The Surprising Science of Creativity (with Dr. George Newman)

Summary

The Happiness Lab: Getting Unstuck

Episode Summary: The Surprising Science of Creativity (with Dr. George Newman)

Release Date: January 26, 2026
Host: Dr. Laurie Santos
Guest: Dr. George Newman (Professor of Organizational Behavior, University of Toronto)

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Episode Overview

In this energizing episode, Dr. Laurie Santos and creativity expert Dr. George Newman bust pervasive myths about creativity and reveal that new ideas emerge not from divine inspiration or innate genius, but from a process much closer to archaeological exploration. Drawing on scientific studies, real-world examples, and Dr. Newman's new book ("How Great Ideas Happen: The Hidden Steps Behind Breakthrough Success"), the episode provides listeners with actionable strategies to get creatively unstuck—in any domain of life.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Redefining Creativity

• Creativity is NOT reserved for "geniuses":
  • It's the process of "generating new and useful ideas" (Dr. George Newman, 04:39), not just artistic genius or what you see in museums.
• "Usefulness" is key:
  • Ideas must bring value—whether via entertainment, scientific progress, technology, or personal life.

Debunking Creativity Myths

1. The Lone Genius Myth

• We often picture creativity as a solitary, mystical lightning bolt moment.
• Dr. Newman: "There's this genius myth, that there's this lone genius and you're going to go off into the cabin and wait for that light bulb moment... But what I argue in the book is actually creativity is much more like a process of discovery." (06:29)

2. The Lightbulb Moment

• Creativity is built through exploration and careful work, not sudden inspiration.
• Thomas Edison, commonly associated with the "lightbulb moment," actually said:

  "My so called inventions already existed in the environment. I took them out, I created nothing. Nobody does. There's no such thing as an idea of being brain born. Everything comes from outside." (10:59)

3. Creativity Only Happens in Isolation

• It's a myth that solitude produces creativity; in fact, diverse environments and social interactions are powerfully generative.
• Even Thoreau, famed for his solitude, frequently socialized and held gatherings at Walden (18:39).

4. Originality is Everything

• Emulation and building on the work of others is not only common, it's highly effective.
• The "5% novelty rule": find your own twist on existing ideas. (19:59)

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The Archaeology Metaphor: Four Stages of Creativity

Drawing inspiration from an archaeological dig (and a song by the Pixies, "Dig for Fire"—16:01), Dr. Newman establishes four steps for unearthing creative ideas:

1. Surveying (16:44)

• Assess the conceptual landscape around you.
• Look at where good ideas have emerged in the past.
• Key takeaway: Orientation before action saves time and yields better ideas.

2. Gridding (20:44)

• Create a systematic approach; keep track of what you’ve tried.
• Develop a guiding question: "What am I trying to do and why? Who is this idea for?" (21:14)
• Use constraints to your advantage ("Think inside the box"):
  • "Use those constraints to your advantage... Let's run towards those constraints." (22:02)
  • Example: Matisse, whose surgery forced him to invent the paper cutout style (22:48).
• Embrace "transplanting": Bringing an idea or method from a different domain.
  • Example: The bullet train's design, inspired by a kingfisher bird’s beak (24:12).

3. Digging (Idea Generation) (29:54)

• Push past the "Creative Cliff Illusion":
  • People can brainstorm far more ideas than they think if they keep digging.
  • "The real key of digging is more is more—just trying to generate as much stuff as possible, not worrying about how practical it is." (29:54)
• Tools: AI is a powerful tool, but needs direction:
  • "AI is like a really powerful excavator... But you have to know what you're looking for." (30:53)

4. Sifting (Idea Selection) (31:44)

• Critique and filter your ideas with rigor.
• Overcome biases:
  • Creative Endowment Effect: Attachment to your own ideas can blind you to their flaws. "Because I'm the person who came up with it, it's really good. ...if you just take those same ideas and pass them along to somebody else, they're actually much more accurate at finding the better ideas in those sets." (32:23)
  • Addition Bias: We tend to add complexity, when sometimes the best idea is about subtracting or simplifying. (33:29)
    • Lego Study: Even when fixing a redundant paragraph, people add rather than subtract (33:45).
  • Praise Can Be a Trap: Positive feedback may prevent further exploration and culling. (34:56)
    • "When somebody says, hey, you've got a genius idea, we're going to be really reluctant to prove them wrong. And because of that, we're going to actually engage in less exploration, less swinging for the fences." (34:56)
• Emotion Regulation:
  • Some of the best ideas initially make us uncomfortable.

