Creative Tension: Blessing, Curse, and Essential

A landmark event occurred yesterday.  Well, a minor landmark in any case.  I was on a long flight, and the airline was playing a movie that I actually wanted to see.  (As you can tell, my definition of a landmark has become rather modest these days...)It was a movie about creativity and innovation, a movie of astonishing depth and insight, revealing a great deal about the three creators profiled, as well as the broader innovation process.How do you explain creativity?  Try this:  "I drive everyone crazy.  I drive myself totally crazy to get the sound that I hear in my head to come out of the speakers."   The Edge said that.This idea beautifully expresses the very essence of creativity, and its motive force as experienced through creative tension, which is the absolutely necessary impulse that drives all meaningful creative and innovative endeavors.  Creative tension is the gap between the vision and the reality, and it is the life force of the arts, of science, of business, of statecraft.  It is the compulsion to transcend the limited, fragmented, inadequate present to create a better reality that will become the future.For the artist, creative tension is both necessary condition for achieving any satisfaction whatsoever, and it is the curse of unfulfilled, and even worse unfulfillable needs, desires, and expectations.  Why unfulfillable?  Because  ...  can he get the right sound to come out of the speakers?  Sometimes.  Occasionally.  Even possibly.  Not always, though.  A sound comes out, OK, but perhaps not quite the precisely right one.But there is always tomorrow.  A new dawn, a new dawn, and still more as yet unresolved creative tension.  "There's always going to be something if you just keep going."  (The Edge said that too.)Hence, why did Monet paint hundreds of canvases of the light in his garden?  Because there was a gap between what he saw in his mind, and what he was able to express with his oils.  Artists engage in their work out of longing for the as yet unexpressed ideal; business people for the as yet unattained expression of customer+product+service; scientists for the unattained insight; and so on.It's not so often that a movie captures the spirit of creativity and creative tension in so eloquent a fashion.It Might Get Loud profiles 3 generations of rock n roll guitarists, Jimmy Page (Led Zepplin), The Edge (U2), and Jack White (White Stripes), and records their fascinating dialog about their art.  If you grew up on rock 'n roll, or if rock 'n roll is something you enjoy today, and if creativity interests you, then this movie may  speak to you as it spoke to me.