Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear (Elizabeth Gilbert)

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  • Done is better than good.
  • Be the weirdo who dares to enjoy.
  • Gratitude, always. Always, gratitude.
  • I do what I do because I like doing it.
  • If you’re alive, you’re a creative person.
  • Everybody imitates before they can innovate.
  • Create whatever causes a revolution in your heart.
  • Argue for your limitations and you get to keep them.
  • It ain’t what they call you; it’s what you answer to.
  • You don’t need to conduct autopsies on your disasters.
  • People’s judgments about you are none of your business.
  • Ideas are driven by a single impulse: to be made manifest.
  • Perfectionism is just fear in fancy shoes and a mink coat.
  • You must learn how to become a deeply disciplined half-ass.
  • You do not need anybody’s permission to live a creative life.
  • It might have been done before, but it hasn’t been done by you!
  • We are all just beginners here, and we shall all die beginners.
  • Live a life that is driven more strongly by curiosity than by fear.
  • Own your disappointment, acknowledge it for what it is, and move on.
  • living a life that is driven more strongly by curiosity than by fear.
  • We don’t have time for perfect. In any event, perfection is unachievable.
  • Frustration is not an interruption of your process; frustration is the process.
  • Do you have the courage to bring forth the treasures that are hidden within you?
  • So many people murder their creativity by demanding that their art pay the bills.
  • failure has a function. It asks you whether you really want to go on making things.
  • It’s a simple and generous rule of life that whatever you practice, you will improve at.
  • And since creativity is still the most effective way for me to access wonder, I choose it.
  • Create whatever causes a revolution in your heart. The rest of it will take care of itself.
  • What is a creative living? Any life that is driven more strongly by curiosity than by fear.
  • You own reasons to make are reason enough. Create whatever causes a revolution in your heart.
  • You can measure your worth by your dedication to your path, not by your successes or failures.
  • What do you love doing so much that the words failure and success essentially become irrelevant?
  • If inspiration is allowed to unexpectedly enter you, it is also allowed to unexpectedly exit you.
  • Learning how to endure your disappointment and frustration is part of the job of a creative person.
  • A good-enough novel violently written now is better than a perfect novel meticulously written never.
  • Give your mind a job to do, or else it will find a job to do, and you might not like the job it invents.
  • It seems to me that the less I fight my fear, the less it fights back. If I can relax, fear relaxes, too.
  • The clock is ticking, and the world is spinning, and we simply do not have time anymore to think so small.
  • Because the truth is, I believe that creativity is a force of enchantment—not entirely human in its origins.
  • Whatever you do, try not to dwell too long on your failures. You don’t need to conduct autopsies on your disasters.
  • Most of their lives, most people just walk around saying: No, No, No, No, No. Then again, someday you just might say yes.
  • When I refer to creative living,… I’m talking about living a life that is driven more strongly by curiosity than by fear.
  • Ideas of every kind are constantly galloping toward us, constantly pass through us, constantly trying to get our attention.
  • Attempts at originality can often feel forced and precious, but authenticity has quiet resonance that never fails to stir me.
  • Your own reasons to create are reason enough. Merely by pursuing what you love, you may inadvertently end up helping us plenty.
  • At such times, I can always steady my life one more by returning to my soul. I ask it, And what is it that you want, dear one?”
  • Don’t abandon your creativity the moment things top being easy or rewarding — because that’s the moment when interesting beings.
  • Through the mere act of creating something—anything—you might inadvertently produce work that is magnificent, eternal, or important.
  • Keep your eyes open. Listen. Follow your curiosity. Ideas are constantly trying to get our attention. Let them know you’re available.
  • Every time you express a complaint about how difficult and tiresome it is to be creative, inspiration takes another step away from you.
  • The Romans didn’t believe that an exceptionally gifted person was a genius; they believe that an exceptionally gifted person had a genius.
  • What is creativity? ‘Creativity is a crushing chore and a glorious mystery. The work wants to be made, and it wants to be made through you.
  • Embrace creativity and do not care about the results. It’s better to be a beginner until the end of life than waiting forever to be perfect.
  • There’s no dishonor in having a job. What is dishonorable is scaring away your creativity by demanding that it pay for your entire existence.
  • If you can’t learn to travel comfortably alongside your fear, then you’ll never be able to go anywhere interesting or do anything interesting.
  • This is how I want to spend my life — collaborating with forces of inspiration that I can neither see, nor prove, nor command, nor understand.