    "Those ideas that we maybe feel a little bit uncomfortable or anxious about... wind up being the most promising." (36:33)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Dr. Laurie Santos (09:27):
  "March 12, 1951... Hank Ketchum debuted Dennis the Menace in the US. But on that very same day, the British cartoonist David Law debuted his own new comic in a UK newspaper... titled Dennis the Menace. Is that crazy or what?"

• Dr. George Newman (08:07):
  "Those iconic Pollock works really came from a very short period of time, Only about three years."

• Dr. George Newman (22:02):
  "What I say in the book is, think inside the box. Use those constraints to your advantage."

• Dr. Laurie Santos (19:46):
  "Just hearing other people's random ideas might help you too."

• Dr. George Newman (24:12):
  "By copying the kingfisher's beak, they were actually able to redesign the [bullet] train so it could exit the tunnel and not make this boom effect."

• Dr. George Newman (33:29): "There's some really fascinating work showing that subtraction itself can be a really powerful way of generating new ideas. And it's not something that normally occurs to us."

• Dr. George Newman (36:33): "... the research suggests that it's, in fact, those ideas that we maybe feel a little bit uncomfortable or anxious about that wind up being the most promising."

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Practical Strategies for Getting Unstuck & Creative

• Explore widely—seek inspiration outside yourself.
• Use constraints as a springboard.
• Emulate and adapt existing ideas; 5% new can make a difference.
• Systematize your efforts; know where you’ve looked and what you’re looking for.
• Generate more ideas than you think you need—don’t stop at the creative “cliff.”
• Critique your ideas rigorously, seek outside perspectives, and don’t get emotionally attached.
• Embrace discomfort and push through anxiety—these feelings can indicate novel, promising ideas.
• Consider feedback carefully; use it to iterate, not discourage.
• Remember: Creativity applies everywhere—career, home, relationships, and everyday tasks.

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Timestamps for Important Segments

| Segment | Timestamp | |-------------------------------------------------------------|:-------------:| | Defining creativity: new AND useful | 04:39 | | Debunking the "lone genius" myth | 06:29 | | "Hot streaks" and creativity as process | 07:21 | | Parallel discovery: Dennis the Menace example | 09:27 | | Edison's real view on invention | 10:59 | | The archaeological process metaphor for creativity | 16:01 | | Step 1: Surveying | 16:44 | | Social connection beats isolation for creativity | 17:48 | | Emulation over originality ("5% novelty rule") | 19:59 | | Step 2: Gridding and the value of constraints | 20:44 | | Matisse and creativity through adversity | 22:48 | | Transplanting: bullet train/kingfisher story | 24:12 | | Step 3: Digging - brainstorm MORE ideas | 29:54 | | Using AI in idea generation | 30:53 | | Step 4: Sifting, overcoming the creative endowment effect | 31:44 | | Addition vs. subtraction in refining ideas | 33:29 | | Praise and its unintended consequences | 34:56 | | Emotion regulation and embracing discomfort | 36:33 |

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Final Takeaway

Creativity is not the domain of geniuses or mythical moments. It's a process, accessible to everyone and applicable to nearly every part of life. By surveying broadly, systematically exploring, wisely leveraging constraints, generating prolifically, and toughly critiquing (and sometimes subtracting from) our own work—while keeping an open, regulated mind—anyone can break free from feeling stuck and unlock new avenues for happiness and innovation.

Recommended Reading:
How Great Ideas Happen by Dr. George Newman (released this week)

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For more science-backed strategies, keep tuning in to The Happiness Lab!

Transcript

[Chase for Business Advertiser]

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[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Hey Happiness Lab listeners. Welcome back to our new season on how to get unstuck in 2026. Over the past few episodes, we've been exploring different ways to get back on track in the new year, rethinking how we spend our energy, learning how to deal with unexpected changes, and getting clearer on our values and what we really want in life. I hope these conversations have already given you a few new tools for the year ahead, but buckle up, because out of all the episodes we've had so far in this series, today's conversation has challenged my assumptions about getting unstuck the most. Today, we're diving into the question of creativity and more specifically, the stories we tell ourselves about how creative ideas are supposed to happen.

