In this episode, we dive deep into the human urge to create—what fuels it, why it feels so essential, and how we can harness it more intelligently in our work. We are joined by psychologist George Newman (author of How Great Ideas Happen) and philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (author of The Mattering Instinct), who guide us through both the mechanics and meaning of creativity.

We explore why creativity is not just a talent or an act, but a fundamental human response that pushes back against chaos and entropy. George Newman unpacks the myths of the "lone genius," showing us that real creative breakthroughs emerge from collaboration, exploration, and persistent engagement—not isolation. He introduces smart frameworks for idea development, including gridding, transplanting, and overcoming the “originality ostrich effect” and the “creative cliff illusion.”

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein takes us a level deeper, exploring why our drive to create is intimately tied to our need for meaning and validation. She discusses the “mattering instinct”—the pursuit of significance—and explains why conflict, resistance, and friction in organizations are often expressions of this core human need. Together, these conversations reveal how creativity is both an existential response and a practical tool for leadership and team health.

Five Key Learnings:

1. Great ideas aren’t conjured in isolation. Creative breakthroughs come from ongoing engagement, trial and error, and exposure to new perspectives—not from waiting for inspiration alone.
2. Originality is often misunderstood. Striving to be radically original can backfire; the most resonant ideas have personal freshness but build on approachable, recognizable foundations.
3. Guiding questions and iterative refinement matter. Defining and regularly reframing your creative questions ensures you’re solving the right problems and making meaningful progress.
4. Discomfort signals opportunity, not failure. The “creative cliff illusion” means our best ideas may arrive late in the process, and discomfort is often a sign that transformation is near.
5. Creativity is deeply connected to our need to matter. According to Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, our drive to create stems from our longing for meaning and significance—making every act of creation a resistance to insignificance and entropy.

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Every human, all of us, are born into a universe that doesn't pause to notice us. Systems seem to decay, energy dissipates, order gives way to disorder. Entropy always wins in the end. And yet against all of that, we keep making things. We keep creating. We write songs that no one may hear. We sketch ideas that may never ship. We wrestle with problems long after it would be easier just to walk away.

We do this even when there's no clear reward, even when there's no applause, even when no one is asking us to try. Today's episode is about that urge. Not creativity as talent, not creativity as output, but creativity as a deeply human response to existence itself. A way of pushing back against chaos, a way of saying, this matters, I matter. I'm here, I'm making things. We're going to begin today with George Newman, who helps us understand how ideas are actually found. Where do great ideas come from? What drives them? Why do people make them? And then later, we're going to go deeper with philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, who's going to help us understand why we feel compelled to search for meaning in the first place. This is Daily Creative.

Since 2005, we served up weekly tips to help you be brave, focused and brilliant. And every day. My name is Todd Henry. Welcome to the show.

Yeah, so I, I was really fascinated by just all these quotes from famous creatives throughout history. You have Thomas Edison saying, I've invented nothing. There's no such thing as a brain born idea, or David lynch talking about ideas or fish. And you wouldn't give credit to the chef for the fish just for cooking it.

One of the most persistent myths about creativity is that great ideas arrive fully formed, that they appear in isolation, sparked by inspiration delivered to a lone genius who somehow sees what other people can't. But George Newman argues that this story is not just wrong, it's actively harmful. His new book, How Great Ideas Happen, argues that ideas aren't conjured from nothing. They're discovered through exploration, trial and error, and sustained engagement with a problem. And this is why isolation often stalls creativity rather than fueling it.

And I really wanted to push on this notion and ask, is there something to that idea? And when I started looking at work that I had done and research by a lot of other people, this different view started to come into picture about. Yeah, like there we, there is an element of human ingenuity and foresight and even things that kind of feel magical or bespoke in the creative process. But I think what gets swept under the rug is all of the very careful exploration and iterative trial and error, Some of it that's going on subconsciously behind the scenes that we often don't talk about or maybe don't even recognize. So that there's this kind of very long, much more methodical process that is happening, even though maybe sometimes it feels to us like it's a aha kind of moment.

