Creativity Starts in the Mess

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Simplicity is having a moment.

We’re told to declutter our minds, unsubscribe from everything, eliminate toxic people, and reduce our goals to a vision board and a few sticky notes. Simplicity is sold as a shortcut to clarity, peace, and creativity. Just strip it all back, and genius will emerge.

But creativity doesn’t begin with simplicity. It ends there.

Despite the cultural obsession with minimalism—mental, digital, emotional—real creativity doesn’t come from doing less. It comes from doing more. More experiments. More drafts. More failures. More uncomfortable ambiguity. Before simplicity is ever achieved, complexity must be endured.

Why We Crave Simplicity

Simplicity feels good because it reduces cognitive load. Psychologist John Sweller’s Cognitive Load Theory (1988) explains how our working memory is limited; when we’re overwhelmed with complexity, we become mentally fatigued and decision-averse. Simplicity promises relief—a way out of the overload.

But in creative pursuits, too much simplification too early can kill the very process we’re trying to nourish.

Psychologist Keith Sawyer, an expert on creativity, emphasizes that creative insight typically emerges not from initial clarity but from structured chaos—what he calls “zig-zag thinking” (Sawyer, 2013). It’s a nonlinear process filled with false starts, detours, and unexpected turns. The illusion of a neat, efficient path is just that—an illusion.

James Joyce’s manuscript page for Ulysses.

Source: Open Culture

Complexity Is the Playground of Creativity

Want proof? Look at how real creative work gets done.

Reverse-engineer a song, a poem, a new business model, or a painting, and you’ll find layers—discarded versions, splashes of failed experiments, sudden inspirations that arrived after long stretches of frustration. Simplicity, when it appears, is the reward for persistence through complexity.

Take someone like James Dyson—not a polarizing tech mogul but a famously iterative creator. It took him 5,127 prototypes to develop his first bagless vacuum cleaner. That’s not minimalism. That’s creative endurance. The sleek, simple design we see today? It came only after thousands of failed attempts, not before.

This mirrors the concept of design fixation, where jumping too quickly to a simple or obvious solution actually reduces creativity (Jansson & Smith, 1991). True originality often requires wandering through a wilderness of complexity before we discover the elegant idea hiding within.

Creativity Is Not Clean

Too often, we equate creativity with freedom, play, or inspiration—an effortless flow. But in reality, it’s messy. It requires resilience. It involves sitting with incomplete ideas, resisting the urge to tidy up prematurely.

Leonardo da Vinci said, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” But he didn’t mean simplicity as a starting point. Da Vinci’s journals are riddled with dense notes, mirror writing, anatomical sketches, and mechanical diagrams. He planted everything imaginable—only to spend years pruning it down.

This isn’t about romanticizing suffering or chaos. It’s about acknowledging the creative arc: from confusion to coherence. From too many ideas to the right one.

How We Misread Creativity Culture

Modern advice often promotes a fast track to clarity—eliminate, reduce, simplify. While that’s useful at the end of a process, it’s destructive at the beginning. We’re told to find our "one big idea" or our "creative niche" before we’ve explored enough possibilities to even know what’s possible.

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This pressure to clarify too soon leads to what psychologist Barry Schwartz calls the paradox of choice (2004). In a complex world, we want fast resolution. But in doing so, we often limit the very creativity we’re trying to unleash.

In short: We confuse creative discomfort with failure. We rush to reduce instead of expand.

How to Stay in the Mess (Productively)

So, how do we move through creative complexity without getting stuck? Here are three principles supported by research and practice:

1. Allow for ambiguity. Cognitive flexibility—the ability to shift between different concepts or perspectives—is a hallmark of creativity (De Dreu et al., 2011). Don’t rush to solve the problem. Sit with it. Ask better questions.
2. Create more than you need. Quantity precedes quality in creative work. A study by Simonton (1999) found that highly creative individuals produce more total output—not all of it good—but this sheer volume increases the chances of a breakthrough. Think drafts, not declarations.
3. Edit later. Treat simplicity like a sculptor treats stone. Don’t look for it at the start. Let it emerge through subtraction. As designer John Maeda put it, “Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful.”

The Modern Trade-Off

Yes, the modern world is noisy. Yes, we are overwhelmed. But creativity doesn’t mean withdrawing from complexity—it means learning to work with it. Navigate it. Mold it. Only then does something useful, elegant, and new emerge.

We shouldn’t be trying to escape complexity. We should be learning to trust it.

So if you find yourself stuck, uncertain, or overwhelmed in your creative work, don’t panic. Don’t strip everything away in search of instant clarity. Stay in the mess a little longer. Explore. Experiment. Let your ideas be too many, too complicated, too unpolished—for now.

Because on the other side of that mess, there may be something simple. And sophisticated. And entirely your own.