[Dr. George Newman]

Think inside the box. Use those constraints to your advantage.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Today's guests will argue that nearly everything we imagine about generating creative ideas is wrong.

[Dr. George Newman]

My name is George Newman. I'm a professor of Organizational behavior at the Rotman School of Management. It's a University of Toronto. My book is called How Great Ideas the Hidden Steps Behind Breakthrough Success.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

George and I are about to unpack some of the most common myths we have about creativity, and we'll learn just how important rethinking these assumptions will be for getting unstuck. The Happiness Lab we'll be right back after some quick ads.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

This is an I Heart podcast. Guaranteed human hi, Dr. Laurie Santos from.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

The Happiness Lab here.

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[Dr. Laurie Santos]

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[Dr. Laurie Santos]

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Is available for select mobile devices. Message and data rates may apply JP Morgan Chase Bank NA Member FDIC Copyright 2026 JP Morgan Chase Co. Creativity expert George Newman and I go way back.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

This is such a treat to be able to talk to you, George, because as you know, we've known each other for a long time.

[Dr. George Newman]

I know. So.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

Oh my go.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Before he joined the University of Toronto, George was a PhD student at Yale. But George has been thinking about creativity long before his academic career began.

[Dr. George Newman]

Both my parents are musicians, my brother was a musician too, and I thought I was going to be a visual artist. So I've kind of had this lifelong interest in creativity that was like a big topic of conversation around the dinner table, really talking about like composers and different musicians. And then when I became a psychologist and got interested in cognitive science, it seemed like a really natural progression to say, oh well, can I study this thing that I've been interested in forever and try to make sense out of it?

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

One way of making sense of things is to define things, which may be an impossible task with creativity. But how do you define creativity? What is it?

[Dr. George Newman]

The definition I like is the process of generating new and useful ideas. I think everybody associates creativity with newness and novelty. But the useful part is really interesting because it's not just newness for its own sake. The idea about creativity is finding these ideas that provide value to people. And that value could be entertainment, or it could connect with us emotionally. But it could also be things like new scientific theories or new inventions or new kinds of technology. So it's a really broad definition that I think captures what this more general process really is.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

I love that definition because this whole series is about getting unstuck. And I think sometimes when we think about creativity or getting unstuck, when it comes to the creative process, we think about some artist or an inventor, you know, sitting there trying to get unstuck. But I think for so many of us, we can get Stuck creatively for very seemingly much more mundane things like what am I going to cook for dinner tonight? Or you know, what's a new idea at work. All of us have these moments of generating new ideas that we hope are effective totally.

[Dr. George Newman]

There's this kind of like association of creativity as it's messy or it involves finger paint or you've got to put on a smock. But absolutely, creativity applies in all of these different contexts, right? It could be a new way of folding your laundry, or a new way of cooking your favorite recipe. Or actually the last example in the book is this guy, Dan Pashman, who wanted to come up with a better type of pasta. And so that can be a form of creativity as well.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

So it seems like we have these myths when it comes to creativity. One is that it's kind of this big thing, you know, I have to make a painting or I have to do something really incredible, invent a new technology or so on. But another myth you talk about is how we often think of where creativity comes from. What's our usual way of thinking about it and why is it problematic?

[Dr. George Newman]

Well, I think the common wisdom about creativity is that it's something that comes from inside of us. And there's this genius myth, that there's this lone genius and you're going to go off into the cabin and wait for that light bulb moment where that brilliant idea kind of just springs forth from within. And it's also kind of how arriving at an idea might feel to us sometimes where it just hits you like a lightning bolt in the shower. But what I argue in the book is actually creativity is much more like a process of discovery than doing careful work to kind of uncover something that is going to be new and useful.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

And so in the book, you go through all these pieces of evidence against this isolated genius light bulb idea. And one of the ones I found most interesting was this idea of hot streaks. What are hot streaks? And why do they show that creativity doesn't work in a lot of the ways we often think?