You've coined some phrases of, oh, my gosh, this is such a great way of saying this. One piece of advice you give is to burn the cabin down.

Oh, yeah.

And to let go of the romanticized idea of the solitary creator. So a lot of us, when we hit create a block, our tendency is to want to turn inward and to just really knuckle down and focus on the problem. But you say that kind of isolation can actually be damaging to our process. So what should we do instead? Well, first of all, what does burn the cabin down mean? And then what should we do instead when we hit that creative block?

Yeah. So the burn the cabin down idea is just like, at least where my mind goes. And I actually asked people in surveys, like, what do you think about this? If you wanted to go really create, what would you do in an ideal world? And you think about this isolated cabin in the woods, and I'm just gonna sit there and wait for my moment of inspiration. And I think, whereas that idea is romantic, it's not really how creativity works. And what the research suggests is actually it's like the exact opposite. That embedding yourself around other people, stimulating new ideas, checking out even a completely different field, something that we've never really even looked at before, all of these can be great ways of stimulating new ideas, stimulating insight and inspiration. The line that I used there is that what's important is not that it's new to everybody, but that it's new to you. And there were all these times, like, in writing the book, where I actually struggled and was having a difficulty making progress.

And my wife would be like, you gotta drink your own. Drink your own tea or take your own medicine or whatever the right phrase is. But how important it is to, okay, look, you're probably just hunkering down and looking inside too much and really starting to read again and see what else is out there and expose yourself to new ideas was really, oftentimes what I needed to unlock that next new idea.

Ryan Holiday, who also writes in this space, was talking about writer's block. I heard him say that there's no such thing as writer's block. It's just like, researcher's block. It's like you haven't. You don't have the right research yet. Once. Yeah. And I'm sure you probably have experienced the same thing.

It's like you sit down to write, and this is happening with my current book project, I'll sit down to write, and I'll realize, oh, I don't have enough here to be able to write right now. Right. I need to actually go find the pieces that need to become part of this. And I think we sometimes think we have this imaginary sense that people just conjure up this creative flow out of nothing, and it's. No. You have to have the pieces to be able to put together. And that. I think that kind of gets to another one of the amazing phrases that you use in the book, which is the originality, ostrich effect.

When we feel like we have to be so original, tell us what that is and why that affects us, and then how we can begin to counter that.

So that idea came out of some research, actually, that I did with a great grad student named Jin Kim. And we were basically looking at when people set out to do something creative with a creative idea, it's, like, new. But it also has to have some sort of value or purpose, or even if that's emotional or aesthetic or entertainment, it still has to have some sort of value to people. And so we're interested in how people balance that. To what extent are they focusing on novelty versus kind of the value of the idea? We asked people to come up with recipes for sandwiches, and. And what we found essentially, is that. That. That our chefs thought that the more original and outside the box they made their sandwich, the more appealing it would be to others.

But the exact opposite was true. And what seems to have happened is that by focusing on doing something that was totally original, they left out the most important part, which is, is this gonna be tasty? Is anybody gonna enjoy it? And I think that same pattern repeats in lots of different domains. Right. We set out to do something completely unconventional that's going to break the mold, forgetting that. Well, look, a lot of the substance of what makes ideas effective and impactful and moving to people is grounded in stuff that is maybe gonna be mundane and conventional. And usually it's more like our own twist or spin on things that unlock something new for us.

Part of the way that you describe this and part of what keeps us centered in or focused on the right thing is a process you call gridding or surveying and gridding. So could you explain that to us? And maybe talk a little bit about what guiding questions are and how they can help us.

Yeah, gridding is thinking about this after you've surveyed the landscape, you know, okay, I think a promising idea is over here. Now you're going to search for it. And gridding is the process of trying to make that search more organized. And so one of the big ideas I talk about there is this notion of a guiding question, which I described as like your compass. Right. It's your sense of orientation. And really the big components, for me at least there are the what, what is my thing? But then also the why. Like, why should it exist? What meaning or value does it have to people? And again, I don't think that has to be like this kind of huge question.

