“The clustering itself is a thing that matters, economists have argued, because it helps people trade ideas, land better jobs and find others doing highly specialized things. And those benefits of what economists call “agglomeration” have theoretically grown more important as America has shifted over decades to an economy built on ideas.”
“When Groff starts something new, she writes it out longhand in large spiral notebooks. After she completes a first draft, she puts it in a bankers box — and never reads it again. Then she’ll start the book over, still in longhand, working from memory. The idea is that this way, only the best, most […]
“Innovation is easier with a relatively small team that has to make a decisive and clear concentrated bet and that doesn’t tolerate any mediocre performers. That’s it.”
“Strikingly, before about 1950 there were approximately zero articles, books, essays, treatises, odes, classes, encyclopedia entries, or anything of the sort dealing explicitly with the subject of “creativity.” …Despite the fact that many in the postwar American art world embraced self-expression and experimentation, it turns out the efforts to really get under the hood of […]
“Last week I had the pleasure to chat with art coach Beth Pickens, author of Make Your Art No Matter What and Your Art Will Save Your Life. Beth and I share many of the same core messages, but I come at making art from the inside of being a working artist and Beth comes […]
“Moment to moment feedback may be enough to motivate deep engagement.”
“1. Be a Genius… 2. Increase Your Variance… 3. Increase Your Throughput.”
“How do parents and teachers encourage creativity? Because it sounds like anything we do might make kids feel like they’re being watched or evaluated. Lesson number one is to get out of the way. Back off and give kids free rein to explore something they’re interested in, as long as it’s safe. It’s important to encourage […]
“Not only will you have to persevere for many years, if your wildest dreams come true and your project is a huge hit, you have to be ready to talk for years — if not decades! — about it. So at the very least, it better be something you were passionate about at the time of its making.”
“Every night read one short story, one poem, one essay. Do that for a thousand nights and you’ll be stuffed full of ideas.”
“The notion of participatory creativity has major implications for any person or organization concerned with the creation of innovative ideas or artistic expression. It means recognizing and putting in place the means to foster creativity as a collaborative process.”
“We found causal evidence of a negativity bias, where evaluators lower their scores by more points after seeing scores more critical than their own rather than raise them after seeing more favorable scores.”
“What got lost along the way was a view of UX as something deeper and more significant than a step in the software delivery pipeline: an approach that grounds product design in a broad contextual understanding of the problem and goes beyond the line-item requirements of individual components. Also lost along the way were many […]
“No matter what you make, if you produce a lot every day, you need some sort of system for going back and figuring out what you have.”
“Our data show that the lean startup method does what it promises to do. We found a positive correlation between teams’ interviews of potential customers in a given week and their convergence on a particular idea the next. In other words, the more interviews the teams conducted, the faster they settled on whether a business […]
“In this study, we empirically assess the contributions of inventors and firms for innovation using a 37-year panel of U.S. patenting activity. We estimate that inventors’ human capital is 5-10 times more important than firm capabilities for explaining the variance in inventor output. We then examine matching between inventors and firms and find highly talented […]
“Whenever I got into a new band or played a new game or watched a new movie, I still looked it up on TV Tropes. I had to understand it—and seeing the same tropes appearing over and over again made me realize that I was holding myself to an impossible standard. Nothing is original. Every […]
“Based on more than a decade of research on creativity and collaboration, Sawyer and his colleagues found schools that have been successful in nurturing creativity in their students use an approach he dubs guided improvisation, to borrow a jazz metaphor. Rather than entirely student-led instruction, teachers ground students’ creativity within a domain such as history […]
“Teachers’ use of creativity in learning was determined by the frequency with which they report allowing students to do each of the following: 1) choose what to learn in class; 2) try different ways of doing things, even if they might not work; 3) come up with their own ways to solve a problem; 4) […]
“We all see something blinking in the sky at some point, but it’s a damn lot of work to put it in the bottle. Maybe that’s why only some of us become artists. Because we’re obsessive enough, idealistic enough, disciplined enough, or childish enough to wade through whatever is necessary, dedicating life to the search […]
“Here are nine questions we think a lot about. Each links to deeper descriptions and related research we’ve uncovered along the way.”