[Dr. George Newman]

This is super fascinating research. Dashan Wang at Northwestern and his colleagues have found that across a lot of different fields. So in science, filmmakers, artists experience these moments in their careers where they generate their kind of most impactful work all at once and they're short lived. But there seems to be this flurry of activity. And what he finds in his work is that those periods of hot streak moments are actually preceded by a lot of exploration. So these creators in lots of different disciplines are kind of poking around, trying out lots of different things before. Boom. You know, they hit on that one idea that they're able to mine and refine further.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

Do you have any favorite examples of these hot streaks?

[Dr. George Newman]

One of my favorite is Jackson Pollock. You know, the artist known for his drip paintings and splattering paint on canvas. Those iconic Pollock works really came from a very short period of time, Only about three years. And that's really produced a lot of the work that we recognize.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

I feel like every modern art museum I go to has, like a bunch of these splatter paintings. And it was just like three years of his time where he did these.

[Dr. George Newman]

It was just three years. And the notion there is that through exploration, Pollock kind of hit on this much deeper principle that he was able to explore and then exploit.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

You've also talked about this idea of parallel discovery. Explain this phenomenon.

[Dr. George Newman]

Why?

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

It also kind of goes against this idea of these isolated genius moments.

[Dr. George Newman]

This is a super interesting phenomena. And actually, I was shocked when I found this paper from over 100 years ago that was talking about parallel discovery and cataloging just hundreds of instances in which scientists and artists and across a lot of different fields had hit upon very similar ideas at the exact same time. And so kind of challenging this genius myth that, oh, I'm just discovering things come from within. The fact that multiple people can arrive at the same idea at the very same time suggests they're actually finding their way to something that's outside of them.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

I can't help but jump in and nerdily share one of my favorite examples of parallel discovery. On March 12, 1951, the cartoonist Hank Ketchum debuted what would become the famous syndicated comic strip Dennis the Menace, illustrating the adventures of a young boy who was constantly getting into trouble. But on that very same day, the British cartoonist David Law debuted his own new comic in a UK newspaper. And that comic was also about an adventurous young boy. And it was also titled Dennis the Menace. Is that crazy or what? George's book is filled with stories like these ones that show there's lots of great ideas out there just waiting for you, me, or whatever cartoonist happens to be paying attention to find them. So it seems we really need to.

[Commercial Narrator/Advertiser]

Drop this idea of the isolated genius.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

George has a metaphor he believes reflects the science of creativity even better.

[Dr. George Newman]

I really like this metaphor of the creative explorer or even archaeology, where we're exploring a landscape and searching for an idea. So there's this notion that ideas are in some way external to us and that we can draw on inspiration and forms of insights and use that to really propel our creative process. When you're feeling stuck, you know, look out and see what kinds of things can I draw on for my environment.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

One of the things I was shocked by in your book is it seems like so many of the people I think of as like the great kind of light bulb inventors, they were the ones who also think of this creative process as exploration. There was this quote from Thomas Edison that I really loved, which was, my so called inventions already existed in the environment. I took them out, I created nothing. Nobody does. There's no such thing as an idea of being brain born. Everything comes from outside. Which is funny, particularly for Thomas Edison, who I literally think of as the light bulb. You know, like the light bulb creator, but also like the light bulb popping up in his head. But even he was like, nah, I didn't do anything fancy. I just found the stuff that was already out there.

[Dr. George Newman]

Totally, totally. I mean, I think it's kind of like the quintessential example, right? Because we do associate Edison with inventing the light bulb. And light bulb is kind of our. Our model for creativity. And yet Edison employed, you know, at one point, 200 different people in these large teams. He called them these mucker teams. And they essentially were just exploring space, trying out every different combination they could. And even the discovery of the light bulb is really fascinating because different parts of it had been worked out for almost over a century, and it was really Edison at the end working out a very tiny detail which he largely borrowed from somebody else. So this notion that ideas just spring forth from nowhere, I think really mistakes a lot of what's really happening.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

I kind of love George's new take on where good ideas come from, that we don't need to just wait around for some light bulb moment to show up. Because if finding good ideas is like excavating a landscape, that means we can actually hack this process to generate new ideas. But how do we do that? We'll have answers and bust even more creativity myths when the Happiness Lab returns from the break. Hi, Dr. Laurie Santos from the Happiness Lab here.