It could just be like, who's gonna, who's gonna resonate with this idea? Who's gonna respond to it? And really focusing on that audience, I think can be such a powerful driver in saying, am I on the right track or am I not, or should I be looking over here? It gives us a sense of orientation when we're looking around that landscape.

How do we know that we have defined the right question? I think that's always the challenge. Right. Because I think most people are at least pursuing a question. But how. What are some of the qualifiers of the right question?

That is a great question. I, the way that I approach it in my own work is thinking about it much more as like an iterative process that you are going to start. Very broad, that I want to be in this general space. The example that I talk about in the book is Shake Shack. And you know, how it started as this pop up that was part of an art project actually in Madison Square Park. But then we, over a series of years became much more refined in terms of what they were going to try to offer. So I think that's something that's really like a kind of a test and learn process that we have a guiding question. But then as we get more information from the world, we can begin to narrow them in closer and closer, spiraling in and getting.

Okay, I think there's really something promising here that that's resonating with people.

One of the things I find often with the clients I work with is that the phrase I always use with people is you can succeed your way into failure. Meaning you can do the thing that you think that you're trying to do, but you are solving entirely the wrong problem. Because you. Your advice is, okay, so you need to reframe that question every so Often you need to. It's an iterative process. But some people don't do that. They become so fixated on a specific thing, and then they end up doing that thing. But they've solved the wrong problem because they haven't been learning along the way and adapting along the way.

And part of what helps us do that, and you talk about this in the book, is what you call transplanting, right? Which is looking at different contexts or applying different fields or thinking about it through different lenses. Can you give us a sense of what transplanting is?

So transplanting is this idea that a lot of a big source of new ideas is when we borrow from a different kind of domain. And to run with this gridding analogy, it's like I'm taking the grid from a different domain and applying those same rules or structures or constraints to the problem that I'm working on. And so I give a lot of examples in the book of how that's been a really kind of effective strategy throughout history for different people to borrow. Okay, this has nothing to do with the problem that we're working on, but we see some kind of potential. There's some kind of underlying structure there that matches our own process. And then once they begin to really unpack that. For me, that was even like, in writing this book, it was initial idea of making the connection to archeology. But as I started to learn more about archeology and the different steps.

So there's actually a lot to this structure that. That could be helpful for what I'm trying to communicate.

I want to get back to this archaeology framework because I think that's a really. It's a great framework. It's a great way to describe the creative process. We talked about gridding, which is we've all seen archeological sites where they're grading the site and defining the area where they're going to excavate. And then we actually dig, right? We have to dig. And one of the things that you talk about in the process of digging is something that you call, again, another one of these great phrases that I wish I had come up with. The creative cliff illusion. Tell us what that is and why the later parts of the digging process are often more productive than the early parts.

And that's one of those ones that I can't take credit for either. So this is a great team at. They were at Northwest Northwestern and. And now Cornell. So this is Lauren Norgren and Brian Lucas. And so they have these fabulous studies basically looking at how. How creative do people expect that they're going to be like in, let's say over a five minute period. And then how does that match reality? And so if you had people say, how many ideas are you going to come up with in minute one and minute two and minute three and so on.

Basically people think, oh, I have a lot of ideas in the first part of the session and then I'm going to run out of stuff pretty quickly. And what they find is that almost the exact opposite, that once people get going, it's like, minute three is way more productive than minute two, minute four is more productive than that. And not only that, but the ideas that come out of those later rounds tend to be rated as better. So it's, there's something about when we're first standing on the precipice of a, of a creative problem, we think, oh, maybe I'm not going to have that much to say it and say about it. But when we really start digging and whether that's diggering around in our own memory and our kind of associations or doing additional research, we wind up with coming up with much, much more than we anticipated. And so that's getting over this perception of a creative cliff.

We've talked about excavating or digging, but at some point we have to look at what we have and we have to determine, okay, is this a good idea? Is it not a good idea? And sometimes what we initially think might be a great idea turns out not to be. Or sometimes what we don't really think much about ends up being a great idea. First of all, how do we determine what a great idea is? So like, how do we determine what great actually means? And then what do we do in those moments where maybe we come up with something that we're not really excited about, but we think there might be potential with?

