Paint it black

By Deborah Hill Cone, February 20, 2006 @ 1 am

Idealog March/April 2006, page 34

Kiwis can be a miserable bunch. We like our humour as black as our art. Our captains of industry expect the sky to fall at any time and we’re cast into national gloom when we lose a rugby match. Enough! It’s time to lighten up

Prescriptions for new-generation antidepressants known as ‘selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors’ prescribed last year: 584,000.

Local taxpayer-funded films with themes of loss, grief, betrayal or automobile collisions, bearing short but glum names: Rain, Crush, Fracture, Hopeless, Loaded, Lunatics’ Ball, Vigil, Utu.

New Zealand works of literature with themes of loss, grief, betrayal or self-loathing, guaranteed to give you a fricking pick-me-up on a rainy day: too many to count but start with John Mulgan’s Man Alone, Keri Hume’s The Bone People and anything by Janet Frame.

Notable New Zealand works of art where more than nine-tenths of the canvas surface is painted black: 2,300.

Okay, I made that last one up. But regrettably I didn’t make up the youth suicide statistics which show 200 young people took their lives in one year, the highest in the developed world, ahead even of sunshine-deprived Finland. Neither did I fabricate the following: almost a third of businesses expect sales will tank in 2006 even though our economy has expanded for 21 successive quarters.

Getting the idea? We’re a bunch of gloomy buggers, eh.

This is old news when it comes to art. New Zealand fashion designers are forever being hailed as existential geniuses for designing duffel coats and bum-covering tunics while dour thespian Sam Neill made a documentary about our angsty movies called Cinema of Unease.

“Our culture loves irony and is suspicious of images that celebrate the beautiful. Our art tends to be full of darkness and self-criticism,” fed-up photographer of pretty scenery, Craig Potton, complained to Sunday magazine.

But what about gloominess and business; could the melancholy expressed in our art also be to blame for our export statistics being obstinately stuck at around 29 percent of our economic activity for over 25 years?

C’mon people, we’re trying to build a creative economy here where ideas, free thinking, entrepreneurship and achievement flourish. Not easy when you’re surrounded by sulkypants. I can see the billboard now: I could build a billion-dollar company. Yeah right.

Are our entrepreneurs and creative people being held back by the Kiwi inclination towards cynicism, our grim culture of knockers and naysayers? Peace Software chief executive Sebastian Gunningham, who worked in the US, India and Mexico before heading up the Kiwi technology company, wouldn’t be surprised. He suspects New Zealand’s geographic isolation has created a downbeat business psyche.

“I think New Zealanders who are abroad behave quite differently. When they’re here they talk about how tough life is but when their plane lands in LA they start saying ‘I’m the best in the world.’”

Overcoming our negativity is an important part of building our creative economy. If we can do it in LA, surely we can do it Godzone?

“It’s an awful, hackneyed cliché, but the glass is always half empty [here] whereas in Canada, for example, it is always half full,” says Dr Brad Jackson, director of Victoria University’s Centre for the Study of Leadership. Jackson, who worked in Canada and the UK before moving to New Zealand six and a half years ago, wrote The Hero Manager about our business leaders. He detects “quite a bit of cynicism and scepticism, especially around business”.

That’s not a good sign, as cynicism and scepticism are the enemies of innovation and creativity. Researchers say the best work is created when people feel good about themselves, rather than wracked with self-loathing.

Harvard University professor Teresa Amabile, who heads a research programme devoted to studying creativity, challenges the widespread notion that fear and sadness somehow spur creativity. Her study of ‘creativity in the wild’—based on daily journal entries from hundreds of people working on creative projects in major corporates—found that “creativity is positively associated with joy and love and negatively associated with anger, fear and anxiety.”

There’s more. Amabile’s research is corroborated by a proverbial truckload of studies into the science of happiness that’s part of the ‘positive psychology’ movement (see ‘Born Happy’, below). For example, numerous experiments have tested the idea that happy people make better, faster decisions. The studies usually involve asking randomly selected groups to complete a task such as a puzzle or diagnosing a problem. One group is first given sweets, shown funny cartoons or asked to think about happy events. The other groups are either made to feel sad or do nothing. Whether it’s with children, adults, doctors or mechanics, the studies all show that the happy group completes the tasks faster and more correctly.

Summarising the studies, Martin Seligman, one-time president of the American Psychological Association and a founder of the positive psychology movement, says “a positive mood buoys people’s thinking into a way that is creative, tolerant, constructive, generous and lateral. This way of thinking aims to detect not what is wrong but what is right.”

It seems we can discard the tortured artist theory. Hallelujah!