[Commercial Narrator/Advertiser]

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[Commercial Narrator/Advertiser]

Or even the songs we listen to.

[Dr. George Newman]

So I had been thinking about this exploration, discovery idea, and then I was listening to the Pixies, and they have this song, Dig for Fire. And something just clicked for me there where I was like, oh, yeah, like archeology. And so I started kind of taking notes about it. And then the longer I thought about it, it really started to actually connect. And I started learning more about archeology. And these different parts of the process really started to map onto what I was trying to say about creativity.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

And so you've argued that the same process that we see in archeology can be applied to creativity, and that can help us get unstuck. And one of the first parts of these processes is what you've called surveying. What's that?

[Dr. George Newman]

So surveying is basically getting a sense of the landscape, in this case, kind of the conceptual landscape, trying to figure out, where am I? Where are other good ideas? What is a good idea going to potentially look like? So it's a way of orienting yourself in space, and it's a big part of the process of archeology. Right. You have to know where you're digging, otherwise you're just going to dig up a bunch of empty ground. But it's also a really important part of creativity where if we just start generating ideas randomly, probably not going to be super productive. It's about looking to where have good ideas been discovered in the past? And can I help orient myself towards those more promising sites?

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

And when we start thinking of how we can go about finding those promising sites, I think this is a spot where another myth comes in. We assume that, like, to think really creatively, I need to be by myself. We have this idea that I have to go off to a cabin somewhere and lock myself up and just have time by myself to think of all these good ideas. But you've argued that that's wrong, too. How do we know that?

[Dr. George Newman]

Yeah. So a major source of creativity is exposure to outside information. Even new pictures on the wall and new kinds of furniture and exposure to new people can be that trigger which cues a new idea. So there's some empirical evidence. Also, a lot of the myths that we have about those cabin in the woods, like Thoreau, you know, was probably the most famous one, but he wasn't isolated at all. He was like half a mile from town and he threw these parties and was seeing people all the Time. So I think there's this kind of cultural myth that we're going off in isolation when actuality creatives are really drawing on their environment.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

Wait, I wanna pull that out. Cause I've been to the Thoreau house. It was basically the size of my podcast studio with a little table and so on. And my understanding was he went there and just hung out and like, Walden sprung on him. But you're saying he was at dinner parties and he was part of civilization?

[Dr. George Newman]

Absolutely. Yeah. He would have over his author friends, family members. He had an annual melon party. You know, Thoreau was very much connected, and I think that was a big part of his creativity and creativity for everyone.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

I think it's so critical. Right. Because a lot of the work that we talk about on the Happiness Lab involves the importance of social connection for being happier. And we also know that feeling better increases your performance. So it makes total sense that, like, just being around other people kind of puts you in the mindset to be performing better and being more creative. But also seems like other people are just a font of lots of different ideas. Just like putting new posters on the wall might get, you think differently. Just hearing other people's random ideas might help you too.

[Dr. George Newman]

I mean, even writing this book was a real opportunity to kind of take my own medicine where, you know, inevitably I hit all of these creative blocks, and then I would kind of start sweating and try to block out all of the noise and everything. And it wasn't until I started just reading and exploring things online and checking out new sources that were new to me that I really started unlocking some of those new ideas and new kinds of insights.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

Another thing we need to reject is this idea that to come up with something creative has to be perfectly original. You've argued that we should just embrace the idea of emulating a bit more. Why is emulating so effective? When it comes to new ideas, we.

[Dr. George Newman]

Often hear phrases like it's been done before. And I think that can be a way to dissuade us from going down a particular avenue. But it turns out that a lot of great ideas throughout history were about building on what has come before and just tweaking it a little bit. And I think about this as kind of like finding your own 5%. I call it the 5% novelty rule in the book. But if we're able to borrow an existing idea and then put your own spin or find a new application or new way of thinking about it, that can usually be a really powerful source of creativity that lots of different people have used throughout history.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

So that's stage one, surveying. Next stage, stage two, is what you call gridding. How does gridding work, and what's the connection with what archaeologists are doing there?