  • If you don’t learn to travel comfortably alongside your fear, then you’ll never be able to go anywhere interesting or do anything interesting.
  • If you’re going to live your life based on delusions (and you are, because we all do), then why not at least select a delusion that is helpful?
  • Every time you express a complaint about how difficult and tiresome it is to be creative, inspiration takes another step away from you, offended.
  • Let inspiration lead you wherever it wants. For most of history people just made things, and they didn’t make such a big freaking deal out of it.
  • Pure creativity is something better than a necessity; it’s a gift. It’s the frosting. Our creativity is a wild and unexpected bonus from the universe.
  • When I refer to ‘creative living,’ I am speaking more broadly. I’m talking about living a life that is driven more strongly by curiosity than by fear.
  • But never delude yourself into believing that you require someone else’s blessing (or even their comprehension) in order to make your own creative work.
  • If I am not actively creating something, then chances are I am probably actively destroying something — myself, a relationship, or my own peace of mind.
  • Do whatever brings you to life, then. Follow your own fascinations, obsessions, and compulsions. Trust them. Create whatever causes a revolution in your heart.
  • Your fear will always be triggered by your creativity, because creativity asks you to enter into realms of uncertain outcome, and fear hates uncertain outcome.
  • This is a world, not a womb. You can look after yourself in this world while looking after your creativity at the same time — just as people have done for ages.
  • This, I believe, is the central question upon which all creative living hinges: Do you have the courage to bring forth the treasures that are hidden within you?
  • You’re not required to save the world with your creativity. Your art not only doesn’t have to be original, in other words, it also doesn’t have to be important.
  • Your life is short and rare and amazing and miraculous, and you want to do really interesting things and make really interesting things while you’re still here.
  • The universe buries strange jewels deep within us all, and then stands back to see if we can find them. The hunt to discover those jewels––that’s creative living.
  • Often what keeps you from creative living is your self-absorption (your self-doubt, your self-disgust, your self-judgment, your crushing sense of self-protection).
  • So this, I believe, is the central question upon which all creative living hinges: Do you have the courage to bring forth the treasures that are hidden within you?
  • creative entitlement simply means believing that you are allowed to be here, and that—merely by being here—you are allowed to have a voice and a vision of your own.
  • But it’s a terrible master-because the only thing your ego ever wants to reward, reward, and more reward. Always remember this: you are not only and ego; you are also a soul.
  • One of the oldest and most generous tricks that the universe plays on human beings is to bury strange jewels within us all, and then stand back to see if we can ever find them.
  • I have never created anything in my life that did not make me feel, at some point or another, like I was the guy who just walked into a fancy ball wearing a homemade lobster costume.
  • Work with all your heart, because—I promise—if you show up for your work day after day after day after day, you just might get lucky enough some random morning to burst right into bloom.
  • You can clear out whatever obstacles are preventing you from living your most creative life, with the simple understanding that whatever is bad for you is probably also bad for your work.
  • Fear is always triggered by creativity, because creativity asks you to enter into realms of uncertain outcome. This is nothing to be ashamed of. It is, however, something to be dealt with.
  • If you don’t have the courage, let’s try to get you some. Because creative living is a path for the brave. We all know this. And we all know that when courage dies, creativity dies with it.
  • The guardians of high culture will try to convince you that the arts belong only to a chosen few, but they are wrong and they are also annoying. We are all the chosen few. We are all makers by design.
  • You have extraordinary treasures hidden within you. Bringing forth those treasures takes work and faith and focus and courage and hours of devotion. We simply do not have time anymore to think so small.
  • Basically, your fear is like a mall cop who thinks he’s a Navy SEAL: He hasn’t slept in days, he’s all hopped up on Red Bull, and he’s liable to shoot at his own shadow in an absurd effort to keep everyone ‘safe’.
  • As long as I’m still moving in that direction—toward wonder–then I know I will always be fine in my soul, which is where it counts. And since creativity is still the most effective way for me to access wonder, I choose it.
  • Fear is always triggered by creativity, because creativity asks you to enter into reals of an uncertain outcome. And fear hates an uncertain outcome. This is nothing to be ashamed of. It is, however, something to be dealt with.
  • So take your insecurities and your fears and hold them upside down by their ankles and shake yourself free of all your cumbersome ideas about what you require (and how much you need to pay) in order to become creatively legitimate.
  • We must understand the need for perfectionism is a corrosive waste of time, because nothing is ever beyond criticism. No matter how many hours you spend to render something flawless, somebody will always be able to find fault with it.
