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Stephen Hawking’s Creativity Recipe

By Peter Lloyd

The world’s greatest living scientist has opened our eyes on a number of cosmological subjects over the years. He has changed fundamentally our understanding of the big bang, black holes, and quantum mechanics. It was good to hear such a creative individual spell out his recipe for creativity.

While the way creativity works has been clear for centuries, it always helps to have someone as revered as Stephen Hawking weigh in. “The recipe is simple,” he told an admiring crowd at Canada’s prestigious Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, “Put willing people together in an inspiring and creative intellectual environment where they are encouraged to pursue ambitious and timely research.”¹

There you have it. Sounds to me like one part willing people, one part inspiring environment, one part encouragement. But note that Dr. Hawking made no effort to emphasize any particular kind or quality of people. He didn’t say “brilliant people” or even “creative people.” Maybe because he was speaking to a fairly intellectually endowed crowd but I don’t think so. Again, we’ve always known that creativity shows up in everyone.

Hawking did emphasize place and time, however. “The importance of special places and special times, where magical progress can happen, cannot be overstated.”

Keeping in mind that the good doctor was speaking at an institute to an audience that was thrilled to host him, we might expect the great man to give a nod to their location. It was his first public appearance in Canada and widely touted as such. But no one of Hawking’s stature needs to inflate the importance of a place that welcomes him. No, I’m confident he meant exactly what he said, especially with his emphatic tag, “cannot be overstated.”

The scientist who some appropriately compare to Galileo and Einstein also gave us a hint on how to encourage. Take your own lesson from these words: “I am hoping, and expecting, great things will happen here.”

NOTE 1: It has been brought to my attention that Hawking’s quote acutually does call for brilliant people. Online citations disagree but the official Perimeter Institute version begins, “Bring brilliant people together...” Mark Berns of Ready About brought this to my attention but agrees, “I don’t think it takes only brilliance. Willingness, or passion—or even a strong interest—are equally valuable.”

Peter Lloyd is co-creator with Stephen Grossman of Animal Crackers, the breakthrough problem-solving tool designed to crack your toughest problems.