There’s a strange concrete lion statue here at Rebellion, right inside the front doors. It’s a clunky, audacious thing to have in an office, really. Most workplaces decorate with things that are pleasant and tasteful. Not us, apparently.
I’ve always liked that about it, because it makes little sense, but the more I’ve explored the psychology and philosophy of creativity, the more I’ve come to see our lion as a symbol of something ancient, powerful, and profoundly human! (I often also make little sense.) It makes me think of something I believe every creative person possesses, although many of us have forgotten how to recognize.
The ancient Greeks had a word for it: thumos.
Shut up, and stay with me for a few minutes!!!
Thumos is hard to really translate, but you might call it spirit, passion, courage, or the fire within us. It’s the source of our indignation when something is wrong, our determination when something is difficult, and our conviction when something is worth fighting for.
It isn’t simply anger, ambition, or desire, and not just what crimes of passion are made of. It’s the part of us that cares enough to act. The part that feels something so deeply that remaining still, not caring, or giving up becomes almost impossible.
I think it might also be one of the most overlooked aspects of creativity and valuable today as obvious things threaten our creative souls.
The Human, the Lion, the Beast
To explain thumos, Socrates described the human soul as having three parts: reason, appetite, and spirit, which became embodied as a strange creature composed of three beings: a many-headed beast, a lion, and a person.
He was a smart guy, apparently, so if this doesn’t make sense, that’s on you.
Anyways, all three are joined together and concealed beneath the outward appearance of an ordinary person, just like you and me. To the outside world, we appear entirely human, but within us lives a struggle between our desires, our reason, and something considerably more ferocious.
The beast represents our appetites, those endlessly multiplying desires for comfort, pleasure, possession, and satisfaction.
The person represents practicality and reason, our ability to think, judge, understand, and choose.
And the lion represents thumos, the spirited part of ourselves that seeks greatness, feels indignation, and finds the courage to act.
He believed a well-ordered soul required the person to guide the whole, with the lion acting as their ally. The lion’s strength was essential, but strength without wisdom could become dangerous. It needed something worth defending, something worth pursuing, and the judgment to know the difference.
You probably imagine reason and passion as opposing forces, as though the sensible thing to do and the thing we desperately want to do are locked in some eternal argument, and our language reinforces it. We tell people to think with their heads instead of their hearts, to control their emotions, or to stop being so passionate about things, but what if the most extraordinary things happen when reason and passion work together?
Reason can help us understand a problem, recognize an opportunity, and imagine a better possibility, yet understanding alone doesn’t necessarily inspire us to do anything about it. Knowing that something could be better is quite different from feeling compelled to make it better.
That’s where the lion comes in.
An idea can exist entirely inside your head. You can understand it, admire it, and imagine all the wonderful things it might become, but none of that means you’ll actually do anything about it. Something has to make you care enough to pursue it, to struggle with it, to give it life. That’s the part of creativity I see in thumos.
This is a partnership of rational passion: the marriage of understanding and emotional conviction. Not passion without purpose, or intelligence without feeling, but a remarkable union in which reason gives our passion direction, and passion gives our reason the strength to become something real, and I believe creativity depends on both.
Of course, we’ve all met people whose lions have gotten the better of them. Passion without reason can become obsession, conviction can become arrogance, and the courage to defend an idea can become the inability to recognize when it’s wrong. The lion needs the person just as much as the person needs the lion.
The Spirit of Making
Thumos and the creative spirit can come to you in many ways. Sometimes it feels like wonder. Sometimes anger, frustration, and this itching need to make something. Sometimes it’s excitement, fascination, love, or the peculiar obsession that keeps you working on something long after any reasonable person would have stopped.
Anyone who has truly lost themselves in creating something knows this feeling. Hours disappear…the outside world fades…the work becomes its own reward…you find yourself consumed by something you can barely explain to someone who hasn’t experienced it…
It’s not work…it’s spiritual…it’s natural…it’s universal…it feels like these dots…
But, it’s not just woowoo stuff; it’s science!
