The Cultivation of Creativity and Motivation
By D. J. Cram

J. M. Roberts, in his "History of the World," l987 edition, page 201, writes "The Greeks invented the philosophical question as part and parcel of one of the great intuitions of all times, that a coherent and logical explanation of things could be found, that the world did not ultimately rest upon the meaningless and arbitrary fiat of gods or demons." This occurred starting about the fifth century B.C., and is possibly the greatest invention of all time, since a faith in rational inquiry into what is new and different is at the base of civilization in general and research in particular.

A simple example is illustrative. It was not until the last hundred years that mental disease was thought to be a chemical-physical phenomenon. Prior to that time, mental processes and the mind, itself, were thought to be governed by supernatural forces - that demons or evil spirits were at the bottom of insanity. Only when investigators thought that the mind was a physical-chemical phenomenon did they try chemicals to correct for mental problems. As a result, mental disease is often treatable with chemicals, because many mental aberrations are metabolic deficiencies or disorders.

This talk addresses the subject "The Cultivation of Creativity and Motivation." My views on this subject are not "expert," but are the evolutionary product of many thoughts and experiences which reflect first my attempt to cultivate these qualities in myself, and secondly, in my students. Definition of "to create": 1. to cause to come into existence; bring into being; make; originate. 2. give rise to. 3. to portray (a character) for the first time.

By the time I was sixteen, I had had about twenty employers in the small town of Brattleboro, Vermont. These jobs were repetitious and boring. When the word "research" entered my vocabulary, I made an intuitive judgment. I hated repetition - research to me meant every day would be different. The idea of being creative - of doing things never before done - was as exciting to me as was the ice cream parlor that sold ten flavors when I was six. Although I had little notion of what research was, to me it was the antithesis of dullness, of sameness, of drabness, of marching in place. To me, it meant challenge, novelty, excitement, unlimited possibilities. In my senior year in high school, I encountered my first chemistry course, and saw chemistry as the ideal research vehicle for me. By my second year in college, I wanted to be a college professor so as to do my own research. I never deviated from this objective from age 20 on. Research has been the center of my life for about 50 years. My early intuitive judgment about self-fulfillment through doing research turned out just as I had hoped - my life has been and still is enormously satisfying, and research has been its core - its center. Here, I wish to tell you some of the personal policies that have helped me to reach somewhat above myself. Personal cultivation of creativity and motivation have been central policies, and have been the tools most generally useful to me over the years. Here are some personal policies I recommend to you that might be useful in a career in science.

1. Constantly ask yourself questions, and screen them for the potential importance of their answers. Keep them in a notebook, and think about them over time. How can the answers be found? How many new ancillary questions will arise out of possible answers? How good are the questions as vehicles for teaching coworkers and yourself how to do research? How can work on the answers be organized and sold to coworkers or supporting agencies? Do the questions address novel phenomena? Are they in territories of inquiry that are little surveyed or explored? How easily can you get leads that allow evaluation of the viability of possible approaches to the questions?

Think about the questions in all moods, with different shadings of optimism, pessimism, wildness, and criticism. Argue with people about the questions, and solicit criticism of your approaches to the answers to the questions. Persist in this contemplative operation, over years if necessary, if the question is important enough. If answering the question intrigues you over time, do research on it to the point where it pays diminishing returns.

2. Questions occur to people who have and can maintain a sense of wonder, of innocence, and of a need to invest themselves in seeking answers to questions of their own design. Cynicism, intellectual impatience, and pessimism are enemies of wholesome attitudes toward research. Cultivate optimism, a spirit of inquiry, and of making a game of developing research questions and answers.

3. Successful researchers have to have a tolerance for failure, and an ability to quickly and economically discard negative results. We have about a 20% success rate, about a 30% partial success rate, and about a 50% failure rate. The 20% success rate pays the bills for the other 80%. Research is gambling with large chips - the chips are your and your coworkers' time, society's money, your past, current, and future reputation as a scientist, the future positions of your coworkers, and the reputation of the research family of which you are a part. Cut your losses by not dwelling on failure. Quickly extract lessons to be learned from failure, and then forget it.

4. Increase your chances of being successful in research by addressing questions that provide aesthetic appeal - where results can be looked upon as being beautiful. Beauty is inspiring. To be able to think "what a beautiful solution we have to that beautiful problem" is about as rewarding an experience as I have had in my 50 years in the profession.