Almost 50,000 people took part in the BBC Arts Great British Creativity Test. It suggested that being creative can help avoid stress, free up mind space and improve self-development, which helps build self-esteem. The findings also said there are emotional benefits from taking part in even a single session of creativity.”
In the end, determining when cultural appropriation is O.K. can feel as if it requires a delicate calculus, more holistic than binary. It’s understandable that as a result, we’ve landed on treating cultural appropriation as a bad habit to be trained out of us; often it feels easier not to engage at all. But this […]
“Smaller groups were more likely to produce novel findings than larger ones. Those novel contributions usually took a year or so to catch on, after which larger research teams did the work of consolidating the ideas and solidifying the evidence.”
“There’s something about deeply understanding and learning about another culture that’s transformative.”
“The issue isn’t the right of artists to imaginatively enter other lives. What’s being questioned is the concentration of cultural capital, and how members of the dominant class, who tend to receive more resources and broader access to the public, are rewarded for telling “difficult” stories — like those dealing with the subjugation and suffering […]
““The most regretful people on earth,” the poet Mary Oliver wrote… “are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”
“In my research, no matter whether I was interviewing a painter, a chef, or a songwriter, I’d eventually hear some variation of the same story. Painters show up at numerous art exhibits. Chefs eat at cutting-edge restaurants, visit farms, and travel to food shows. Songwriters are constantly listening to music, new and old.”
“Innovation-speak is meant to compensate for a dearth of actual innovation.”
“In the course of creative endeavors, artists and scientists join fragments of knowledge into a new unity of understanding.”
“The Chinese have two different concepts of a copy. Fangzhipin are imitations where the difference from the original is obvious. These are small models or copies that can be purchased in a museum shop, for example. The second concept for a copy is fuzhipin. They are exact reproductions of the original, which, for the Chinese, are of […]
To say that Keats influenced Wilde is not only to credit Keats with an activity of which he was innocent, but also to misrepresent Wilde by suggesting he merely submitted to something he obviously went out of his way to acquire. In matters of influence, it is the receptor who takes the initiative, not the […]
Three specific neural systems: the executive network, which is engaged in complex mental tasks such as problem solving; the default mode, which is activated when we’re in a resting or ruminative state; and the salience network, which monitors incoming input, prioritizes it, and allows us to efficiently process it. Normally, it does so by suppressing […]
Two [studies] replicated previous research, finding that people who are open to aesthetic experiences ‘felt more inspired in their daily lives, and in turn performed better on creativity tasks.’
The common pattern in the natural cycle of creative evolution — we learn our own minds by finding out what we love; these models integrate into a sensibility; out of that sensibility arises the initial impulse for imitation, which, aided by the gradual acquisition of technical mastery, eventually ripens into original creation.”
The notebook is the place where you figure out what’s going on inside you or what’s rattling around. And then, the keyboard is the place that you go to tell people about it.”
The explanation may have to do with a tension between two kinds of thinking: what computer scientists call exploration and exploitation. When we face a new problem, we adults usually exploit the knowledge about the world we have acquired so far. We try to quickly find a pretty good solution that is close to the […]
“Classical Design… Design Thinking… Computational Design”
[The artist] must be able to abstract himself and also to abstract reality, which he does by placing it in his imagination… It is imperative for him to make a choice, to come to a decision regarding the imagination and reality; and he will find that it is not a choice of one over the […]
But there’s another way of using time that’s common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can’t write or program well in units of an hour. That’s barely enough time to get started.”
“The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”
“Being creative isn’t about being the first (or only) person to think of an idea. More often, creativity is about connecting ideas.”
When you build something significantly new it isn’t just a matter of formally assembling evidence from the past in a predictable way. A leap is needed, or several. Different insights. A new viewpoint. Often in practice these will occur from a mixture of observation, experience and what still appears to be very human-style intelligence. But […]
“Talented people want to contribute. To make a difference. They want to know they have a chance to do something important. Tapping into this requires encouraging trial and error.”
“Our conversations revealed recurring themes about applying Pixar’s principles in other organizations: delight and storytelling as driving forces, the elimination of ego as management strategy, the idea that creativity can come from anyone, and the balance between patience and action.
“We yearn for frictionless, technological solutions. But people talking to people is still the way that norms and standards change.”