John S. Couch shares how to boost your creativity, and it's about to get connected

"The period we’re in right now, with these crazy unusual circumstances, this is when the pressure of society both becomes stronger and also relaxes simultaneously. It’s the unknown. So in this period of great distress, that’s when creativity comes forth." In this week's installment of You've Got This, VP of Product Design at Hulu and author John S. Couch discusses finding a state of flow, how UX design can be intensely personalized, and how in the absence of physical space you can use psychological space to create. Read on to see his thoughts - and don't miss our next guest whose recent conversation on LinkedIn took off and inspired others around one facet of the coronavirus situation, job search strategist & founder of The Briefcase Coach Sarah Johnston.

Victoria: "You discuss in your book the need for a 'a space to create,' as 'the environment in which you work affects you.' For those whose work routine has been disrupted by recent events to now be working from home, what advice would you have to help elevate your overall space to create, especially if it's crowded, noisy, or challenging?"

John: "How do I write and paint? A lot of people ask me this. There’s no huge science to this, but I’ve allocated parts of my day I consider sacred, or sacred time. It doesn’t matter what you do during that sacred time - and it can be any time of day - it could be 5-6 PM, it could be 4 AM, it could be 11 PM - but you need to allocate one solid hour at least just to you and the things you want to do. It could be meditation and yoga. In my case, I meditate and write. But it can’t have any utilitarian purpose aside from satisfying you. It’s not for business. It’s not to make a living. It’s literally for you.

And I think the lack of making creativity into a daily practice - by simply allocating a period of time daily that you commit to - is what messes us up. The reason why I can 'get so much done' is because I commit to a certain time of day that no matter what, I show up and do X. And I do it every day. Of course there are days you miss. But if your mindset says you do it every day, it compounds interest. You start getting better at whatever it is you’re doing inadvertently. You can’t help but get better. And you get less precious about whatever it is you’re doing. It doesn’t have to be the perfect essay, short story, design, or book. But by allowing yourself that time, that’s where the good stuff starts happening.

And regarding recent events, that’s a really interesting question right now, because in my design team, I have a lot of people in their 30s who have children that are ranging between 1-6 years old. And they’re being homeschooled because of school cancellations, and both parents oftentimes are working, so we have to work out a system where they exchange time. So in a way, it’s not quite sacred time, but it’s family time. And in addition to that, I’m advocating taking time specifically for yourself to have contemplation time. It seems like a lot, but if you get up at a decent hour, you spend sacred time working on your own stuff, then you take an hour throughout the day to work on family stuff, and you take your hour lunch outside to break up the rhythm. And that gets you a way from the computer, which I believe sucks a lot of creativity out of your brain. I think the computer is a great repository for ideas that come out away FROM it, and it’s a very good organizer. If you’re using Mural, Figma, InVision, Sketch, it’s a great way to compile and refine ideas.

"The abstraction of creative thought requires space. And if you can’t have physical space, you have to have psychological space."

So for me that would be building moments throughout your day that you commit to moving yourself away from the computer. Or your smartphone. Anything that tethers you back into the energetics of working in technology keeps you on a vibrational ‘mode’ that is hard to break.

That feeling of being naked for a moment when your phone is in another room, when your computer is turned off, that’s your natural state. It’s become foreign to us because we’ve adapted to the machine so much. The equivalent would be being in your car ALL DAY LONG. And then when you’re out of your car, you’re saying “I should be in my car!” No, the tool is a machine, a utility, to fulfill a purpose. But it’s not your life. And if you draw the analogy between the car and technology, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with technology. It’s a tool. At a certain point you have to put the machine down, otherwise the machine will not let you go. I have a hard time with that personally, that’s why I use a fountain pen and paper. It’s the best way to think things through, on paper. It slows you down. The physical process of having to use your hand, scratching ink, embedding it into what was formerly a plant mushed up and called paper, is a very analog process.

If you think of the hand as being an extension of your mind, it’s extending into the paper. It’s a different experience than your computer, which is so fast it almost causes you to accelerate your thinking to a level that wouldn’t be natural for how you’d normally think away from the machine. This isn’t a luddite rant against technology. I love technology. But I’m looking for balance. Part of why I’m painting at night is it allows me to connect directly to physical colors.

"As a designer, I'm working with RGB - a dis-intermediated color field - I can’t feel the color in the way I can LITERALLY feel color when my hand touches paint. I have blue in my hand when I’m painting with blue. There’s something about moving, switching mindsets, where I'm physically putting my hand on something."

And the reason why I put my hand on the cover of my book which we just released on audiobook, The Art of Creative Rebellion - that’s my hand, in paint, that I used to sign the back of a painting- because I realized the hand itself is a symbol. It’s extremely childlike - putting your hand in paint, making a turkey from it - but there’s also the way that cave paintings dated 10,000-30,000 years ago, doing patterns with their hands, saying “I. Am. Here.” And when I signed my painting with my hand, it’s almost like an analog transference of my energy. I put my ki (Japanese for energy, 気), the sense of who I am, in that hand, and it reverberated with the painting. And I feel that transferred through to the book. The hand is the mudrā for fearlessness. The Buddha holds up his hand like this for fearlessness. So it hit many things at the same time."

Victoria: "With streaming media being top of mind with so many people right now, and your extensive background with other pivotal design experiences, how does it feel to be able to help others navigate and discover content?"

John: "The interesting thing about designing for streaming services, or actually designing for any kind of application, is that the thing that’s important is most people get used to UX pretty quickly. When you turn on an Xbox and turn on a new game, there’s a new UX - that game has its own rules, its own ways of navigating. It’s different for each game, but in general you get it worked out in about 10 minutes.