Cultivate along with a desire for and love of order, a tolerance for disorder. Why? Much disorder is encountered during the enfolding of research problems. Results often diverge, and generate more questions than they do answers. New layers of organization, new effects, new obstacles constantly appear which have the aspect of unrelatedness, and sometimes appear hopelessly complicated. Novelty - the unexpected, is frequently disturbing, then intriguing, then rewarding - it takes "getting used to." Challenges of novel results are hard to live with at first because they do not fit into any old pattern - they stand alone - they have no context. Building that context is frequently good science. Remember, at some time in the past everything we know - even the stirrup of a saddle or paper currency was an invention, a discovery - they were novel.

6. The interesting question arises: at what point in the evolution of a research problem is the most fun? The graduate student involved might say when he dots the last "i" of his thesis - but that is a facetious or even a fatuous statement. The most fun is when there is enough data on hand to form a new hypothesis that relates and orders the results - enough so predictions can be made as to the next test of the hypothesis. For me, the most fun is when there is the most design possible. The most stimulating time is either when an experiment fails completely, or is strikingly successful. The failure stimulates my combative instincts - why did it fail? What was wrong with the design? I could not have been that dumb! These are the first thoughts. But then the challenging thought occurs - what have we learned to avoid failure the next time? Where is the profit to be extracted from that failure.

When an experiment is successful, the mind and imagination soar - all kinds of new questions flood the brain - everything becomes possible - optimism is unavoidable - beauty is everywhere. It is at those times that an investigator knows why he has been working so hard and long - he has broken the shell of ignorance to give birth to a whole flood of new phenomena and new ideas! Here are the rewards that made all of that hard work and uncertainty worthwhile!

7. Just as in other kinds of battles, an investigator goes through a "mopping up" period - details and loose ends are made tidy. Writing research and review articles describing research and developing its context is the final stage, and it must be done in order for the research to be complete. Academicians unwilling or unable to write fully documented papers should not be in the business. Research papers are the legacy that scientists leave to other scientists to build on, and that provide a starting point for engineers developing uses for new compounds or phenomena. Writing papers forces the scientist to think, to rationalize, to turn the implicit into the explicit, to take the long view, to relate his or her contribution to the field as a whole, to develop perspective. It also serves as a starting point for the development of new questions and new hypotheses that are the starting points for new research. Research papers are the wares of the scientific marketplace where results and conclusions are judged by one's fellow scientists. One of the wonderful characteristics of the research marketplace is its efficiency. Judgments about the quality, originality, importance, and significance of research tend to be more critical and accurate than in almost any other field, with the possible exception of coaching in sports. Research papers are detailed records of how effort and time - even lives - have been spent, and a knowledgeable person can by reading a research paper judge the quality of the "minds and hands" of the authors.

The research marketplace is composed of the following components: the refereeing of research fund applications made to granting agencies, the refereeing of research papers: the symposia and seminars that serve as forums for oral exchanges; the reward system. Here are the places where judgments are made of your past efforts, your research plans, and your promise for the future. Your peers (your competitors) can take a shot at you. And they know how to shoot, too. The judgments are largely anonymous, and can be pretty brutal.

Imagine working very hard on a great research idea, getting what you think are great results, writing them into a great paper, and having an anonymous referee chosen by an editor telling you that the paper is not good enough for publication for five or ten different reasons. This research has been your child - the product of your imagination and rational thought, the result of your cultivation, an expression of your physical and mental artistic expression, judgment, character, and standards. Some referee reports are detailed, rational insults. The question becomes - how do you handle such things - and most scientists in my field face this at times - I certainly have faced it enough to keep my capacity for humility exercised.

My first reaction is anger and insult, and a feeling of being wronged. After a week or two, and several readings of the referee report in different moods, two questions emerge whose answers remove the sting. The first question is "how justified is the criticism" - if justified, it must be met, since truth is your goal. The second question is "where is the profit in this criticism." Frequently, you have presented a poor enough argument for your interpretations so that the referee is unconvinced by your argument. Sometimes you have been misunderstood, which suggests a lack of clarity in your writing. Possibly you have overlooked experimental tests that should have been carried out. The important thing is that criticism can be turned into profit. It is very stimulating to have to defend a hypothesis - a little like having to play a five-set tennis match and you are already down two sets. Use the "fix you are in" as the emotional fuel to climb out of the fix and gain your objectives. Above all, do not run away from the problem - handle it, and grow accordingly. Learn lessons from the criticism. Criticism is a much more pungent stimulant than praise. Turn criticism into challenge, and response to challenge into profit. Many of my best ideas for research have come out of criticism of what I have been doing or thinking. The human animal is the most predatory being on this globe, and criticism is a civilized way of attacking others. Defending one's position draws on one's powers and resources in ways no other activity can equal. The art of turning criticism into profit is a well-developed facet of my character. Not only have I had a lot of practice in learning how to recover after losing, but also of making use of other people's negative judgments about our research proposals or results. A life composed only of winning and of praise would be dull beyond belief - a sort of "killing me softly," as in the song by that name.