  • People don’t do this kind of thing because they have all kinds of extra time and energy for it; they do this kind of thing because their creativity matters to them enough that they are willing to make all kinds of extra sacrifices for it.
  • Anyhow, the older I get, the less impressed I become with originality. These days, I’m far more moved by authenticity. Attempts at originality can often feel forced and precious, but authenticity has quiet resonance that never fails to stir me.
  • [Believe that] ideas are alive, that ideas do seek the most available human collaborator, that ideas do have a conscious will, that ideas do move from soul to soul, that ideas will always try to seek the swiftest and most efficient conduit to the earth (just as lightning does).
  • But to yell at your creativity, saying, “You must earn money for me!” is sort of like yelling at a cat; it has no idea what you’re talking about, and all you’re doing is scaring it away, because you’re making really loud noises and your face looks weird when you do that.
  • A creative life is an amplified life. It’s a bigger life, a happier life, an expanded life, and a hell of a lot more interesting life. Living in this manner — continually and stubbornly bringing forth the jewels that are hidden within you — is a fine art, in and of itself.
  • Creative entitlement doesn’t mean behaving like a princess, or acting as though the world owes you anything whatsoever. No, creative entitlement simply means believing that you are allowed to be here, and that—merely by being here—you are allowed to have a voice and a vision of your own.
  • The paradox that you need to comfortably inhabit, if you wish to live a contented creative life, goes something like this: ‘My creative expression must be the most important thing in the world to me (if I am to live artistically), and it also must not matter at all (if I am to live sanely).’
  • The essential ingredients for creativity remain exactly the same for everybody: courage, enchantment, permission, persistence, trust—and those elements are universally accessible. Which does not mean that creative living is always easy; it merely means that creative living is always possible.
  • I think perfectionism is just fear in fancy shoes and a mink coat, pretending to be elegant when actually it’s just terrified. Because underneath that shiny veneer, perfectionism is nothing more that a deep existential angst the says, again and again, ‘I am not good enough and I will never be good enough.
  • You are worthy, dear one, regardless of the outcome. You will keep making your work, regardless of the outcome. You will keep sharing your work, regardless of the outcome. You were born to create, regardless of the outcome. You will never lose trust in the creative process, even when you don’t understand the outcome.
  • You have treasures hidden within you — extraordinary treasures — and so do I, and so does everyone around us. And bringing those treasures to light takes work and faith and focus and courage and hours of devotion, and the clock is ticking, and the world is spinning, and we simply do not have time anymore to think so small.
  • My soul, when I tend to it, is a far more expansive and fascinating source of guidance than my ego will ever be, because my soul desires only one thing: wonder. And since creativity is my most efficient pathway to wonder, I take refuge there, and it feeds my soul, and it quiets the hungry ghost—thereby saving me from the most dangerous aspect of myself.
  • Fierce trust asks you to stand strong within this truth: You are worthy, dear one, regardless of the outcome. You will keep making your work, regardless of the outcome. You will keep sharing your work, regardless of the outcome. You were born to create, regardless of the outcome. You will never lose trust in the creative process, even when you don’t understand the outcome.
  • You are free, because everyone is too busy fussing over themselves to worry all that much about you. Go be whomever you want to be, then. Do whatever you want to do. Pursue whatever fascinates you and brings you to life. Create whatever you want to create — and let it be stupendously imperfect, because it’s exceedingly likely that nobody will even notice. And that’s awesome.
  • Are you considering becoming a creative person? Too late, you already are one. To even call somebody a creative person is almost laughably redundant; creativity is the hallmark of our species. We have the senses for it; we have the curiosity for it; we have the opposable thumbs for it; we have the rhythm for it; we have the language and the excitement and the innate connection to divinity for it.
  • Pure creativity is magnificent expressly because it is the opposite of everything else in life that’s essential or inescapable (food, shelter, medicine, rule of law, social order, community and familial responsibility, sickness, loss, death, taxes, etc.). Pure creativity is something better than a necessity; it’s a gift. It’s the frosting. Our creativity is a wild and unexpected bonus from the universe.
  • She said: We all spend our twenties and thirties trying so hard to be perfect, because we’re so worried about what people will think of us. Then we get into our forties and fifties, and we finally start to be free, because we decide that we don’t give a damn what anyone thinks of us. But you won’t be completely free until you reach your sixties and seventies, when you finally realize this liberating truth—nobody was ever thinking about you, anyhow.