[Dr. George Newman]

So gridding in archeology is the stage of, you know, where they're stringing up twine over the site into manageable grids. And the notion there is, I want to keep track of everywhere I've searched, where did I find stuff, and importantly, where didn't I find stuff. And so I make an argument for a similar kind of process with creativity, of trying the best you can to make your search process systematic.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

You've also argued that gridding requires having a guiding question to know that you're on the right track. What's a guiding question? Why is it so essential?

[Dr. George Newman]

I talk about the guiding question is kind of like your compass in this process. And it essentially comes down to, what am I trying to do and why? Who is this idea for? Who's going to find it impactful? And it's not really about pandering to a specific audience so much as understanding the value that somebody is going to get from your idea, why they're going to find it useful. And that can be such a powerful way of helping to orient us more or away from less promising directions.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

So there's another myth that we have during this gridding process, which was one that I was kind of surprised by. I think when we're thinking about our guiding questions and coming up with new ideas, we often assume that we need to think outside the box. Right. But you've argued that thinking outside the box is bad, which shocked me. Why isn't this a good idea?

[Dr. George Newman]

What I say in the book is, think inside the box. Use those constraints to your advantage. I talk about the way in which creativity really responds to not only what's in our environment, but what about the environment is limiting our idea? And when we can take those limitations and use them to our advantage, it actually can be a very powerful source of creativity. So I talk about the artist Matisse and how late in life he had to get a major surgery, which basically left him bedridden. He wasn't able to paint in the way that he had before, but that led him to explore this totally new method using paper cutouts. And that's a lot of what we know Matisse for today is the style that developed specifically because of those limitations that he was facing.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

This thinking inside the box is awesome because I think it allows us to remember that not only can we be creative when, like, something tricky has happened.

[Commercial Narrator/Advertiser]

Right.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

Like, I'm bedridden, I can't do the same thing. But maybe those constraints or those bad situations might make us more creative, which seems like a different attitude than we normally take towards the creative process.

[Dr. George Newman]

Yeah. I mean, I even go so far in the book to say, let's run towards those constraints. Let's try to find them and seek them out and narrow our search field a little bit, or narrow the way that we're exploring for ideas.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

Another practical strategy for using constraint is what you've called transplanting. What's that?

[Dr. George Newman]

The transplanting is this idea of taking principles or things that have worked in one domain and applying them to another. And if you look across history, this also winds up being a really powerful way in which people generate new ideas. One of my favorite examples there is a woman named Janet Stevens who was a hairdresser, and she was at a museum and noticing Roman busts and said, oh, I wonder how they were able to construct these, like, elaborate hairstyles. And so she began this process of trying to recreate them herself and figured out that it was possible to do by stitching the hair together. And this wound up being actually a big discovery for classic scholars who had assumed that it must have been wigs or something like that. Like that.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

You also tell this example of the invention of the bullet train, which I found fascinating. Can you share that one?

[Dr. George Newman]

So when they first invented the bullet train, you had this problem that it was traveling at such speeds that when it would exit the tunnel, it would create this, like, supersonic boom effect. And so engineer happened to be an avid bird watcher, knew about the kingfisher bird, which doesn't want to scare away the fish. And so it has this very long beak that kind of allows it to seamlessly enter the water. So by copying the kingfisher's beak, they were actually able to redesign the train so it could exit the tunnel and not make this boom effect.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

So the front of the train actually looks like the beak of a kingfisher to me.

[Dr. George Newman]

Almost identically, yeah.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

That's so awesome. It also fits with these studies coming out showing that if you look at, like, Nobel Prize winners, they often are more likely to have these kind of outside hobbies and things than folks who haven't won the Nobel Prize. This idea that, like, being interested in multiple fields or having kind of funny hobbies actually helps you be more successful in your field, maybe more creative in your field. It suggests that maybe if you're doing these other hobbies, you just have more ideas to transplant from one domain into another.

[Dr. George Newman]

Those are some really fascinating studies on early diversification and how people who wind up being very successful in their careers early on instead of specializing very narrowly, kind of took a very broad swath. And it seems like what these folks are doing is being able to draw on a really diverse set of ideas and then re explain them in terms of their own expertise.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

It was fun to hear you talk about that, George, because we haven't mentioned this yet, but you and I worked together a long time ago on experiments with monkeys, and I know you've done work on celebrities and possessions, and you've done work on pro social donation. Like, if I look at your cv, there's just papers on all these different topics. You are so diverse as a young scholar, and I feel like that might be why you're so good at talking about creativity today.