Psychologist Teresa Amabile spent decades studying creativity and motivation, finding that people tend to be more creative when they’re genuinely interested in the work itself, rather than simply pursuing external rewards. Psychologists call this intrinsic motivation, although I prefer the less academic explanation of giving a shit.
And then there’s flow, that remarkable psychological state of becoming so absorbed in something that your sense of time, self-consciousness, and the outside world can seemingly disappear. It’s what happens when our attention, abilities, and challenges come together in the experience of doing something for its own sake, rather than being motivated only by a paychewck and the potential rewards that may follow.
Flow isn’t thumos, of course, but I think they’re connected. Thumos is part of what makes us care enough to pursue something in the first place, and when we put ourselves into it, for ourselves, we actually enlighten the lion – we feed it! The basic, beastly human drive of gaining to consume and possess is subsided by the lion’s passion for creating for creation’s sake.
To put it another way: human beings don’t create through intellect alone. Emotion, motivation, energy, presence, magic, attention, and our sense of personal meaning are deeply involved.
You don’t passionately make something because you’ve been instructed to; you make something because some part of you desperately wants it to exist.
And I wonder if that’s something we’re beginning to lose. In a world increasingly devoted to making creation faster, easier, and more automatic, we’re at risk of forgetting that the struggle to make something is often part of what makes it meaningful. The experience of creating is itself something of value, even when there’s nothing particularly valuable at the end of it.
The Courage to Care
There’s another quality of thumos that I find particularly important: courage – a lionly trait.
Creativity requires an unusual willingness to expose yourself – to open a vein and bleed, as they say. You’re offering something that doesn’t yet exist, asking other people to believe in a possibility that may be difficult to explain, revealing your inner self, and risking the embarrassment of being completely exposed and wrong.
Creating is vulnerable work. Sometimes humiliatingly so.
That vulnerability is why I don’t believe creative courage always looks like confidence. I’ve known brilliant creative people who are remarkably quiet, thoughtful, and uncertain. They don’t storm into rooms demanding attention, and they rarely describe themselves as fearless.
Yet they’ll spend weeks pursuing a difficult idea, defend something everyone else has dismissed, or return to a problem a hundred times because they believe there’s something worthwhile hidden inside it. They understand perfectly well how badly things could go, but they care more about the possibility than the embarrassment of failing.
And I think that’s an important part of creative courage. It’s not necessarily the absence of fear, but having something you care about more than the fear itself.
That’s thumos.
The lion doesn’t always roar. Sometimes it just chills and looks powerful. Sometimes it simply refuses to leave. Sometimes it eats you quietly.
Remember the Lion
When people ask about that statue out there, I’ve tried to make up a story for what it represents, standing there in a place devoted to creating things. It would be easy to see it as a symbol of strength, dominance, or defiance. Those are the traditional qualities we associate with lions, and they’re certainly part of the appeal, but I’d like ours to mean something more.
I’d like it to remind us that creativity requires both a thoughtful mind and an untamed spirit. That curiosity deserves to be followed, that conviction deserves to be cultivated, and that the things worth making often demand more than talent or technical proficiency.
I’d like it to remind us to care enough to challenge, to explore, to take risks, and to occasionally make something for no better reason than the sheer delight of seeing it come to life.
Most of all, I’d like it to remind us that there’s something wonderfully wild inside every creative person – something that can’t be entirely explained by process, measured by productivity, or replaced by a more efficient way of producing things.
The Greeks called it thumos. Plato imagined it as a lion. We’ve got a strange concrete one standing by the front door, reminding us that the things worth creating are rarely made with our heads alone. They require our hearts, our spirit, and occasionally a little Blood. Not AI.
James Dowd is Chief Operating Officer and Chief Creative Officer at Rebellion Group, where he helps shape how the agency thinks, creates, and grows. A creative leader, author, occasional university lecturer, and reluctant podcast guest, James has spent his career exploring the intersection of human behavior, imagination, and the strange things that make people tick.