this doesn’t matter all that much. All that does matter is that you’re storing your inputs in a system that’s easily accessible and you can search through. A simple notebook can do this, and more advanced methods like Notion databases can do it too.

Ultimately, whatever method works for capturing and storying inputs is good.

Part Two: Process – Adding Commentary to Your Inputs

Raw inputs don’t spontaneously become creative outputs. The second part of this system is to organise your inputs and then add your own thoughts, ideas, and commentary to them.

In my Second Brain, I have three types of notes: Unprocessed, In Progress, and Complete. These allow me to see which stage each input is at, and what I need to do to “complete” them. The status markers are broken down like this:

• Unprocessed: These are raw inputs that don’t have my own commentary associated with them, which can be things like quotes, interesting YouTube videos, photos, artwork, or even just thoughts I’ve had that I think could be used for/in something later down the line.

• In Progress: These are where I’ve started to add my own commentary to the input. I’ll often write summaries of the input in my own words, expand on the collected thoughts, or muse on the input idea.

• Complete: When I’ve added my own thoughts, I’ll then add tags to the input which allow me to organise each input into the various subjects I’m interested in: things like psychology, marketing, graphic design, etc. Each completed input will have various tags, which is essential for organising and searching through the inputs. During this stage I’ll also add links to any related ideas that already exist within the system.

Once the inputs are organised I’m then able to look through an organised selection of ideas, photos, videos, and more that directly link to the subjects I’m interested in.

If all of this sounds slow, that’s because it is. Creativity is a slow process; you don’t write a great article in one sitting, masterworks of fiction aren’t written in one day, and you don’t paint the Mona Lisa in one go. This part of the system is intentionally slow because it allows you to engage with the inputs, instead of just thinking “that’s cool,” saving it, and then never looking at it again.

The whole idea of the processing step is to get you thinking and writing about the input, forcing you to engage with the idea and working with the material. By doing this, the information begins to swim around in your mind, which then connects with other ideas.

The swimming around in your mind part happens on a subconscious level, which is why you need to…

Let Yourself do Nothing

Neuroscientific research has shown that creativity is not localised to a single region of the brain. It involves the coordinated activity of multiple networks, particularly the Default Mode Network (associated with spontaneous thought and daydreaming) and the Executive Control Network (associated with selection and evaluation). Effective creative thinking tends to involve the interaction of these systems – the generative, associative mind working in concert with the evaluating, focusing mind.

What this means in practice is that not working is an essential part of the working. Walking, sleeping, showering, letting the mind wander – these are not breaks from the creative process, they are a key part of it.

The ideas and thoughts that come in the shower aren’t magic; they’re the brain completing a combinatorial operation that was set in motion by careful input and then given room to run. This freedom to let your mind wander is vital. It might sound counterintuitive, but to be creative, you need to let yourself be bored every now and then.

Part Three: Output – Volume is the Strategy

The third component of the creativity system is perhaps the most counterintuitive: to produce good work, you must produce more work, full stop.

This principle has been validated by decades of empirical research. Studies that are consistently replicated show that quality of output is a probabilistic consequence of quantity of output. Put simply, this means the more a creator produces, the more likely they are to produce something extraordinary – not because of some linear improvement, but because creative success follows statistical probability.

There are many inventors, painters, creators, and more throughout history that are known for specific works, but what we forget is that these same people will have hundreds, if not thousands of works under their belt. For example, Thomas Edison filed over 1,000 patents, Johann Sebastian Bach wrote over 1,100 pieces of music, and Pablo Picasso is estimated to have produced more than 50,000 works across his lifetime.

The masterpieces exist in proportion to the total volume. As the psychologist Keith Simonton’s research formalised: the relationship between creative hits and total creative output is “positive, linear, stochastic, and stable.“

The implication of this is liberating: the pressure to make every piece of work a masterpiece is not only unrealistic, but also actively counterproductive.

The goal of the creativity system isn’t to collect all your inputs and make just one perfect thing. Instead, the goal is to use those inputs to make many individual things, consistently, and let quality emerge from volume.

