Do you create alone or in groups?

I notice that my students are today smarter, more attentive, more hard working than in the past. And also less imaginative. When I discuss this with them, it becomes apparent that many faculty do not want students to exercise their imaginations—they want them to be good little sponges and absorb what they are told. And then spout it back.

We see the effort to repress individuality and impose groupthink everywhere, beginning in kindergarten where children are assigned group projects and extending into colleges. Everywhere we are told that we need community, collaboration, cooperation, consensus, compromise.

Susan Cain, in her book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, writes that solitude is now out of fashion and that our culture is in thrall to what she calls the New Groupthink. We are told that creativity comes from the group, that collaboration is in, and that lone geniuses are out.

Imagine two college applicants. One has spent a summer in Peru with a volunteer group helping to bring water to a village. The other spent a summer reading Russian novels. To which will the admissions committee respond more favorably? Working in Peru our applicant might have learned the values of community and collaboration. Reading the novels of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, and Gogol, our other applicant might have gained insights into the human condition, the depths of the human psyche, the torments of the soul, and the surreal nature of our world. Both activities are worthy, and both realms of learning are valuable. The question is, in what balance?

We are constantly pushed toward our social responsibilities, toward group participation, toward collaboration while being asked to subsume our individual Selves and focus on the common good. All of this is laudable, and the solutions to some of our problems may well come from such collaboration. But can they improve creativity? The studies don’t say.

And we are even now told that true creativity happens only in groups, and when individuals think they are creating alone, they are actually using the work of groups. But might there also be such a thing as individual creativity? We could look at a hundred examples, but for now here are two. Working by himself after hours from his Hewlett-Packard job, Steve Wozniak designed the first Apple computer, the Apple I, sold mostly to hobbyists, and then the Apple II, one of the first commercially successful personal computers and the machine that launched Apple, the company Wozniak cofounded with Steve Jobs. Wozniak writes:

Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me … they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone… I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone… Not on a committee. Not on a team.

And Max Planck, a pioneer of quantum theory, writes:

New scientific ideas never spring from a communal body, however organized, but rather from the head of an individually inspired researcher who struggles with his problems in lonely thought and unites all his thought on one single point which is his whole world for the moment.

Don’t let them crush your creativity. Don’t be afraid to work alone. You just might do some remarkable things.

For more on this and related matters, see my book, Visionary Creativity. You can buy the book on Amazon and Barnes and Noble.