How to Be More Creative: Hang Out With Immigrants
Breakthrough ideas happen when very different worlds collide.
Management experts have long made the case that spending time living in another country gives immigrants and expats unique and valuable skills. Time spent abroad makes people more comfortable with change and open to reinventing themselves. It feeds creativity and improves people’s ability to read subtle emotional and cultural clues.
This line of thinking has obvious appeal to those, like me, who’ve lived large parts of their lives outside the country of their birth. But most people aren’t expats. So if spending extended time in other countries isn’t in the cards for you, why should you care about the cognitive benefits of immigration?
Because, argues author and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill creativity researcher Keith Sawyer, a boatload of scientific evidence shows immigration doesn’t just make immigrants more creative and cognitively flexible. It also makes everyone who interacts with immigrants more creative and cognitively flexible too.
Great ideas cross borders
It won’t be news to anyone who’s paying attention that immigrants are over-represented among business owners in the U.S. That’s not just because so many of America’s most famous companies, from Microsoft and Google to Nvidia and Tesla, are led by immigrants. Or how many immigrants you see starting small businesses in your local community.
Statistics confirm this intuition. A little over 15 percent of the U.S. population is foreign born, yet 23 percent of entrepreneurs are immigrants. Immigrants also hold nearly a third of all patents and a quarter of all Nobel Prizes awarded to Americans, according to author Eric Weiner.
Those who cross borders are clearly a dynamic bunch, in part for the many of the reasons listed above. But as Weiner explained in a 2016 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, creativity research also suggests that the biggest, boldest ideas generally come from bringing together insights from vastly different fields of learning or thought. Immigrants, with their deep knowledge of at least two worlds, draw from a richer pool of varied ideas.
All of which confirms that crossing borders spurs creativity and cognitive flexibility. But apparently so can just getting to know immigrants, even if you personally have stayed closer to home.
More immigrants, more creativity
Work by Columbia University’s Adam Galinsky and his collaborators, for instance, shows that people who have been in a long-term relationship with someone from another country performed better on standard tests of creativity. That was true whether study subjects were romantically involved with an immigrant or just close friends. But the effect didn’t hold for flings — a deep, sustained bond was required.
Another recent study, also out of Columbia, found that when the number of skilled immigrants coming to a region goes up, so does the local rate of entrepreneurship. The research looked at highly skilled employees coming on H-1B visas. So the effect isn’t due to them opening bodegas or food trucks. Instead, the skills and energy of immigrants seem to inspire more entrepreneurialism in the local community.
That’s also why universities are keen to attract foreign minds, Sawyer notes. “There’s another body of research suggesting that the universities that immigrants work for produce more scientific breakthroughs and spin off more businesses,” he writes. “It’s hard to design rock-solid causal studies. But leaders of the top universities certainly believe in the importance of having immigrants working there.”
A lesson for non-immigrants
Put all this together and get a clear pattern. Scientific evidence strongly suggests that spending time with immigrants will introduce you to new ideas and help you see the world through different eyes. That will make you a more creative and flexible thinker, even if you never leave home.
The obvious lesson for anyone else looking to expand their minds is to seek out those born in faraway places and get to know them deeply. But Sawyer (and, it should be noted, also Steve Jobs, who made much the same argument) suggests that the real takeaway is even broader.
Hanging out with immigrants will season your thinking with new perspectives. But so will seeking out and exploring the distant and unfamiliar in any form.
“The lesson for everyone is: If you want to be more creative, seek out difference — and engage with it deeply,” Sawyer concludes. Really getting to people from other cultures is one great way to do that. But there are other options too.
“Meet people very different from you. Travel to a very different place and consider staying a while. Read magazines that you’ve never looked at before. Date someone from another culture. Fill your mind with variety,” he urges.
The more diverse the experiences and information you feed your brain, the more creative and dynamic the ideas it will produce.
A version of this post originally appeared on Inc.com. Books and authors mentioned have affiliate links, meaning I receive a small commission if you click and go on to buy them.