Rachel: Everything you’ve been told about creativity is probably a lie. That flash of genius? A myth. The pressure to be 100% original? It’s actually holding you back. Today, we’re talking about why the real path to innovation involves getting your hands dirty and, controversially, becoming a better thief. Justine: A better thief? Okay, I'm listening. That sounds way more fun than staring at a blank page waiting for inspiration. Rachel: It is! And it’s all from a fascinating book called Creative Superpowers, edited by a team of creative leaders including Daniele Fiandaca, Mark Earls, and Laura Jordan Bambach. What's amazing is how the book itself was made. It was published through Unbound, a platform where readers crowdfund the books they want to see. Justine: Whoa, so the book about new ways of creating was… created in a new way? That’s very meta. I like it. Rachel: Exactly. It embodies its own philosophy. And that philosophy starts with a very physical, almost primal idea: the superpower of Making.

Rachel: We tend to picture creativity as a purely mental act, right? The lone genius, thinking really hard until an idea appears. But this book argues that our brains are often the last to know. The real ideas come from our hands, from the physical act of doing. Justine: I can see that for a painter or a sculptor. But what about the rest of us? I work in an office. Am I supposed to start finger-painting my spreadsheets? Rachel: Ha! Not exactly. But it’s about embracing experimentation over rigid planning. The book shares this wild story about an Australian musician named Lucas Abela. He performs as Justice Yeldham. Justine: Justice Yeldham. That's a name. Rachel: In the early 90s, he had a Kombi van. He got into an accident, and when he was fixing the radio, he messed up the wiring. Suddenly, the entire van became an amplifier. The glove box, the dashboard—tapping them made these incredible, distorted noises. Justine: That sounds like a happy accident. Rachel: A very happy accident! He started doing "drive-by recitals" for people at bus stops. But the real breakthrough came later. He was on tour in Japan, and his equipment failed. Out of desperation, he was looking for anything to make a sound. He found a broken pane of glass, held it up to his mouth with a microphone, and started vibrating it with his voice. Justine: He did what now? He put broken glass in his mouth? Rachel: Not in his mouth, but against it. He essentially plays the glass, creating these otherworldly sounds—from deep bass rhythms to shrieking melodies. He discovered his signature instrument not by thinking, but by a series of accidents, experiments, and pure, hands-on making. He found the idea through the process. Justine: Wow. Okay, that is an incredible story. It’s also completely unhinged, in the best way. But again, he's an avant-garde artist. How does this 'making' superpower translate to a team trying to launch a product or a marketing campaign? It can't just be chaos and happy accidents. Rachel: That's the perfect question. The book uses a fantastic business example for this: the band OK Go. You know them, they’re famous for their incredibly complex, single-take music videos. Justine: Oh, the treadmill video! Yes, masters of synchronized creativity. Rachel: Exactly. For their song 'I Won't Let You Down,' the creative director, Morihiro Harano, had this vision involving hundreds of dancers with umbrellas and a camera on a drone. Instead of storyboarding it to death, they rented an empty shopping mall and just started making it. They started playing with the movements, the timing, the logistics. Justine: They were prototyping in real life. Rachel: Precisely. And in the middle of this process, they hit a wall. There was a point in the song where they needed to move the camera rig from the ground floor to the roof, and there just wasn't enough time in the music. A traditional team would have given up on the idea. Justine: Right, you’d say, "Well, the song is the song. The idea doesn't work." Rachel: But because they were in 'making' mode, Morihiro suggested something unthinkable. He said, "What if we change the song?" They went back to the band, and OK Go agreed to double the length of the bridge, adding eight extra measures. They hacked the source material to fit the needs of the creation. The final video went viral faster than any of their others. The perfect solution was only discoverable through the messy act of making. Justine: That’s a great example. The process informed the product, not the other way around. It wasn't just about executing a plan; it was about discovering the plan while building it. Okay, I'm sold on 'Making.' But this next superpower you mentioned... 'thieving'... that feels a lot more problematic.