  • I have a friend, an aspiring musician, whose sister said to her one day, quite reasonably, What happens if you never get anything out of this? What happens if you pursue your passion forever, but success never comes? How will you feel then, having wasted your entire life for nothing? My friend, with equal reason, replied, If you can’t see what I’m already getting out of this, then I’ll never be able to explain it to you. When it’s for love, you will always do it anyhow.
  • It starts by forgetting about perfect. We don’t have time for perfect. In any event, perfection is unachievable: It’s a myth and a trap and a hamster wheel that will run you to death. The writer Rebecca Solnit puts it well: ‘So many of us believe in perfection, which ruins everything else, because the perfect is not only the enemy of the good; it’s also the enemy of the realistic, the possible, and the fun… The most evil trick about perfectionism, though, is that it disguises itself as a virtue.’
  • Creativity is a path for the brave, yes, but it is not a path for the fearless, and it’s important to recognize the distinction. Bravery means doing something scary. Fearlessness means not even understanding what the word ‘scary’ means. If your goal in life is to become fearless, then I believe you’re already on the wrong path, because the only truly fearless people I’ve ever met were straight-up sociopaths and a few exceptionally reckless three-year-olds—and those aren’t good role models for anyone.
  • You’re not required to save the world with your creativity. Your art not only doesn’t have to be original, in other words, it also doesn’t have to be important. For example, whenever anyone tells me that they want to write a book in order to help other people I always think ‘Oh, please don’t. Please don’t try to help me.’ I mean it’s very kind of you to help people, but please don’t make it your sole creative motive because we will feel the weight of your heavy intention, and it will put a strain upon our souls.
  • Creativity is sacred, and it is not sacred. What we make matters enormously, and it doesn’t matter at all. We toil alone, and we are accompanied by spirits. We are terrified, and we are brave. Art is a crushing chore and a wonderful privilege. Only when we are at our most playful can divinity finally get serious with us. Make space for all these paradoxes to be equally true inside your soul, and I promise—you can make anything. So please calm down now and get back to work, okay? The treasures that are hidden inside you are hoping you will say yes.
  • Frustration is not an interruption of your process; frustration is the process. The fun part (the part where it doesn’t feel like work at all) is when you’re actually creating something wonderful, and everything’s going great, and everyone loves it, and you’re flying high. But such instances are rare. You don’t just get to leap from bright moment to bright moment. How you manage yourself between those bright moments, when things aren’t going so great, is a measure of how devoted you are to your vocation, and how equipped you are for the weird demands of creative living.
  • Possessing a creative mind, after all, is something like having a border collie for a pet: It needs to work, or else it will cause you an outrageous amount of trouble. Give your mind a job to do, or else it will find a job to do, and you might not like the job it invents (eating the couch, digging a hole through the living room floor, biting the mailman, etc.). It has taken me years to learn this, but it does seem to be the case that if I am not actively creating something, then I am probably actively destroying something (myself, a relationship, or my own peace of mind).
  • Recognizing that people’s reactions don’t belong to you is the only sane way to create. If people enjoy what you’ve created, terrific. If people ignore what you’ve created, too bad. If people misunderstand what you’ve created, don’t sweat it. And what if people absolutely hate what you’ve created? What if people attack you with savage vitriol, and insult your intelligence, and malign your motives, and drag your good name through the mud? Just smile sweetly and suggest – as politely as you possibly can – that they go make their own fucking art. Then stubbornly continue making yours.
  • I believe that our planet is inhabited not only by animals and plants and bacteria and viruses, but also by ideas. Ideas are a disembodied, energetic life-form. They are completely separate from us, but capable of interacting with us—albeit strangely. Ideas have no material body, but they do have consciousness, and they most certainly have will. Ideas are driven by a single impulse: to be made manifest. And the only way an idea can be made manifest in our world is through collaboration with a human partner. It is only through a human’s efforts that an idea can be escorted out of the ether and into the realm of the actual.
  • but understand this: Creativity and I are the only ones who will be making any decisions along the way. I recognize and respect that you are part of this family, and so I will never exclude you from our activities, but still—your suggestions will never be followed. You’re allowed to have a seat, and you’re allowed to have a voice, but you are not allowed to have a vote. You’re not allowed to touch the road maps; you’re not allowed to suggest detours; you’re not allowed to fiddle with the temperature. Dude, you’re not even allowed to touch the radio. But above all else, my dear old familiar friend, you are absolutely forbidden to drive.