[Dr. George Newman]

Or maybe I'm just trying to justify my own past.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

So far, George and I have covered steps one and two of his creative process, surveying and gridding. But once you've done that, it's finally time to dig up that new idea, and we'll discuss how to uncover something amazing when the Happiness Lab returns in a moment. Hi, Dr. Lori Santos from the Happiness Lab here.

[Commercial Narrator/Advertiser]

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[Dr. Laurie Santos]

What you preach about well being, sometimes.

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[Dr. Laurie Santos]

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[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

About the creative process.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Instead of waiting for divine inspiration, he encourages us to channel our inner Indiana Jones and start playing archaeologist. And once all your idea groundwork is laid with the first steps of surveying and gridding, it's time for the part that everyone's been waiting Idea generation.

[Dr. George Newman]

So this next stage in the process is all about getting everything you can out of the ground. And there's a study that I love called the Creative Cliff Illusion, that people kind of think that they're going to run out of ideas that when they start brainstorming, oh, I can only come up with 10 or 15 ideas in this domain. But when we keep persisting, when we keep going, we're able to generate many more ideas than we expect. So the real key of digging is more is more just trying to generate as much stuff as possible, not worrying about how practical it is. At that point, we're just going to be generating ideas. We're just going to be kind of brainstorming. No idea is bad. In fact, let's generate as many bad ideas as we possibly can and then let's go back later to see what we've really found.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

This may be a delicate question, but I guess I think it's one that a lot of folks are asking right now. How helpful is AI when we're going through this idea generation process? Should we be using lots of different LLMs to help us generate ideas? Is that a good thing or are there some constraints there?

[Dr. George Newman]

I mean, what the research is showing is that it can definitely be a good thing when it's used in the right way. The way I like to fit it into this archaeology metaphor is that AI is like a really powerful excavator. It's a way of clearing a lot of ground in a very short amount of time. But you have to know what you're looking for and you have to know where you're going to direct it. Because if you just plow an excavator, you know, you're going to find a lot of ground where there's absolutely nothing. AI is a really powerful tool for kind of generating more ideas. But you know, if we're not careful, those ideas can be really similar. And so, you know, on aggregate it can make everybody's ideas the same. So we really need that guidance early on to make sure that I'm directing it to new and promising directions.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

Okay, so we've excavated all the good ideas, now we move on to the final phase, stage four, which is what you call sifting. What's sifting?

[Dr. George Newman]

So sifting now is, you know, we've taken up a bunch of stuff out of the ground, more is more. And we're going to go back and see do we find anything of note, is there anything here that's actually going to be useful to us? And so if in the digging stage it's all about optimism, go, go, go. The sifting stage is really the opposite. We want to be as hard headed and critical as possible and say, is this really something that we can carry forward?

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

And when we're doing that critical process, we have to make sure that we don't fall prey to a bunch of biases. One bias that I know I fall prey to a lot that I need to let go is what you've called the creative endowment effect. What's that and how can we let go of that bias?

[Dr. George Newman]

So the creative endowment effect is actually some research that we did in our lab which is our attachment to our own ideas. That because I'm the person who came up with it, it's really good. And we found that if you just take those same ideas and pass them along to somebody else, they're actually much more accurate at finding the better ideas in those sets.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

That's so important because this comes up in group settings all the time. We'll have this big brainstorm meeting, and everyone's dropping ideas, and we're on idea number 142. I'm. I like to go back to idea number one that I had. Like, I really like that one.

[Dr. George Newman]

Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think it comes out of this again, it's kind of like an extension of this genius or light bulb way of thinking that, oh, well, I thought of it. You know, how could it not be great? So as much as we can trying to create that psychological distance and space between, you know, ourselves and our ideas so we can see them more objectively.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

Another bias we need to overcome is our tendency to always want to add more. We're very good at adding stuff, but we kind of bucket subtracting stuff. Why is subtracting so essential during this part of the creative process?

[Dr. George Newman]

Well, there's some really fascinating work showing that subtraction itself can be a really powerful way of generating new ideas. And it's not something that normally occurs to us. Right. We think about what we can add, not what we can take away.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

I think there's a very famous Lego study on this, Right?