Rachel: It does, and the book leans right into that discomfort. It argues that our obsession with total originality is a trap. The ability to copy, to borrow, to steal ideas from others, is humanity's greatest and most misunderstood superpower. Justine: I mean, my high school English teacher would have a very different opinion on that. That sounds a lot like plagiarism. Rachel: And that's the distinction the book makes. It's not about passing someone else's work off as your own. It's about understanding that no idea comes from a vacuum. The book quotes everyone from Picasso to T.S. Eliot, but my favorite example is David Bowie. Justine: A true original if there ever was one. Rachel: Was he? Bowie himself would disagree. He famously said, "The only art I’m interested in is art I can steal." His Ziggy Stardust persona was heavily inspired by William Burroughs' novel The Wild Boys. His music from the Berlin era was a direct response to German Krautrock bands. He even borrowed his songwriting techniques, like the cut-up method, from the same author, Burroughs. He was a master synthesist, a brilliant thief. Justine: Okay, but there's a difference between being inspired by something and outright copying it. I'm thinking of the famous architect Zaha Hadid. The book mentions she sued a group of Chinese architects for building a near-identical copy of one of her buildings. Where's the line? Rachel: That's the billion-dollar question, and the book offers a really elegant framework for it, from a chapter by Faris and Rosie Yakob. They call it "Same Same But Different." The difference between lazy copying and genius stealing is the level of abstraction. Justine: Abstraction? What do you mean? Rachel: Plagiarism is copying something at the same level. You take my sentence and call it yours. That's theft. But inspiration, or what the book calls 'good thieving,' is when you abstract the principle behind an idea and apply it in a new context. You don't steal the car; you steal the idea of the assembly line and use it to make something else entirely. Justine: Ah, I see. So it's about understanding why something works, not just what it is. Rachel: Exactly! Think about the invention of Velcro. George de Mestral went for a walk and got burrs stuck to his dog's fur. He didn't just glue burrs to shoes. He looked at them under a microscope, understood the hook-and-loop principle, and then recreated that principle with nylon. He stole the idea from nature. Justine: That’s a perfect analogy. He took the 'how' and applied it to a new 'what'. Rachel: And this happens everywhere. The book even argues that the English language is the world's most successful language precisely because it's a shameless thief. It steals words from French, German, Hindi, you name it. It doesn't have a strict academy policing it. It’s flexible, adaptable, and easy to copy. Justine: So being a good 'thief' is really about being a good student of the world, a pattern-recognizer. Rachel: It is. It's about having a vast library of concepts to draw from. The book argues that learning to copy well is more important than learning to code. Because even with code, the best programmers don't write everything from scratch; they use tested libraries and frameworks built by others. They stand on the shoulders of giants.

Justine: So when you put these two superpowers together, a really interesting picture of creativity emerges. It’s not about being a lone genius waiting for a lightning bolt of pure, original thought. Rachel: Not at all. On one hand, the 'Making' superpower tells us to get our hands dirty, to experiment, to trust the physical process, and to find new ideas in the happy accidents of creation. It's about generating something new from your own messy, internal world. Justine: And on the other hand, the 'Copying' superpower tells us to look outward, to be a voracious collector of ideas, to understand the principles behind what works, and to intelligently recombine them into something new. Rachel: Exactly. The real magic happens when you do both. You use your making skills to experiment with the ideas you've cleverly stolen. You're not just a maker, and you're not just a thief. You're a creative alchemist, turning old gold into new forms. Justine: I love that. The pressure is off. The job isn't to invent from thin air. The job is to be a curious tinkerer and a smart collector. It makes creativity feel so much more accessible. Rachel: It really does. And the book received a lot of praise for that practical, accessible approach, though some readers felt it was a bit light on deep theory. But its goal was always to be a hands-on guide for this new "Age of Creativity." Justine: Well, it's definitely changed how I think about my own work. Rachel: So the question for everyone listening is: what's one idea you've seen in a totally different field—another industry, a piece of art, or even in nature—that you could 'steal' to solve a problem you're facing right now? Justine: A great question to ponder. Rachel: This is Aibrary, signing off.