The Disney Plus film release of Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s award-winning blockbuster, gives us an opportunity to analyze the creative spark that turned the project from an idea into a cultural phenomenon.
According to LinkedIn, creativity is the number one ‘soft-skill’ that employers are looking for in today’s job candidates. Although ‘creativity’ isn’t a skill that can be easily taught, it can be inspired.
Miranda is a creative genius, but some of the tactics he uses to get his creative juices flowing are strategies that are available to all of us.
1. Give your brain a rest.
Too much work and too little sleep sabotage creativity.
“It’s no accident that the best idea I’ve ever had in my life—perhaps maybe the best one I’ll ever have in my life—came to me on vacation,” Miranda once said.
The origin story behind Hamilton is well-known, but it’s worth revisiting.
Miranda picked up a copy of Ron Chernow’s biography [of Hamilton] to bring something to read at a resort. Miranda was exhausted after working for seven straight years to bring In The Heights to Broadway.
“The moment my brain got a moment’s rest, ‘Hamilton’ walked into it,” Miranda told Arianna Huffington.
Numerous studies have shown that our best ideas don’t come in times of stress. They appear when we give ourselves a topic or problem to work on, and then give our brains a break to let our imagination work it out.
2. Connect ideas from different fields.
One of the most fascinating areas of cognitive psychology in recent years is about the creative process. Specifically, why are some people better at coming up with creative solutions than others?
Evidence suggests that the most creative among us are those who connect ideas from different domains and apply those ideas to their chosen field.
In Range, bestselling author David Epstein makes the persuasive case that ‘generalists’ triumph in a highly specialized world.
Epstein shows that many of the world’s most admired technology innovators “increased their creative impact by accumulating experience in different domains…Everyone is digging deeper into their own trench and rarely standing up to look in the next trench over, even though the solution to their problem happens to reside there.”
Combining ideas from different fields is what makes Hamilton, well, Hamilton. Telling the story of America’s founders in the language of hip-hop is a leap of imagination none of today’s supercomputers could have achieved.
In How to Think Like a Rocket Scientist, Ozan Varol writes that novel ideas come from searching in unconventional places. Albert Einstein called it, “combinatory play.”
According to Varol, “The next time you find yourself in a jam, don’t look to your competitors for a strategy. Instead, ask What other seemingly unrelated fields can I borrow inspiration from?”
If you want to make connections that no one else can see, look for ideas outside of your field and think about how they apply to your industry, company, or content.
3. Take a walk.
Miranda says he wore out a lot of shoe leather to write Hamilton. The songs you hear took six years for Miranda to compose—and he did so while walking and walking and walking around the city.
In an interview for Smithsonian Magazine Miranda said, “I’d write at the piano until I had something I liked. I’d make a loop of it and put it in my headphones and then walk around until I had the lyrics. I kind of need to be ambulatory to write lyrics.”
Miranda is on to something. Our brains developed from ancestors who walked—a lot, up to 12 miles a day. In a series of fascinating experiments, two Stanford psychologists found that walking boosts creativity.
“They asked people to quickly come up with alternative uses for common objects, such as a pen,” according to an article in The Wall Street Journal. “They found that people whom they got to walk before coming up with alternative uses came up with almost twice as many novel ideas as those who remained seated.”
Following these tactics might not lead to the next Tony Award-winning musical, but they’ll sharpen your ability to bring new ideas to the table and approach problems creatively. And that’s something worth celebrating.