This may sound counter-intuitive to fans of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Kurt Cobain or Van Gogh, but I can believe it. I once had a boyfriend—we’ll call him Butler since he could recite Yeats’ The Second Coming word-perfect. (“Turning and turning in the widening gyre / the falcon cannot hear the falconer …”)

Butler was a talented writer who won a major literary award and a contract with a large publisher with the gripping first chapter of a novel. He was also a perfectionist who could only write with Quark XPress, would sleep only on white cotton sheets and refused to play any guitar but a $3,000 vintage Gibson Les Paul. (He also wouldn’t go anywhere without his sunglasses or be friends with anyone called Steve, but that’s another story.)

But after his father died, Butler was down in the dumps. Sitting around in a damp Ponsonby flat smoking, listening to Nirvana and getting nagged by his (admittedly fabulous) girlfriend probably didn’t help lift his mood either, or get him in front of his laptop. He was a vastly better writer than most published authors but found it impossible to finish anything.

We broke up (“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”) and last I heard he was still working on the manuscript. But one thing I do know—Butler will never finish anything until he perks up enough to overcome his inner critic.

Creation is about struggle but another of Amabile’s findings is that creativity depends on the capacity to push through those uncreative dry spells.

WRC creative director Nigel Corbett knows how tough that is. “When you have a creative idea you don’t know if it’s any good until someone says it is and in a country known more for farming than creativity, that’s hard.

“We’re kind of in a bad place to start with because of that, so there is reticence. We definitely need confidence—we can bluff for a little bit but in the end the confidence has to be real.”

Writer and idea-hatcher Mike Hutcheson, author of Kickstart Your Creativity, worries New Zealanders’ grimness may be too deep- seated to be easily shrugged off. “We’re limited by a small-mindedness,” he says. “We get to a certain point and stop. We’re in a 100-story building but we only get to the second floor. It’s the boat-and-bach-in-Pauanui syndrome.”

He suspects this attitude is rooted in our island mentality. “Some of the population are standing on the beach looking over the horizon and others are saying there be dragons out there.”

Perhaps instead of telling us to stop spending, Reserve Bank governor Allan Bollard should be telling us to cheer up. Have group therapy. Spend a week reading PG Wodehouse (I defy anyone to be miserable after that). Watch Mel Brooks’ back catalogue, eat Pinky bars, jump in bouncy castles, invite your friends round for a tickle-a-thon. The alternative, Dr Bollard, is to buy another 3,500,000 prescriptions for selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors.

Let’s not get too gloomy talking about gloomy Kiwis, though. It’s possible to harness Kiwi doubt and modesty and create something great—just tell your inner critic to keep the message constructive, thanks. Artist Jon Tootill, a former art director with Saatchi & Saatchi who gave up the corporate life to paint, has felt the icy finger of creative terror on the back of his neck. He’d be worried, however, if he lost his self-doubt altogether.

“You can’t have art without it,” Tootill says. “Doubt is one of the building blocks of the creative process. There’s nothing worse than an over-confident creative person. The more I paint the less confident I become. You become more aware of your limitations.”

Tootill’s tip for getting through those dark times: have a supportive environment and family, understand doubt’s place in the creative process (“I’m learning less is more”) and look for humour everywhere.

Turn gloom to zoom

Ask Dr Tom Mulholland about picking yourself up off the floor and he’ll throw the book at you. The one he wrote, that is. The Taranaki physician and founder of Internet business Dr Global is now carving out an international reputation as the Attitude Doctor, spreading his philosophy of ‘healthy thinking’ through books, a daytime TV show, a consulting business and, just this year, by launching the Healthy Thinking Institute on the banks of the Hangatahua River in Taranaki.

It hasn’t been easy. Mulholland suffered a period of depression when he lost control of his Internet business while his marriage began failing. For such a creative and energetic sort the experience left him devastated and looking for a cure.

It also forced him to change. After a short stint on anti-depressants he found a method for turning unhealthy emotions to healthy ones, which forms the basis of his ‘healthy thinking’ system. “Our brains are plastic,” he says. “They can change. Medicine is showing us that different parts of the brain function when we have unhealthy and healthy emotions. You can change the way your mind operates.”

So if the ‘Land of the Long Black Cloud’ was a person, what would Dr Tom report? “It seems to me this nation thrives on unhealthy thinking, with an abundance of lethargy, complaining, running other people down and creating barriers rather than solutions to growth. The result is stagnation. You can see it in the high crash rate of new startups and the mediocrity of performance in business and in sport. In medicine we would call it ‘failure to thrive’.

“This patient suffers from Multiple Attitudinal Illness!”

What’s the cure, Dr Tom? Mulholland has created a set of characters that embody unhealthy and healthy thinking. For New Zealand, he prescribes the following:

The judge

This character classifies people as failures, useless, egotistical or arrogant. It’s a national sport. Treatment: turn the judge into the advocate. If I make a mistake I am not useless, I have just discovered a way not to do something. It says nothing about my value as an individual. The greatest risk is not trying.

