The most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work.
Ira Glass on the secret of success in creative work
creativity and innovation
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1. Associative orientation: Imaginative, playful, have a wealth of ideas, ability to be committed, sliding transitions between fact and fiction.
2. Need for originality: Resists rules and conventions. Have a rebellious attitude because of a need to do things no one else does.
3. Motivation: Have a need to perform, goal oriented, innovative attitude, stamina to tackle difficult issues.
4. Ambition: Have a need to be influential, attract attention and recognition.
5. Flexibility: Have the ability to see different aspects of issues and come up with optimal solutions.
6. Low emotional stability: Have a tendency to experience negative emotions, greater fluctuations in moods and emotional state, failing self-confidence.
7. Low sociability: Have a tendency not to be very considerate, are obstinate and find faults and flaws in ideas and people.
Norwegian researchers find the 7 characteristics of highly creative people. Pair with John Cleese on 5 factors to make your life more creative and Ira Glass on the secret of success in creative work.
Particularly interesting and counter-intuitive is #6 – but then again, we do know that emotional excess is essential to creativity.
In your working conditions avoid everyday mediocrity. Semi-relaxation, to a background of insipid sounds, is degrading. On the other hand, accompaniment by an etude or a cacophony of voices can become as significant for work as the perceptible silence of the night. If the latter sharpens the inner ear, the former acts as a touchstone for a diction ample enough to bury even the most wayward sounds.
Walter Benjamin’s advice on your daily creative environment, from his 13 rules of writing. Pair with the daily routines of famous writers.
Google, for example, says that its legendary free meals are meant to keep people happy and healthy over the long haul—and, of course, working longer at Google. Meanwhile, the setting, with tables for seven to eight as opposed to 40, is intended to provide the right climate for offhand brilliance. “The cafeterias are designed to make food social rather than fast,” says Jennifer Kokowski, who is one of Google’s in-house social scientists and studies the company’s food programs. “We recognize that innovation requires serendipity, and the lunchroom is the best place for that.
Though I see nothing but vague & cloudy uncertainty in the foreground of our being, yet I fancy I discern a very bright light a good way further on, and this makes me care much less about the cloudiness & indistinctness which is near.
Reconstructionist Ada Lovelace, the world’s first computer programmer.
Assume that on any given day you can accomplish one big mission, three medium tasks, and five small things. Get those done as best you can.
The 1-3-5 rule for more doable to-do lists. Pair with the psychology of what makes an effective to-do list.
The ever-delightful Grant Snyder adds to history’s definitions of genius.
Available as a print in Grant’s poster shop.
Complement with the 1942 gem Anatomy of Inspiration.
As every poet knows, it is emotion under the force of limits, emotion pressed down and held down to strict formal constraints, that makes for the purest expression.
Adam Gopnik echoes Anaïs Nin.
Bukowski would agree.
Creativity is about the most worn-out, abused concept that used to mean something remarkable, something that differentiated someone, something that made them special. It’s a term that’s been usurped … and reduced to a base concept that has come to stand for the opposite of creativity: mediocre, middle-of-the-road, acceptable, unadventurous, and so forth—so that creativity is no longer creative. What was once creative is now uncreative.
Calling a practice uncreative is to reenergize it, opening creativity up to a whole slew of strategies that are in no way acceptable to creativity as it’s now known. These strategies include theft, plagiarism, mechanical processes, repetition. By employing these methods, uncreativity can actually breathe life into the moribund notion of creativity as we know it.
An interview with Kenneth Goldsmith, author of the provocative Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age.
The lone inventor myth is really good at selling T-shirts but it’s a poor understanding of history.
In discussing the wildly popular Tesla comic strip that inspired this Tesla vs. Edison rap, Paleofuture’s Matt Novak corroborates the idea that all innovation builds on what came before, contrary to the Eureka! myth of genius, and creativity is a remix.
Wisdom on life and art from legendary painter Agnes Martin, born 101 years ago today.
Some timeless advice on finding what you were born to do here and here.
From planting seeds to the internet – how innovations in farming and growing our own food civilized society. Also see how Thomas Jefferson pioneered urban farming.
Maya Angelou, reconstructionst.
My inspiration to invent and redesign is fed through frustration. I spend a lot of time taking things apart and putting them back together, considering how they work and how they might work better. Observation is important. The inspiration for incorporating a cyclone on a vacuum cleaner came from a visit to a sawmill. Using an industrial cyclone it was able to remove the sawdust from the air. I found myself thinking ‘Could we use this principle on a smaller scale?’ Five years later I had developed the G-Force, my first bagless vacuum cleaner.
In this BBC interview, inventor James Dyson adds to other famous creative minds’ meditation on where inspiration comes from.
Also see Steven Johnson on where good ideas come from.