9. Constantly shop for models for behavior that are admirable in others, and emulate those qualities if they do not violate your sense of identity or propriety. These models can come from characters in books, from history, from your peers, neighbors, or coworkers. I have been particularly stirred by historical figures lifted from my reading of history.

10. I have been continuously in need of violent exercise over the years to keep my brain in a refreshed state - to be able to maintain perspective, to keep my mind flexible, and to generate optimism. Good science is great for the mind, but sometimes very hard on the back. Writing a textbook and eighteen research papers in a two-year period was something I did in the late 1950's. My payment for this labor was a great sense of accomplishment, a sore back, and a resolve to mix a good dose of regular exercise with my work. This I have done ever since. Surfing, skiing and tennis have been my sports, coupled with daily stretching and conditioning exercises. A strong, active body is the foundation for all other activities. There is no substitute for good health. "We were bred to move, and move we must." I can think of no worse advice than that of a famous president of the University of Chicago who said "whenever he felt like exercising, he went to bed!"

The counterpart of enough exercise is enough sleep. Very important things happen during sleep. Impressions of the day are sorted, discarded, and filed. The intuitive and cognitive parts of the brain are renewed. A fresh start is possible the next morning. Furthermore, dreams are interesting and, for the most part, very satisfying. I like to sleep, and always have. Sleep provides full reign for the undisciplined, hallucinative and wild propensities of the brain - exercise these faculties during sleep, rather than mixing them into your waking hours. I have always been puzzled by those that denigrate sleep as a waste of time. To me, sleep is an unloading of our computers, getting them ready for tomorrow.

11. How is motivation cultivated and maintained over the years. It is not automatically there. It has to be planted, tended, fertilized, weeded, and watered. Here are some policies that have kept my interest in science alive now for half a century. I pretend that when I am doing research it is the most important thing in the world. When a paper is being written, I do everything to maintain continuity of thought and effort from day to day. Each evening, I outline the next day's effort. On getting up, I think of nothing else before sitting down to writing. I get up, do a few chores, exercise, or do whatever needs to be done, keeping the substance of the work still in mind. Maintain as much continuity as possible. When facing a problem that needs solution, I frame the question to myself before sleep for several nights in a row. Usually solutions come in the morning. The same is true about important decisions. They are all easier to make in the morning, when confidence and vitality are high. Finishing a paper or a book or a big piece of work provides me with great release. I usually follow this with a period of violent and excessive exercise, and then I am ready for another round.

After working in a research field for a while, I become stale, since its challenges become too much like yesterday's. Hence, I have changed fields about five or six times in my life. This has meant developing new peers, new constituencies, new literature contexts, new sources of funding. It has been scary, because there was always the scepter of possible failure - but that is just the point. Without the threat of failure, the challenge, the allure, fades. A piece of well-done research that is written up and published is like a fine meal just eaten. The satisfaction is there, and the hunger is gone. A good meal lasts just so long - a new hunger is the next step. The art of remaining hungry for exciting new research results over a lifetime has been the story that has dominated my activity for some fifty years now, and I am still greedy.

12. Faith in research and one's ability to carry it out is a dominant component in carrying one's enthusiasm over the dry periods. Dry periods are sometimes two or three years in duration. They are induction periods, planning periods, sometimes slogging periods, when nobody in a research group is getting positive results. Morale sags. These are the times when self-doubt and discouragement have to be battled with faith, personal resources and grit. All of the best research we have done has gone through periods like this, when everything you think of seems to fail. So persistence and faith in the ultimate yielding of the unknown to repeated resourceful attacks is an important, character-testing ingredient in carrying on research. The tougher the problem, the more satisfying the solution. The greater the resources needed to be successful, the sweeter is that success.

So the cultivation of creativity and incentive as applied to research is a highly personal thing. Intuition and rational thought are both involved, and in differing amounts, depending on the person. One of the many wonderful things about organic chemical research is the breadth of the phenomena studied. Over ten million discretely different organic compounds are now known, and an infinite number are possible. There are in excess of two thousand different types of organic reactions known to use in synthesizing new compounds. There are between fifty and a hundred thousand separate compounds that compose the human genome. Only the surface of brain chemistry has been scratched, but the tools are now available to make wonderful advances. The whole field of organic chemical properties of compounds in the 2,000-l0,000 molecular weight range is now within reach. Opportunities for adventurous lives in organic chemical research abound. I have never seen a period so rich in scientific adventure and promise for intellectual and material rewards. Finally, I personally can think of no other profession or activity in which I could have invested my life and obtained a more satisfying return than has been realized.