I’ve started to think that one of the more underrated skills in creative work is being nosy.
Not intrusive, hopefully. Just interested in things that have very little to do with whatever assignment is sitting in front of you.
How people talk when they’re not trying to sound smart. What someone says five minutes after the brainstorm ended. The joke that gets a bigger reaction than anything on the screen. The song playing in the Uber. The podcast tangent that had nothing to do with the episode. The neighborhood chisme you didn’t ask for but are absolutely going to listen to anyway.
Most of it feels useless when you collect it. You’re not thinking, this might be useful for a campaign someday. You just notice it. Then weeks or years later, something from one part of your brain bumps into something from another and suddenly there’s an idea sitting between them.
For a long time, I thought creativity was mostly about connecting dots. A cultural behavior connects with a product truth. Something somebody said in research reminds you of something you saw three weeks ago. A visual unlocks a line.
But lately I’ve been wondering if I’ve been giving too much credit to the connecting part.
Maybe the harder work happened earlier, when you decided which dots were worth noticing in the first place.
That question has become more interesting to me as AI has become part of almost everything I do creatively.
I use it a lot. To brainstorm, research, organize, poke holes in ideas, get unstuck, find another way into something. Sometimes it gives me a genuinely useful direction. Sometimes it gives me twenty options and nineteen of them make me appreciate the one I already had.
What has really changed isn’t that ideas suddenly exist where they didn’t before. It’s that there’s almost never a shortage of them anymore.
So the more I use AI, the more I keep coming back to judgment.
If coming up with options gets easier, knowing which one actually matters gets harder.
And judgment is weird because so much of it sounds completely unscientific when you try to explain it. “This feels too advertising.” “It looks good, but it doesn’t feel like us.” “The strategy makes sense, but nobody actually talks like that.”
Or the least useful and somehow most useful sentence in creative work:
“There’s something there.”
Usually you feel it before you can explain it. Then you spend the next thirty minutes trying to put logic around something your brain decided ten minutes ago.
I used to call that experience. I still do. But I’m starting to think experience might just be a nicer word for everything you’ve been paying attention to for years.
There’s some psychology behind that. Researchers Shelley Carson, Jordan Peterson and Daniel Higgins studied latent inhibition, basically the brain’s tendency to filter out things it has already decided are irrelevant. In their study, lower latent inhibition was associated with higher creative achievement in high-functioning people (Carson et al.).
I don’t think that means creative people are just more distracted. What interests me is the idea that creativity might sometimes come from being a little slower to decide that something doesn’t matter.
A strange phrase. An awkward pause. A dumb joke. A behavior that doesn’t fit the research. Sometimes the job is just being the person who says, “Wait, go back.”
I think my own background probably made me more aware of that without me really noticing it. My creative taste was shaped by growing up in Miami and by American advertising, but I live and work in Mexico now, where some of those instincts travel well and some absolutely do not.
I don’t think that makes me especially good at understanding either place. If anything, it has made me more aware of how often I assume something is universal when it isn’t.
Research on multicultural experience found that living abroad was linked to creativity, especially when people actually adapted to another culture instead of just spending time in it (Maddux and Galinsky). I like that because adaptation means getting things wrong. Missing the joke. Misreading something. Realizing the way you see something is only one way of seeing it.
You start paying closer attention because you have to.
That same thing shows up for me in meetings.
I’ve developed a bit of an allergy to the idea that everyone needs to say something all the time. There’s a pressure in creative rooms to prove you’re participating by talking, so everyone has a take, everyone adds a thought, everyone finds another way to say what somebody else said five minutes earlier.
I don’t think speaking and contributing are always the same thing.
Sometimes the most useful person in the room is the one who has been listening long enough to realize that three people are actually talking about the same problem.
Research on group intelligence points in a similar direction. Anita Williams Woolley and her colleagues found that strong group performance wasn’t just about having the smartest person in the room. Social sensitivity and more balanced conversational turn-taking also mattered (Woolley et al.).
There’s a skill in listening long enough before deciding what you need to add. Hearing when someone keeps coming back to the same word. Watching where a conversation suddenly gets more energy. Letting someone finish a thought instead of interrupting because you already know where you think they’re going.