The fortune teller

What if Michael Campbell said “I am not entering the US Open because I know I won’t win?” Predicting a bad future is a common attitude illness. Treatment: listen to the explorer inside you. So much of Kiwi achievement is about having a go. Michael Campbell, Peter Jackson and Andrew Adamson didn’t know how the story was going to end.

The doom merchant

This character repeats bad scenarios in the mind’s eye, creating a sense of blackness. One bad experience can sometimes ruin a day, a week or a life. Treatment: the spin doctor is the healthy alternative and fl ips us a way from the dark side to the more intelligent side of thinking, emotion and action. It’s about amplifying and focusing on success, creativity and progress.

The prognosis? Well, it’s too early to say. But knowing us, it’s not until we see Dr Tom on Oprah one day that we’ll start believing what he has to say.

Visit Dr Tom at theattitudedoctor.com

“A person needs a healthy self-respect to pursue novel ideas and to make mistakes, despite criticism from others. Self-doubt there may be, but it cannot always win the day,” writes scientist and philosopher Professor Maggie Boden in The Creative Mind.
Peace’s Gunningham agrees that a more positive attitude has to be based in reality: “The gloom and doom nature of New Zealanders is not a problem if it can be overcome by competence.” (Competence? Sure, we can do that.)

Saatchi & Saatchi chief executive and management thinker Kevin Roberts has lobbied for many years to turn that ‘edginess’ into a positive. “We’ve too often over-emphasised the negative about being on the edge [of the world],” he said in 1999. “We’ve seen our distance from the centre as a disadvantage [but] the power of the edge is New Zealand’s greatest asset. Creative people have always known its power, and they have always sought it. Innovation always comes from the fringes in the arts, from the edges of conformity in business and in social attitudes.”

Even if we are a gloomy—sorry, edgy—bunch who would rather celebrate success with a Colin Meads-style amble back to halfway than a Jeff Wilson high-five, is that a bad thing? It doesn’t have to be. Plenty of others have made their gloom pay. The Office is a recent expression of centuries of sardonic creativity emanating from the dreary streets of Great Britain. The Office has become a global hit and the creative industries are the UK’s fastest-growing export sector. The Finnish, known for their long faces and alcoholism, have also produced legendary film maker Aki Kaurismäki and the world’s best rally drivers. Oh, and a rather good mobile phone company.

And who ever heard of the ‘laughing Japanese’?

A little self-doubt does have its uses. But how do we allow our inner creativity to shine through our inner critic? Studies in positive psychology suggest it’s possible to shift your level of happiness upwards from the disposition you inherited—your so-called ‘set range’. They include actively expanding your social network, increasing your level of gratitude, making your key relationships a success and practicing forgiveness.

What’s more, scientists are speculating now on the existence of a ‘spiral of happiness’, the opposite of the spiral of depression. The latter works because a depressed mood ignites bad memories which in turn fuel bad moods and so on. Conversely, in one study scientists found that when happy people deal with a problem they became more broad-minded through solving the issue, which in turn ignites greater happiness. Martin Seligman advises people to “augment positive emotions to start an upward spiral”. In other words, celebrate even the smallest of successes.

The positive psychology research is throwing up other curious outcomes. More money has a negligible effect on happiness. Improved health, higher education or sunnier climates also show no correlation with happiness, or by implication for creativity.

You might think creativity is boosted by the pressure of a deadline. In fact, the Harvard research found people are least creative when they are fighting the clock. We need an incubation period to let ideas bubble up.

“When people are excited about their work, there’s a better chance that they’ll make a cognitive association that incubates overnight and shows up as a creative idea the next day. One day’s happiness often predicts the next day’s creativity,” Amabile found.

WRC’s Corbett agrees: “The more fun you have, the better the work you create. There are other schools of thought—some people like the chaotic situation where you are flying by the seat of your pants, but I know which sort of agency I’d rather work in.”

In the joyless 1940s, car-assembly workers at the Ford Motor Company’s River Rouge plant could be disciplined or sacked for smiling or laughing, but these days when major corporates want their workers to be innovative and creative they want them to be having fun, fun, fun.

In his book A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age, Daniel Pink devotes a chapter to the importance of play in encouraging innovation. Play rewires your brain to become more creative—something corporate America has now cottoned on to in a serious way.

Southwest Airlines claims: “People rarely succeed at anything unless they are having fun doing it.” Nokia, Daimler-Chrysler and Alcatel have brought in consultants in ‘serious play’, a technique using Lego to train corporate executives, and British Airways has a corporate jester on the payroll.

It’s not just the big multinationals that see the benefits in being silly. Workplace survey analysts John Robertson & Associates say local research confirms New Zealanders rate a fun workplace highly. Corporates Vodafone and Toyota, whose local subsidiaries value fun as part of their culture, are considered as models for the rest of their empires.

What’s that? New Zealanders showing the rest of the planet how to have fun? “Maybe rather than lagging on this we lead the world,” Robertson says. Now that would be funny.