When you’re dealing with any kind of application - whether it’s streaming video, or trying to rent a house or a car, you’re trying to make it as easy as possible for the user. The equivalent analog for this would be the idea that product design is as seamless for the user as film editing is for a movie. If you notice the editing in a film, it’s not good. It takes you out of the movie, out of the story. So the moment you get too frustrated with an experience - which isn’t necessarily UX, by the way, it could be this isn’t the right content for me, this isn’t the house I wanted to see - it’s not just the display, the grids of information in the product, but the relevance of what you’re showing, which ties into AI and recommendation engines. And those two things together, design and recommendations, are what makes a delightful experience. One alone can’t do it.

"So that’s why product design is so complicated. It’s like three-dimensional chess. What happens over time is the product becomes a very personal thing to you. As you use your apps - let’s say LinkedIn for example - the more you interface with LinkedIn, the more you filter information, it becomes uniquely yours. The way your LinkedIn feels to you will feel radically different than it is for me. So I think product design will be very personalized."

My mother's experience on an app is giant typography, really big images. It will learn over time what she prefers. Eventually, UX may dynamically change itself. We’ll design the patterns, but the AI may morph - the more input you put into the experience or product, the more the product will change and make itself personal to you. So you may use an application in your living room that, when you go to your parent’s house, it looks different. Branding will go through. There will be a certain feeling that will be consistent between the two, but it will be geared around the generational difference between how you use it."

Victoria: "The most in-demand skill that companies need most, as uncovered by LinkedIn research, was (and continues to be) creativity. What are some simple steps someone can take to enhance their creativity day to day?"

John: "The interesting thing in my theory about creativity is that it’s something you already have. I was saying earlier that to learn something is to remember. Creativity is something you just remember. People will self-selectively say” I’m not creative.” But if you got back to any child between the ages of 0-3 or 4, they’re pure creativity. They’re pure exploration. There’s zero ego, if they fall flat on their face, if they scribble a purple sun or polka-dotted cow. This is normal. And then what happens over time is we’re told, for whatever reason, that creativity is de-valued. It’s beaten out of us over time. You have to specialize and become a proper member of society with constraints.

But the reality is - I remember reading this quote years ago - 'The only laws that are real are the laws of physics. Everything else is made up.' And if you read Noah Yuval Harari, who wrote Sapiens, everything we do in society is an agreed-upon hallucination. Everything from the nation-state to money to shared beliefs are agreed-upon hallucinations. What creative people do can be disruptive to the stability of most companies and most countries, in terms of power-structures. And yet at the same time, creativity is the most coveted, because it’s akin to having the DNA mutation in evolution that causes survival to happen.

It’s looked upon as being a problem, but it’s really not. The aberrant genetic expression of DNA is literally X-Men. That’s what causes the species to evolve. The period we’re in right now, with these crazy unusual circumstances, this is when the pressure of society both becomes stronger and also relaxes simultaneously. It’s the unknown. So in this period of great distress, that’s when creativity comes forth. Case in point: most recently in the 2008 recession, we had AirBNB, Uber, Pinterest - you can name ALL these companies who were born during the last economic collapse. If you go back to art, Picasso was probably his most productive during WWII, during the Nazi occupation of France, when he was still working in spite of all that.

"In a weird way, the pressure of unusual circumstances is when things are galvanized. Great stress can either break something, or turn it into a diamond. So I think it’s how you flow with what’s happening."

If you try to resist and try to overlay your normal ways of doing things on what are completely different circumstances you will be completely confused and depressed. Creativity is the ability to mutate on demand, to adjust to changing circumstances. And then what you can do is take what is a dire situation, because it’s different, and turn it into something which is beautiful and expansive. That’s what creative courage is. It’s looking at something and saying 'I’m not going to resist it, I’m going to use it.' It’s like you're using Aikido. Instead of trying to say “no,” you simply move out of the way and redirect it. And that’s where creative thinking comes in. It requires a flow state. 

And the reason it’s called 'flow' is because the metaphor is kind've like a river. It’s moving, and always there, but it’s always changing at the same time, so you can see in the metaphor of a river, there’s a rock in front of you. If you flow, you can move around this obstacle, but instead if you try to smash through it, it won’t work, you’ll stop, and the flow will stop. And that’s where creativity stops. Innovation is the ability to flow around the rock and find solutions.

"In a strange way, creativity requires the ability to surrender to what is, and let go, and let answers present themselves to you. As opposed to 'I have to fix this,' which is a panic state."

When I was a much younger man, I trained under a painter named Kenji Yoshida, and what was interesting was he saw me drawing, trying so hard to make a good drawing, and he said 'What are you drawing?' And I said 'I’m trying to make a drawing.' And he said 'Stop that. Stop trying to make something. Creativity comes from letting something out. Not making something. You may not like what comes out, but that’s where creativity comes from.'"

Follow John on LinkedIn.

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Next week's guest: Sarah Johnston

I'm excited about our next guest on You've Got This, founder of The Briefcase Coach and job search strategist Sarah Johnston. Sarah has been able to build up an engaged community on the LinkedIn platform through sharing her professional insights and expertise. Most recently a LinkedIn post she made around the coronavirus situation offering empathy and support for fellow working parents struck a chord, generating hundreds of reactions and dozens of comments from parents - some in the United States, others internationally - who were looking to connect and share what's working for them during this challenging time.

To be able to inspire others to take action is a theme throughout Sarah's work. With that in mind, here's what I'll be asking Sarah:

• What's something you wish more people understood about being a professional or career coach?
• What's the most rewarding part of your day-to-day?
• With so many people being affected by aspects of the evolving and changing COVID-19 situation, what would be your top piece of advice be for job seekers and others right now?

I invite you to ask your questions below, and thank you for reading!