Yeah, the first one is like this huge question that I think it's so deep and rich. What does it even mean for something to be a great idea? And I want to fall back to thinking about utility or having an effect in the world or moving people. And again, that doesn't mean like just like a tool or a function or that has to make you money. But does it move people in some way? Does it resonate with, with something? Does it spark new kinds of conversation? And that ultimately, I think is a cultural question, right? That, that, that is something that is shifting and changing over time. That's part of a larger discussion that we're all having together in one sense. I think we can point to something is great if it has this impact on the world. And people have modeled that as like a disruptive effect. And I think that's can be a nice approximation.

But there's also shifting target there that as cultures change and depending on which culture you're talking about, that can be. That can be a moving target over time. Now this issue of how do you recognize if something is great or where we maybe go wrong is, oh, we screw up on either side. Some of the research that I've done suggests that we tend to hold onto our ideas a little bit too tightly because we're the person who came up with them. And in fact, if you have people like brainstorm a bunch of ideas and incentivize them, okay, now give us really just the absolute gems they actually do worse than if somebody else took that same list of ideas and they had to pick the gems on them. In trying to anticipate what a broader market is going to respond to, we're a little bit attached to our. Our own ideas. On the flip side, these ideas that are really transformative and powerful, and this is some work that Justin Berg at Michigan has done, those ideas can at first find feel to us abstract and vague.

And there's just a very basic tendency right. Of our brains respond to things that are familiar. What's familiar and easy to process feels good and we like it. And because those kind of bigger ideas, because they feel foreign and abstract, we might not rank it number one on our list. It might not be the highest in terms of what we think is going to have an impact in the world. And actually it's maybe those uncomfortable ideas that turn out to be these kind of breakthrough, transformative ideas. Talk about these cases of Einstein and others who were really driven by almost like a sense of agenda and like discomfort. And it was that feeling of something that was unresolved that I think there's something here.

It maybe doesn't feel so comfortable, but I want to get over this hump. And that can actually be the signal of something much larger.

George Newman's new book is called How Great Ideas Happen, and it's available now wherever books are sold. He gives us a language for the mechanics of creativity. How ideas are found, why persistence matters, why discomfort is not a warning sign. It could be a signal of opportunity. But beneath all that is a deeper question. Why does any of this. Why does all of the creative process, everything that we make, why does it feel so perfect personal? Why does creative stagnation feel more like a workflow problem? Why does creative stagnation feel like more than a workflow problem. Why does failing to make something often feel like failing as a person, like you're failing in your purpose in some way? To answer that, we have to move beyond process and into philosophy.

We have to ask why humans feel so driven to create at all. And that's where Rebecca Newberger Goldstein enters the conversation. In a moment, we're going to have a conversation about her new book called the Mattering Instinct. We're going to explore why humans feel driven to create. Stick around. We'll be right back.

What I mean by Mannering in general, and we speak both of what matters and who matters, is the most basic core definition is deserving of attention. And what the mattering instinct is. We want to be deserving of our own attention.

That's Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. Her new book is called the Mattering Instinct.

Which is a strange idea because we are so determined to pay ourselves constant incessant attention. There is something unique, and I would say it's really the defining aspect of being a human being. And that is we're able to step outside of ourselves because we have this amazing capacity for self reflection. And there is from out of that grows this longing to justify ourselves to ourselves. We have various ways of doing it and we dis. We all try to do it. We go about it in such different ways. And some of our most fraught and irresolvable differences evolve out of the different ways that we try to justify ourselves.

Some of our most fraught and irresolvable differences evolve out of the different ways that we try to justify ourselves. Let's think about that for a minute. Think about how that shows up in your organization, in your relationships. The problem isn't that we try to justify ourselves. The problem is that we do it in different ways. And in organizations or with clients, these differences show up everywhere. A manager who over controls is often not trying to dominate. They're trying to prove their relevance, their value, their meaning is tied to being needed.

