Answer: Read the anticreativity letters by eminent social psychologist, Richard Nisbett:

The Anticreativity Letters: Advice from a Senior Tempter to a Junior Tempter

Reference: Nisbett, R. E. (1990). The anti-creativity letters: Advice from a senior tempter to a junior tempter. American Psychologist, 45, 1078-1082.

The Anticreativity Letters is eminent psychologist Richard Nesbitt’s clever take on  C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters for psychologists.

Written in the form of letters, The Anticreativity Letters is a letter correspondence between senior devil, Snidely, and junior devil, Slump. All of the letters are from Snidely to Slump, and the subject of the correspondence is a budding academic research psychologist, whom Snidely calls “the patient.” Snidely is advising Slump in the wily skills of how to lead the patient away from a career of creative productivity towards a career of drab mediocrity or out of the academic profession altogether.

Here’s a quick summary of the key points:

1. Stay away from sneery, critical colleagues who dismiss your ideas who are always too eager to as “old hat”, trivial and unworkable:

“. . .you want to steer him away from the people who are absorbed in interesting work, and toward the sneerers. When it comes to associates, there is nothing so useful as sneerers, especially if they are intelligent and witty. They are sure to dismiss your patient’s ideas, should he be so foolish as to discuss them, as trivial, old hat, obvious, or patently ridiculous. Old hat is really the most useful accusation because it need never be proved. The clever sneerer knows that he or she need merely assert that an idea is an old one. Such an assertion will not be called into question one time in a hundred. . . My colleague Fallow very nearly succeeded in throwing Leon Festinger off the trail of dissonance theory by encouraging him to associate with people who could be counted on to tell him that dissonance was nothing more than rationalization recycled into new bottles. Festinger’s unfortunate self-confidence blocked that move, but with a more humble patient you would have won every time. . .

. . .Each member of the faculty could find six flaws in every design, 12 artifactual explanations for every finding, and 24 predecessors for every alleged original idea. Every student adopted that same stance toward his or her fellows. And, most important, that critical stance became part of the scientific conscience of every student. As a result, hardly one of those talented students has lived up to the early promise shown. Each of them can be counted on to shoot on sight any glimmer of an idea the moment it makes an appearance on the horizon of the mind.”

2. Read widely and cultivate an interesting group of friends. You never know where your next good idea will come from:

“I note you have steered him away from philosophy and literature by intimations of “hot air,” “speculation,” “fantasy,” “waste of time,” and so forth. This is much to be commended because great philosophy and great literature are an unparalleled source of ideas in psychology. . .

. . .Few things are more calculated to destroy creativity. Whatever original ideas he might have will slowly become assimilated to what he is reading, so that his work will be at best derivative. Unless he is very energetic, in fact, he can be counted on to give up research altogether on the grounds that he never has any ideas that someone else didn’t already have. . .

It is particularly important to prevent him from talking with his colleagues. A cup of coffee with a stimulating colleague can be a disaster. It can easily result in a new idea, a new perspective, a new career! And yet it is so easily avoided. Busy, busy. Not today. Nose to the grindstone.”

3. Don’t isolate yourself. Work closely with your supervisor and colleagues. Talk about your ideas with others:

“Nearly all young graduate students in the social sciences think that learning how to do research is like learning how to write a novel. That is, they think they have to come up with an idea, which they then work on more or less in solitude, with occasional criticism and advice from a professional. That, after all, is the way they functioned with their senior honors theses. (It never occurs to them that custodial care is all that most faculty are willing to give to undergraduates engaged in research.) So they don’t realize that a continuation of that apparently grown-up way of functioning will keep them largely ignorant of how to pursue an idea across a series of investigations, in the face of failure, criticism, and a host of unanticipated difficulties.

We know, of course, that learning how to do research is really like learning how to make movies. There are many things to be learned that are quite invisible to the novice, some highly technical, some grand strategic, and some mundane-seeming but crucial. The only way to do this is by working shoulder to shoulder, trustingly, with someone who already knows how to do it.”