Why This Matters Now

We live in an era that has simultaneously made inputs more abundant and homogenised than ever. With minor variations, we’re all being served by the same algorithm, seeing the same trending content, and seeing the same books appear on those Essential Book lists on Instagram. The infrastructure of modern media is optimised for engagements, clicks, and views, not for the kind of diverse, eclectic, cross-disciplinary input that fuels genuine creative originality.

Research on creative behaviour describes creativity as a process where “culture is both the input to and the output of the creative process.“ Creators draw from the cultural lineage of their domain, transform it through their own perspective and combination of influences, and contribute new variants back to the culture. This is how creativity has worked for decades.

But when the input is narrow (or when everyone is consuming the same things) the outputs converge too. Creative output from one person begins to look like the creative output of the next five people, because they’re all consuming the same inputs.

Building a creative system in this environment means actively resisting the passive default. It means choosing what to read, watch, and study with the same intentionality a chef brings to sourcing ingredients. The meal a chef can produce is only as good as the ingredients that go into it, and it’s no different for your own creative projects; without good input, your output will be boring too. And, importantly, without a way of managing those inputs, you’ll have no way of diving back into the things you love and pulling inspiration from them.

Building Your Own System

This framework, along with the research-backed insights we’ve explored in this essay, point to a creativity system that you can implement in your own process right now.

If you want to build your own system, here are practical steps you can take to begin building, and working, with one right now:

• Curate your inputs: Choose inputs deliberately and across disciplines, seeking out things that are unfamiliar. Read outside your field. Study practitioners you admire, not just to copy them, but to understand the thinking behind their choices. So too, figure out the exact subjects you’re genuinely interested in, and prioritise watching, listening, and reading about them.

• Keep a capture system: A notebook, an app, a voice recorder, whichever works for you. Realistically the format is less important than the habit itself, so as long as you’re saving the things that interest you (and can revisit them), then the actual tool you use should be what feels most natural for you. When something strikes you as interesting or worth saving… record it. Ideas (or inputs) are the raw material of the system and what will build up your repository of inspiration over time, so they need somewhere to land.

• Create volume: Commit to consistent output, however imperfect. Lower the bar for completion and raise the bar for frequency. The goal is not each individual piece, but rather a body of work. From this body of work, from the consistent creation, your skills will grow and cool stuff will eventually emerge. Remember, don’t seek to make a masterpiece right away… aim to just make something.

• Give your brain space: Build in periods of your day or week for non-directed thought, meaning things like walks without music, downtime where you do nothing, and, of course, sleep. This is the incubation phase, and it’s not optional; it’s where the combinatorial work happens.

• Revisit and cross-pollinate: The system isn’t an archive that you store things and never look at again. Aim to regularly review your captured inputs and look for unexpected connections. The insight that leads to cool and interesting ideas is often at the intersection of two things that have no obvious relationship on the surface.

Conclusion

Despite what many of us think (and are often told throughout our lives) creativity isn’t a gift that only a select few are given. So too, it’s not a talent distributed unequally at birth. Nor is it a lightning bolt that strikes the chosen few.

Creativity is a system, one with knowable components, improvable habits, and a track record of producing results when applied consistently.

As we’ve seen through this article, the science is unambiguous: unique ideas and concepts are often the product of joining multiple individual (existing) ideas together to form something new. We now know this is called combinatorial creativity, and an essential thing to harness if you wish to be more creative. We also know that engaging in creative thinking forges new neural pathways so, naturally, the more you practice the system, the more effectively and easily it operates.

But to harness this, you must begin at the inputs. You have to be mindful of saving the things that inspire you, the things that you find interesting, and the things that you wish to emulate. You must save these things in a system that you can then revisit time and time again, discovering new connections and generating new ideas by combining the disparate parts.

Only then can you be creative consistently, and only then can you stop relying on the fallacy of “divine inspiration” that strikes randomly. Those events will still happen (and will even be more prone to happening as you engage with the inputs you find interesting), but by curating your own system, you can take control of your own creativity and be consistent in your output.

Remember, you were not born uncreative – nobody was. Instead, you were taught to be uncreative as you got older and the demands of life began to take over. You can undo that teaching and get back to harnessing your innate creativity, one intentional input at a time.