Is Repetition a Detriment to Our Creativity?

If you’ve read some of my thoughts and articles before you already know my answer to this. If you haven’t come across anything I’ve shared, my answer is… YES. Don’t get me wrong, repetition is useful and purposeful in many cases, but it definitely takes away from your true personal identity. It takes away from what makes you an individual, and let me tell you why.

Repetition is highly important and regarded for someone who is training their mind or body to simply react at a high level, high frequency, and high efficiency. An athlete for example definitely needs to do repetitions to build ‘muscle’ memory. This allows for athletes to perform at high levels without having to think of how to do the basics, almost like second nature. But for someone who is highly creative, and needs more than a reaction to solve an issue, it is not the best thing.

This really forces us to almost become autonomous—which if you didn’t know is proof in itself how repetition makes us less creative. There is no thought process and creative decision making when repetition is so instilled in our day to day lives. Nothing seems like it has meaning, nothing is a challenge, nothing gives us the satisfaction of solving a problem.

There are four steps that should be taken when solving a creative problem:

1. Planning—Form your intentions. Plan which actions are to be performed. Determine criteria you’ll need to meet and obtain.
2. Retention—Let that plan boil in the back of your mind. Literally, once you have all the pieces together, let your brain just think without you doing anything besides existing.
3. Performance—Just like anything else, you need to unleash that plan and implement it to see how it pans out. You’ll evaluate it in the next step.
4. Evaluation—Are you going to reward yourself because of a success, or are you going to start over again to solve the problem?

No matter what you decide to do after step four, there will always be a behavioral adaptation. You either learned something that works, or have to formulate a new plan and try again. I guess one could say that this list can be a repetitious list and go against the whole point of my views. I beg to differ. Every single time you do this for any and every problem you are trying to solve, you will have infinitely different experiences. When you are simply sending out ‘Thank You’ e-mails day in and day out, there is no stimulation, no drive for success, no thrill of failure.

Those types of mundane repetitious behaviors will do nothing but hinder your ability to think clearly, establish goals, make a plan, execute that plan, and then evaluate how it turned out. The ones who truly believe they are creatives and are natural problem solvers will not find any value by doing any repetitious tasks.

Now let’s dig even deeper here. These repetitious behaviors don’t have to just be task oriented. If you do the same repetitious patterns throughout your day, every day, you need to find a way to switch it up. Routines are only good for so long before they put you into auto-pilot, and take away from the goals you’ve previously set forth.

I’m going to speak about the athlete example from earlier. When strength training, athletes eventually reach a plateau if they do the same workout routine for a prolonged period of time. They need to break that ‘tolerance’ and shake things up a bit to see more benefits from their workouts. The same thing is true with the creative mind. If you find yourself getting bogged down, check your day to day routine. Are you doing the same exact thing at the same exact time every day? Are you merely existing instead of living? Yes, we are all life forms, but not all of us are living. The only repetitious pattern that exists in nature is the Fibonacci sequence, and that isn’t even a constant behavior. It is irrational. This means it has no reason for what it does.

Now let’s think about this. Why should humans, a form of nature, have to focus on giving a reasonable pattern for everything we do? We shouldn’t! It takes away from us being us. It turns us into something we were not born to be. Switch up your patterns every once in a while, and your brain will realize it is not stuck in a vortex. You’ll feel more liberated, you’ll have better mental clarity, you’ll have less stress, and you’ll be happier.

Repetitious patterns take away from your individuality, your creativity, and your true personal identity. Break away from patterns unless they are irrational patterns. I’m about 95 percent sure that none of this will make sense to many people, but that’s alright. I’m just here to express myself.