I recently read two very interesting essays. One titled “Energetic Aliens” by Stephen Malina and the other by Michael Nielsen about “Creative Contexts”.
Energetic aliens, as Malina defines it, are those rare people who have the capacity to sustain intense focus for long periods of time on cognitively demanding tasks. Malina gives as examples George Church, Paul Erdős, Isaac Asimov, and Elon Musk to name a few. These are all examples of people who seem to be able to not just function on lower-than-average amounts of sleep compared to an average person, but also be extremely focused and much more productive than an average individual over their lifetime.
[Narrow] Creative contexts, as Nielsen tries not to define it, are things (for lack of a better word) that people attach to, which drive their passion for working on intellectual pursuits. In Nielsen’s own words:
“It’s the emotional and intellectual force driving the work, the thing you return to over and over. People will sometimes describe it as”the idea”, but it’s often both considerably more and less than an idea. And if you get disconnected from it, don’t nurture and stew in it enough, don’t believe in it enough, you start to lose contact with your project.”
A creative context in this sense can come from relatively small things – an email that makes you have a really positive or negative response, an excellent conversation you just had, a really great piece of writing you just read and connected with. It’s that emotional juice that keeps you working on and coming back to a solo intellection project.
Having read both pieces within the same week, I wonder if the “Energetic Aliens” are just really good at creating, nurturing, and sustaining their “Creative Contexts”. If we take Elon Musk for example. Would he have the same level of energy and deep focus if he didn’t feel so strongly about making humanity a multiplanetary species? Would Tesla and SpaceX be what they are today if he was slightly less intense about the future of humankind?
So, what I’m trying to say is that his deep do-or-die desire to create a bright future for humanity, whether you agree with that future or not, is Elon Musk’s creative context. He can not only maintain this creative context under tremendous stress and pressure, but also use it to be laser focused and succeed in challenging and big intellectual projects.
Nielsen gives the example of Steve Jobs while talking about creative contexts:
“I think this is, in part, what former Apple designer Jony Ive was talking about when he said of Steve Jobs:”he treated the process of creativity with a rare and a wonderful reverence. You see, I think he better than anyone understood that while ideas ultimately can be so powerful, they begin as fragile, barely formed thoughts, so easily missed, so easily compromised, so easily just squished.” I suspect what Ive is talking about overlaps with, but isn’t exactly the same as, what I’m calling a creative context. But sometimes that fragile, barely formed thought is the seed of a creative context; it becomes the thing that you defend, and attach to, and develop, the core of a work.”
This is me quoting Nielsen quoting Jony Ive talking about Steve Jobs. I would say Jobs is an energetic alien as well, with his intensity, relentlessness, and reality distortion fields. In Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs, he writes about Jobs’ intensity as:
“Jobs’s intensity was also evident in his ability to focus. He would set priorities, aim his laser attention on them, and filter out distractions. If something engaged him–the user interface for the original Macintosh, the design of the iPad and iPhone, getting music companies into the iTunes Store–he was relentless.”
His passion for perfection was a deeply emotional feeling and his own creative context. This passion drove him and in turn the people around him to do things that seemed impossible.
I am very intrigued by the idea of creative contexts. I connected with Nielsen’s idea quite strongly having recently been in a wonderful creative context myself for a life changing solo project, and then almost completely lost it a few months later. How do they come about? Once you have one, how do you maintain it and not lose it? How can you create creative contexts for yourself? Whenever I have had sustained streaks of dedicated focus on a solo project, it’s usually driven by an underlying motivating factor that I connect with emotionally. I am not saying I am anywhere close to the energetic alien standards, but I am able to sustain many days to weeks of lower amounts of sleep and maintain a laser focus on my intellectual goal.
If you think there is some truth to my premise, that there exists a relationship between creative contexts and energetic aliens, then which way does the arrow point? Are energetic aliens just inherently better at sustaining their creative contexts, or do the right creative contexts create energetic aliens. Perhaps we all have energetic aliens within us, we just need to find the right context and learn how to maintain it. This sounds like “just find what you’re passionate about”, which I think is insufficient and borderline terrible advice. I suspect, as most things are, the links between creative context and energetic aliens are complicated. If it was simple, we would have more energetic aliens walking among us. But, from my own handful of experiences, I would say the right creative contexts are a partial factor in having energetic alien energy.