[Dr. George Newman]

Yeah. So Gabe Adams at the University of Virginia and her colleagues, you know, they gave people some kind of creative object and then said, can you make it better? In lots of different contexts. And people always added stuff, they never took things away. And even when it came down to, like, fixing a paragraph of text that had a lot of redundant senses, instead of removing the redundant sentences, they just added more.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

And so how can we get ourselves to notice that subtraction is essential?

[Dr. George Newman]

I like this metaphor of floating a raft versus building a tower. You know, given our attachment to our own ideas, there's this tendency to say, here's everything I've done. Let me stack up this giant tower of stuff so you can see it. And that reflects all of the effort that I put in. But when we're evaluating our ideas, I think it's much more powerful to think about, like floating a raft. What's going to make my idea or set of ideas watertight and finding all of the holes. And a lot of that times, getting to that place is about subtraction.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

There's another thing that can derail us during the selection process, which I found kind of surprising, actually, which is that we can sometimes get messed up when somebody else praises one of our ideas. How does that work and how does it mess us up?

[Dr. George Newman]

There's a lot of situations in which praise can kind of be a creativity killer. And some very interesting work showing that when somebody says, hey, you've got a genius idea, we're going to be really reluctant to prove them wrong. And because of that, we're going to actually engage in less exploration, less swinging for the fences, which is exactly what the work on creativity suggests we should.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

Be doing, and probably less subtraction. If somebody tells you, oh, my gosh, that idea is great, even if it doesn't fit on your raft, to make your ideas float effectively, you're going to want to keep it there because someone just said, oh, this is great.

[Dr. George Newman]

Absolutely. And I think this is a big issue. Even as people get more senior in their roles. Right. It's hard to not attribute your success to all of the great ideas that you've had in the past, and so you become that much more attached to all of them and every part of them.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

So we need to be careful about praise, but we also want to get feedback from other people. So how can we get that balance most effectively?

[Dr. George Newman]

Well, I talk about a lot of different strategies for getting feedback. One that I really like is thinking about feedback as, how do we get on a learning curve? How do we think about making incremental tweaks to our idea rather than throwing the whole thing out? Because I think, especially when we get critical feedback, there's a tendency to say, oh, scrap it. I'm going to move on. But, you know, that's ignoring all of the progress that we've made along the way.

[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

A final thing we need to pay attention to, which I love a lot because we talk about this a lot on the Happiness Lab, is that the creative process, and especially the subtracting part of the creative process, really requires a lot of emotion regulation. Why is emotion regulation so critical for creativity? And where can doing it badly lead us astray?

[Dr. George Newman]

Well, I think one place it leads us astray is, you know, we were talking about, like, the attachment to our own ideas. The other place it leads us astray is that the research suggests that it's, in fact, those ideas that we maybe feel a little bit uncomfortable or anxious about that wind up being the most promising. Sometimes when an idea is really novel and kind of abstract, when we first think of it, we say, oh, like maybe it's not that promising. And we, we use that feeling to inform whether or not we explore it further. But research suggests, hey, we should actually jump on those opportunities and those can be some of our best ideas.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

So if you've been feeling bored or creatively uninspired, now is the time to get unstuck. You don't have to be an artist or an innovator to put George's advice into practice. You can use these strategies to pursue a new career path, remodel your kitchen or even rethink your exercise routine. Just remember to look outside yourself and be open to the possibilities and sources of inspiration in your environment. Something totally unexpected may just fuel a life changing idea. And if you want even more tips about how to get more creative, be sure to check out George's new book.

[Commercial Narrator/Advertiser]

How Great Ideas Happen, which is out this week.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

Coming up next week on the Happiness Lab, we'll wrap up our series on getting unstuck in 2026. And this time we're going big. Like meaning of life big, or at least meaning in life big.

[Guest Speaker on Meaning of Life]

You're just thinking about the paradigm of life, getting more out of life, not cram more into it. Oh, I need another hobby. I need a bigger thing. I need more. No, you don't need more. You need to get more out of what's already there.

[Dr. Laurie Santos]

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[Commercial Narrator/Advertiser]

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[Dr. Laurie Santos]

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[Podcast Host/Interviewer]

Terms Apply this is an I Heart Podcast. Guaranteed human.