From Knowing to Creating

The Hidden Foundation of Creativity: Why Mastery Makes Magic Possible

From McCartney’s Get Back to Simon’s Bridge Over Troubled Water, moments of brilliance aren’t born from thin air, they’re the product of deep knowledge, relentless practice, and a culture that makes creativity inevitable.

It’s amazing to watch a creation happen before your very eyes. With hindsight, it feels obvious, almost inevitable, but in the moment it’s rare to witness the birth of something so brilliantly familiar. In Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back documentary, there is a moment when Paul McCartney, with nothing more than a bass guitar in his hands, begins to toy with a rhythm. There’s no plan, no sheet music, just a steady pulse and a few tentative chords. Within minutes, Get Back starts to emerge.

What’s so striking is that this isn’t random inspiration. McCartney isn’t guessing his way into a song, he’s drawing on years of musical mastery. The chord changes, the melodic phrasing, the instinct to push and pull the rhythm, all of it comes from a deep reservoir of skill and knowledge built over thousands of hours of playing, writing, and performing. To the casual observer, it looks like magic. In reality, it’s the product of a mind so fluent in its craft that creation feels effortless.

This is the paradox of creativity: the freer it looks, the more discipline and mastery usually sit beneath it. McCartney could “find” Get Back in that moment because his foundation was so strong that ideas had room to appear and take shape. Without that foundation, there would be no song, only noise.

Paul Simon’s account of how Bridge Over Troubled Water came to life offers another rare glimpse behind the curtain. The song didn’t appear in his mind fully formed. It began with a fragment of melody at the piano. A baroque choral influence slipped in subconsciously. A stuck moment was unlocked by listening repeatedly to a gospel group, The Swan Silvertones, whose rhythms and even a key lyrical phrase made their way into the final piece. The song evolved not through chance, but through a layering of skills, references, and conscious exposure to other forms of music.

What’s striking is that none of those steps would have been possible without Simon’s accumulated knowledge as a composer, his years of learning, experimenting, and internalising a vast library of musical language. The act of “creating” was, in truth, the act of connecting and refining what he already knew.

This is the quiet truth about mastery in creativity: Without knowledge, you aren’t truly creating, you’re guessing. Mastery gives you the material to work with. It equips you with structures, techniques, and a mental library of references that you can draw on, consciously or not, when shaping something new.

The same principle applies to strategic leadership. Building a high-functioning organisational culture isn’t a matter of improvisation or instinct alone. Leaders who seem to make bold, visionary decisions aren’t simply relying on flashes of genius, they are drawing on a deep understanding of their organisation, their industry, and the patterns that govern both. That knowledge base allows them to combine ideas in new ways, adapt proven strategies, and integrate lessons from outside their own field.

Just as McCartney didn’t conjure Get Back from thin air and Simon didn’t sit at the piano waiting passively for inspiration, leaders can’t wait for cultural transformation to “just happen.” They build it through the deliberate accumulation of insight, studying past successes and failures, absorbing diverse perspectives, and rehearsing decisions in lower-stakes environments. When the time comes to create something new, whether it’s a strategic direction, a cultural shift, or an innovative process, they have the raw material to shape it with intent rather than hope.

The surface-level brilliance of a song like Get Back or Bridge Over Troubled Water hides the years of learning beneath it. Likewise, the visible creativity of a thriving organisation masks the preparation, discipline, and deep knowledge that make it possible. In both worlds, mastery isn’t the enemy of creativity, it’s the foundation that makes it possible.

For leaders, the challenge is clear: if you want innovation, first build knowledge. Foster a culture where learning is relentless, where people deepen their expertise and expand their mental library of ideas. Encourage the study of what has come before, inside and outside your field, so that when it’s time to create, your team isn’t guessing in the dark. True creativity in strategic leadership doesn’t come from a blank page; it comes from a page already rich with understanding, ready to be rewritten into something new.