4. Don’t agonize over your perceived lack of intelligence or creativity or social standing of your research field:

“All but the very most brilliant patients are therefore candidates for constant worry about whether they are smart enough to succeed. . .

Remember that such people literally have more to lose than to gain by producing something. They know this, and live in constant fear of doing work that is unworthy of them. No idea, of course, however important, seems obviously valuable or even very sensible in its formative stages. The minute a famously smart young person has an idea, you want to encourage speculation about whether it is really earth shaking if true or really true if earth shaking. . . Give me a patient with an IQ of 170 and I’ll produce mental paralysis by the age of 30 more often than not.

But worries about creativity are the best. Regardless of your patient’s real or ascribed intelligence, he is bound to have doubts about his creativity. It is hard to believe, but humans actually think there is a property of creativity that one can either “have” or “not have,” as opposed to a talent for some field–a love of its content that keeps them thinking about it all the time–organization, and a willingness to work. . .

It is important to remember how social scientists view the Great Chain of Being. They think that sociologists are on the bottom and mathematicians are on the top. A consequence is that the psychologists are always trying to impress the biologists, the biologists the chemists, and the chemists the physicists. This makes most psychologists into rabid reductionists. They think this is good scientific strategy, but it is really just biologist envy.”

5. Don’t jump on to whatever is trendy. Think up your own research ideas:

“What is troubling about your patient is that the research is something that he is genuinely interested in, something that proceeds from long-time concerns and that builds both on the thinking and the research skills that he developed in his research with his major adviser. What you want is to have him working on some trendy topic he has picked up by reading the journals. You want him to see some piece of moderately interesting work, get him to thinking that it is ridden with alternative explanations, and have him redo the experiments with the major purpose of showing that he is cleverer than the original investigators. Research is least dangerous when it is most reactive.”

6. Focus on quality rather than quantity of output:

“There is a direct analogy here for the relation between creativity and sheer production for the modern professional, especially scientific professionals. They know that what counts is creativity and that all creative people are productive in some sense. They also know that it can be hard to tell just what work is genuinely creative. From there it is only a step to get them to focus exclusively on the productivity and to slide into a tacit equation of productivity and creativity. Here you have the academic reward structure massively on your side. Academic decision makers count notably better than they read. We have recently encouraged the rapid promotion and advancement of many psychologists whose work, whatever its value in terms of quality, is wretchedly excessive in terms of numbers of publications.”

7. Don’t get caught up in time-wasting chores:

“. . .even if he is obsessed with work, he can’t do research continually. What you want to do is make any other work he does as barren for him as possible. Get him to take the same driven stance toward preparing his courses that he does toward his research. Put him into an endless round of overpreparing his lectures and tracking down minutiae that won’t interest his students in the least. When this is done right, little research is accomplished, the teaching gets steadily worse, and the patient is a bitter, burnt-out case by the time he is denied tenure. . .

. . .It is important to remember that teaching in moderation is actually valuable for research. The necessity of explaining one’s concerns to others, and of putting them into a broader context, together with the effort to demonstrate why certain topics are interesting, all have the most direct benefits for thinking about research. We have had great success with scientists at the modern research institutes who are relieved of all need for teaching. Most of them are turning out to cease all productive activity within a matter of a few years after arrival.”

8. Live a balanced life. Invest time into forming close, satisfying relationships with others:

“I think you are quite mistaken to cackle over the fact that your patient has fallen in love. It is true that love affords innumerable distractions and that he will be quite incapable of work during the inevitable troughs in the relationship. But on balance we have more to lose than we have to gain. Freud pointed out that the primary concerns     . . .are love and work. When a human’s love life is going well, work is likely to be carried out with special joy and contentment. These emotions are our deadly enemy.

You may claim that it is mere coincidence, but it is certainly the case that your patient is doing suspiciously interesting work lately.”