When I finally get ahold of will.i.am, he is walking circles around a hotel complex in Dubai. Snacking on chips and gauc, his energy is frenetic as he tries to capture how he relates to, cultivates, and protects creativity.
“I love to go out, see random things, and find beauty in the little stuff,” he says. “I love to pattern match. The more random, the better.”
Will.i.am (born William Adams Jr.) is an artist, tech entrepreneur, and the founder and CEO of FYI (which stands for Focus Your Idea), a new AI-powered platform. He has won an Emmy Award and nine Grammy Awards and is a recipient of the Crystal Award from the World Economic Forum and an honorary fellowship from the Institute of Technology and Engineering. He’s written more than 130 songs and is a founding member of the Black Eyed Peas, who he performed with at the Super Bowl, as well as countless venues across the world. He launched and runs a nonprofit organization that rolled out a robotics program in 400 Los Angeles public schools and last year introduced FYI AI, an AI-powered productivity tool designed for creativity. At the moment, he’s wrapping up an executive MBA at Harvard University.
My relationship to creativity is ever present
Will.i.am doesn’t view creativity as a distinct act. “When you are it, it is you,” he says. “You don’t have to relate to it. It is your being. That’s existence with creativity.” He does, he says, have rituals he’s instinctively practiced since he was 13 years old, playing with words and numbers, exploring the deeper meaning of ideas and patterns that emerge in both history and nature. “The whole concept of writer’s block—I don’t know what that means,” he says. “You can’t come up with ideas? Then you’re thinking too much. That true moment of, Oh shit, I’m in the zone, you’re not thinking. With writer’s block, you’re thinking too much. You’re not being, you’re not flowing.”
Some people see shit, I see fertilizer
It all depends on how you look at it, says will.i.am; it’s all perspective. “That’s my friend’s rap. When my friend Ben Moore wrote this, I was 17 and he was 19. He said, ‘You see books, I see trees. You see honey, I see bees.’ It’s like wow, that picture told me it’s all perspective. It’s all relative and the whole premise is to be a vessel. It’s made me realize you should never be too critical on your outlet to the point it handicaps you from being that vessel to receive it.”
I embrace the creative sprint
“I’ll do 30-minute sprints. Whatever I do in 30 minutes, I’m finished. I don’t have time to be the judge. You don’t have time to be like, Wait! Wait! Wait! Get out of that,” he says. “Thirty minutes and time told you it’s done. When time is the judge, then who are you, bro? Who are you but the vessel?! Whatever it is, it’s complete. Then, you show it to somebody.”
In business, you listen to the problem
“You have to ignore what you want to do,” he explains. “You have to ignore your ego, and you have to apply your gifts to identifying the problem. Listen to people—put the voices in your head out of the way; calm those things down.” Solving the problem is critical thinking, says will.i.am. “Push yourself to come up with three plausible methods or solutions in 30 minutes. You’ll land on one. You use that same type of hyper-crunch time exercise. It has to be plausible. It can’t be random whateverness.”
Music taught me the value of pattern matching, timing, and rhyming
Will.i.am says that his mind has been conditioned to do these hyper-creative exercises. He has to make sense of his surroundings, be clever, use metaphors, and similes. “I have to make it rhyme,” he says, “and I have to do it in time. It’s like, what’s up with a poet’s brain? They have a unique way of pattern matching and pulling shit out of the sky. That type of brain is the kind you want in the room for a brainstorm. That’s the school I come from. Unfortunately for me, if you said I need you to make something and I need it delivered next August, I’m going to glitch. I work amazingly under pressure. Five minutes, go! We have 30 days? There’s no gravity. You ain’t flying when there’s no gravity. I fly with gravity.”
I am an “and then”-er
If will.i.am is a waterfall of ideation (his words), he considers that both a gift and a curse. He says that he has to calm his mind down from splintering off from “and then. . . . ” He adds, “One ‘and then’ is cool, but if your mind is continuing on with the ‘and thens,’ you’ll distract yourself. I’m still learning which is the best ‘and then’ to execute. Being in that flow of being the performer, the audience, and the critic all at the same time has given me the ability to know in real time which one to pay attention to.”
I freestyle to myself, that keeps me sharp
“It’s something I’ve done since I was 13 years old. I make stuff up based on what I see, and I make it rhyme. Some months I’m like, ‘Wow that’s cool.’ Some months I’ve got too many crutches. Lately, my crutch is the word ‘sometimes,'” he says. “Why am I saying it so many times? Let me see if I can do it again without that word. That’s being present, but at the same time having a bird’s-eye view while you’re processing and being critical of your process. That type of exercise is what I do daily. I do it out loud when I’m in my car.”
I romance concepts and dive deep into them
In his down time, he look at words and concepts, he says. Another one he likes is numbers. “I dive deep into them. ‘One’ is super egotistical. ‘Zero’ is like, hey no one values me. ‘Two’ is just like I want to be creative and collaborate—it’s bio . . . it has a companion. ‘Three’ is trinity. Yo, it’s family. ‘Four’ is like, I don’t know what comes after me, but I can’t even believe we got out of one’s ego.” To will.i.am, the number five says, “Let me run shit here; it’s government, it’s five-star, it’s order. ‘Six’ is about balance: feminine and masculine.
“This is how I exist in my mind every day,” he adds, “when there’s nothing around me. It keeps my creativity active. My mind is never asleep. There is never a moment I’m not processing or imagining or dreaming.”