The one who gets to decide to leaving a visible imprint on every outcome. A creative pro who resists direction isn't necessarily just being difficult. They're trying to protect their authorship. Their meaning is tied to a sense of originality. They matter because of their autonomy, the feeling that their work carries some kind of recognizable signature. Teams argue not just about tactics, but about identity, about why we matter. But we disagree on why that is. Whose ideas count, whose judgment matters, who gets credit, who leaves a mark.

We tell ourselves that these are disagreements about process. But underneath them is a quieter Question, do I matter here? When people feel unseen, they grab the wheel. When they feel unheard, they stop listening. When they feel interchangeable, they try to make themselves indispensable. Most organizational friction isn't necessarily about ego, although it can be, but it's not necessarily about ego. It's about justification. It's about mattering. Each of us is trying to answer the same human question, but in different dialects.

And until we recognize that, we will keep mistaking our shared longing for meaning, for mattering for some kind of personal or organizational flawless.

What motivates you? Why do you care? Why do you do good things? Why do you want to be good? It's very important to understand, to get to that level of speaking about mattering and the shared commonality there.

So many of, like you said, these social dynamics that we're experiencing today are the result of people judging other people's actions that they are taking in order to matter in the way that mean something to them. And so I judge someone because I don't desire to matter in the same way that you do or someone else does. And I look at your actions and I say why are they doing that? That's. And it's purely because my mattering instinct is different, my strategy is different from somebody else's.

Yes.

Yeah. And I can't understand it. I can't understand why someone does what they do. But obviously to them it makes perfect sense because they are. Yeah, their strategy is to matter in a different way.

Values are embedded in this. When you say I mean I'm deserving. Deservingness is already a value laden term. This mannering instinct causes us to have very different values. There are no deeper cautious than that. And what I so want, the first step, I think is for us to reach a mutual understanding of what we share in common. And it's really quite a beautiful thing. Even if it leads to great ugliness sometimes.

And then of course gets us into philosophy. But a fast answer is we're all life. And everything worth doing in life, the things that are really worthy of our efforts, of love and compassion and beauty and knowledge, health and thriving, all are counter entropic. They're all where all of these things we're aligning ourselves with the force of life itself, which is against entropy. So for me, the best way of judging my own life and the life of others is are they working with entropy? Is their mattering project going towards destruction? Is it in favor of ugliness rather than beauty, of ignorance? And instead of knowledge, of confusion instead of clarity Cruelty instead of compassion. All of those ways that are counter entropic are better if there is something objective. Let's go, for me, let's go to the supreme law of physics, the law of entropy.

Rebecca New Newberger Goldstein's new book is called the Mattering Instinct, and it's available now wherever books are sold. And if you'd like to hear the full interviews with George Newman and Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, you can get them for free@dailycreativeplus.com just go there, enter your name and email, and we'll send you a private feed where you can listen to all of our interviews absolutely free. When you put these two conversations side by side, something becomes clear. Creativity, the act of creating, the drive to create is not just about how we make things things. It's about how we make sense of ourselves, of our place in the world, of how we're progressing, moving forward together as an organization, as a team, and how we, as leaders make sense of our leadership. George Newman shows us that ideas are discovered through patient exploration. Almost like an archaeologist, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein shows us that this exploration is not optional. We create because we must.

We create because we want to have a sense that we matter in some way way, because creation is one of the ways that humans resist decay, insignificance and silence, or the law of entropy, as she put it. But to stop creating is not just to stop producing. It's to stop answering the question of whether our lives deserve attention, whether what we do and why we're here even matters. So the next time the work feels slow or unclear or unresolved, or the next time you experience conflict on your team, Team, understand that people are just struggling to define why they matter. The struggle is not a detour from meaning. It's where meaning is forged. Because every act of creation, everything we make, is a quiet refusal to just disappear. Hey, thanks so much for listening.

Again. If you'd like all of our interviews for free, the full interviews, you can get them@dailycreativeplus.com just enter your name and email address and we'll send you a private feed to listen to the full interviews. My name is Todd Henry. You can find me my speaking events, my books, and more@toddhenry.com until next time. May you be brave, focused and brilliant. We'll see you then.