The Bucket Theory of Creativity

I’ve always had this sense that if you build a container for something, you will make things to fill it. What I frequently do is try to figure out different containers. A website is a container.

I like to think of collections as a way of creating meaningful containers for creative work—spaces that allow us to develop our ideas, while maximizing our chances of making unexpected connections.

To come up with new ideas, you have to have space to be messy, to procrastinate, and to let your mind wander and free-associate. But there needs to be a balance. You eventually need to channel it into something concrete, or you won’t produce anything.

Ed Sheeran and Neil Gaiman are in the top 0.000001% of their fields. They're among, say, 25 people in the world who repeatedly generate blockbusters.

If two world-class creators share the exact same creative process, I get curious. Also, while writing this, I found a video of John Mayer doing the same thing.

I call their approach the Creativity Fauce

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In his book Keep Going, author and artist Austin Kleon juxtaposes this messy, networked approach with organization and neatness. “Creativity is about connections, and connections are not made by siloing everything off into its own space. New ideas are formed by interesting juxtapositions, and interesting juxtapositions happen when things are out of... See more