When I was writing my first book, I couldn’t land on a title. The first brainstorm gave me Liminal Minds. I loved it, but people found it confusing, so I did a second brainstorm. That one produced The Uncharted Life. I sat with it, and it didn’t feel right. It was only on the third brainstorm that Tiny Experiments finally clicked.
It was a very similar process for the book cover. By the time we settled on one, I had looked at more than twenty options!
What strikes me looking back is the pattern. Every time, I was ready to quit and go with whatever was already in front of me. And every time, when I pushed a little further, that’s when the creative breakthrough happened.
You’d expect creativity to run dry the longer you go, but it did the opposite. So what was going on? It turns out there’s research that explains this well.
Researchers ran a series of studies on persistence and creativity. They found that people underestimate how many good ideas they’ll produce if they keep going. Partway through a task, the next stretch of effort feels like it will be a waste, when in reality it’s far more productive than people predict.
This seems to happen because creative thinking is hard, and that difficulty misleads you. The first ideas come easily, while the later ones take more effort, and that effort feels like a warning that you’re running out. So you stop a little too early, right when ideas are actually getting interesting.
In 2020, the same researchers published a follow-up. Across eight studies, they found that people expect their creativity to fall as an ideation session goes on. But when they measured what actually happened, creativity held steady or climbed. They named this gap the ‘creative cliff illusion.’
It’s genuinely hard to predict how creative your ideas will be, so your mind leans on something easier to track: how many ideas you’re generating. As the number of ideas does drop over time, we make the mistake of assuming that fewer ideas means worse ideas, although the quality tends to hold or even improve.
Here’s how you can avoid falling prey to the creative cliff illusion:
1. Plan to go past the point where you feel like stopping. The moment it starts to feel like you’ve run dry is actually the moment worth pushing through. So if you’ve set aside thirty minutes to brainstorm, keep going until the end and treat the final ten as the most valuable stretch.
2. Don’t treat “this is getting hard” as a measure of creativity. When the work starts to feel effortful, read it as a sign you’re leaving the obvious creative territory behind. This is good news!
3. Separate generating from judging. A lot of people quit early because the new ideas feel weak in the moment. Give yourself permission to produce rough, half-formed ideas without judging each one as you go. You can sort the good from the bad later.
The next time you’re looking at a decent-enough option and thinking about calling it, notice the pull to stop, and persist for just a little longer, whether that’s ten more minutes or just one more round.
Tiny Experiments only got its name because I gave it one more round. It’s worth giving it that extra little push and seeing what new ideas shop up.
Tiny Experiment of the Week
Ready to put these ideas into practice? Try this week’s tiny experiment to practice creative persistence:
I will [brainstorm for 10 minutes longer on every creative task] for [10 days].
This will help you avoid the creative cliff illusion and generate better ideas. Want to dig deeper? Get your copy of Tiny Experiments.