Whatever the profession, hitting a plateau isn’t fun. Interestingly, athletes have a remedy for this unpleasant state — they call it “shocking the system”. For them a state of plateau occurs because muscle groups adapt to a specific training stimulus when its type, volume and/or intensity does not change over time. So to counter that, they continuously vary their training routines and periods of recovery. Effect: body gets shocked every 4 to 5 weeks and has to start adapting all over again (i.e., build more muscle tissue).
What if we apply this technique to the domain of creativity? Could it be that varying between different types of creative work (e.g., writing × design × photography) could improve the fitness of our minds more than focusing on just one area (e.g., only writing)? My guess is yes. That’s what we do during our early years at school after all: switch from one subject to the next. Until we get to higher education that is, where we are told to become experts in one thing, keep our mouths shut and start paying taxes finally. Hmmm maybe that’s part of the reason why quite a bit of influential people in our history didn’t do so well at school? Because if anybody, those guys definitely did not stick to one discipline (think here Leonardo da Vinci, Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, Isaac Newton, and Pablo Picasso). Again, this could be just a coincidence. Or could it?
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