Some of the best creative conversations I’ve had didn’t even feel creative at the time. They happened over lunch, before meetings, after meetings, while someone was showing us something completely unrelated on their phone.
You can spend two hours in a war room trying to manufacture an idea and then somebody casually says something about their mom and the whole room changes.
The idea was there. Someone just had to hear it.
That’s probably where mindfulness comes into this for me, although I don’t really mean mindfulness in the polished wellness version of the word.
I mean paying attention.
Maybe creative people have always practiced a messier version of it. We people-watch. We eavesdrop. We scroll comments too long. We ask follow-up questions because someone used an interesting word. We get weirdly interested in things that probably don’t matter.
Until they do.
It’s professional nosiness.
Neuroscience around creativity makes that idea more interesting too. Roger Beaty and his colleagues found that creative thinking involves interaction between brain systems linked to spontaneous thought and systems linked to evaluation and control (Beaty et al.).
Which sounds pretty close to how creativity actually feels.
You need the wandering part, but you also need the part that says, “Yeah, but is this actually good?”
Curiosity gets you somewhere. Judgment decides whether it’s worth staying there.
There’s also research suggesting that stepping away from a problem can help. Benjamin Baird and his colleagues found that mind-wandering during an easy task could improve later creative performance, while Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz found that walking helped people perform better on divergent-thinking tasks than sitting did (Baird et al.; Oppezzo and Schwartz).
None of that means going for a walk guarantees a good idea. I wish it did.
But it does make me think about something I’ve noticed in myself.
I’m getting worse at being stuck.
Before, being stuck sometimes forced you somewhere else. You got a cold coke. You walked around. You talked to someone. You watched something unrelated. You left the problem alone for a while.
Now the second I hit a wall, there’s a very smart machine a few centimeters away ready to give me thirty more directions.
And most of the time, I ask.
That’s the contradiction I keep coming back to. I don’t want less AI in my process. I use it too much to pretend otherwise. I just want to get better at knowing when I need more possibilities and when I need to stop asking for them.
Because more output doesn’t automatically create better judgment.
Judgment has to come from somewhere.
Maybe it comes from the cities you’ve lived in. The music you overplayed. Football plays you remember for no reason. Ads you loved before you knew why they were good. Inside jokes. Family stories. Mistakes. Something your kid said wrong that somehow made perfect sense. Something you overheard at lunch that stayed in your head for three days.
Not data exactly.
More like criteria.
A history of noticing.
Maybe that’s also where taste comes from. Not just knowing the right references, but slowly building a sense of what feels honest, forced, alive, obvious, lazy, interesting or wrong.
Which is why I’m less interested in whether AI can connect the dots.
Of course it can.
I’m more interested in whether we’re still collecting enough interesting ones ourselves.
Whether we listen long enough. Whether we still let conversations wander. Whether we occasionally look around without immediately trying to turn what we see into something useful.
AI is going to get very good at working with everything that has already been noticed.
There’s still something to be said for noticing what happens next.
Works Cited
Baird, Benjamin, et al. “Inspired by Distraction: Mind Wandering Facilitates Creative Incubation.” Psychological Science, vol. 23, no. 10, 2012, pp. 1117–22. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797612446024.
Beaty, Roger E., et al. “Creative Cognition and Brain Network Dynamics.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences, vol. 20, no. 2, 2016, pp. 87–95. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2015.10.004.
Carson, Shelley H., Jordan B. Peterson, and Daniel M. Higgins. “Decreased Latent Inhibition Is Associated with Increased Creative Achievement in High-Functioning Individuals.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 85, no. 3, 2003, pp. 499–506. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.85.3.499.
Maddux, William W., and Adam D. Galinsky. “Cultural Borders and Mental Barriers: The Relationship between Living Abroad and Creativity.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 96, no. 5, 2009, pp. 1047–61. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0014861.
Oppezzo, Marily, and Daniel L. Schwartz. “Give Your Ideas Some Legs: The Positive Effect of Walking on Creative Thinking.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 40, no. 4, 2014, pp. 1142–52. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0036577.
Woolley, Anita Williams, et al. “Evidence for a Collective Intelligence Factor in the Performance of Human Groups.” Science, vol. 330, no. 6004, 2010, pp. 686–88. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1193147.