  • Dearest Fear: Creativity and I are about to go on a road trip together. I understand you’ll be joining us, because you always do. I acknowledge that you believe you have an important job to do in my life, and that you take your job seriously. Apparently your job is to induce complete panic whenever I’m about to do anything interesting—and, may I say, you are superb at your job. So by all means, keep doing your job, if you feel you must. But I will also be doing my job on this road trip, which is to work hard and stay focused. And Creativity will be doing its job, which is to remain stimulating and inspiring. There’s plenty of room in this vehicle for all of us, so make yourself at home,
  • So whenever that brittle voice of dissatisfaction emerges within me, I can say “Ah, my ego! There you are, old friend!” It’s the same thing when I’m being criticized and I notice myself reaching with outrage, heartache, or defensiveness. It’s just my ego, flaring up and testing its power. In such circumstances, I have learned to watch my heated emotions carefully, but I try not to take them too seriously, because I know that it’s merely my ego that has been wounded–never my soul It is merely my ego that wants revenge, or to win the biggest prize. It is merely my ego that wants to start a Twitter war against a hater, or to sulk at an insult or to quit in righteous indignation because I didn’t get the outcome I wanted.
  • What’s your favorite flavor of shit sandwich? What Manson means is that every single pursuit—no matter how wonderful and exciting and glamorous it may initially seem—comes with its own brand of shit sandwich, its own lousy side effects. As Manson writes with profound wisdom: Everything sucks, some of the time. You just have to decide what sort of suckage you’re willing to deal with. So the question is not so much What are you passionate about? The question is What are you passionate enough about that you can endure the most disagreeable aspects of the work? Manson explains it this way: If you want to be a professional artist, but you aren’t willing to see your work rejected hundreds, if not thousands, of times, then you’re done before you start. If you want to be a hotshot court lawyer, but can’t stand the eighty-hour workweeks, then I’ve got bad news for you. Because if you love and want something enough—whatever it is—then you don’t really mind eating the shit sandwich that comes with it.
  • You can resist the seductions of grandiosity, blame, and shame. You can support other people in their creative efforts, acknowledging the truth that there’s plenty of room for everyone. You can measure your worth by your dedication to your path, not by your successes or failures. You can battle your demons (through therapy, recovery, prayer, or humility) instead of battling your gifts—in part by realizing that your demons were never the ones doing the work, anyhow. You can believe that you are neither a slave to inspiration nor its master, but something far more interesting—its partner—and that the two of you are working together toward something intriguing and worthwhile. You can live a long life, making and doing really cool things the entire time. You might earn a living with your pursuits or you might not, but you can recognize that this is not really the point. And at the end of your days, you can thank creativity for having blessed you with a charmed, interesting, passionate existence.
  • I think a lot of people quit pursuing creative lives because they’re scared of the word interesting. My favorite meditation teacher, Pema Chödrön, once said that the biggest problem she sees with people’s meditation practice is that they quit just when things are starting to get interesting. Which is to say, they quit as soon as things aren’t easy anymore, as soon as it gets painful, or boring, or agitating. They quit as soon as they see something in their minds that scares them or hurts them. So they miss the good part, the wild part, the transformative part—the part when you push past the difficulty and enter into some raw new unexplored universe within yourself. And maybe it’s like that with every important aspect of your life. Whatever it is you are pursuing, whatever it is you are seeking, whatever it is you are creating, be careful not to quit too soon. As my friend Pastor Rob Bell warns: Don’t rush through the experiences and circumstances that have the most capacity to transform you. Don’t let go of your courage the moment things stop being easy or rewarding. Because that moment? That’s the moment when interesting begins.
  • Let me list for you some of the many ways in which you might be afraid to live a more creative life: You’re afraid you have no talent. You’re afraid you’ll be rejected or criticized or ridiculed or misunderstood or—worst of all—ignored. You’re afraid there’s no market for your creativity, and therefore no point in pursuing it. You’re afraid somebody else already did it better. You’re afraid everybody else already did it better. You’re afraid somebody will steal your ideas, so it’s safer to keep them hidden forever in the dark. You’re afraid you won’t be taken seriously. You’re afraid your work isn’t politically, emotionally, or artistically important enough to change anyone’s life. You’re afraid your dreams are embarrassing. You’re afraid that someday you’ll look back on your creative endeavors as having been a giant waste of time, effort, and money. You’re afraid you don’t have the right kind of discipline. You’re afraid you don’t have the right kind of work space, or financial freedom, or empty hours in which to focus on invention or exploration. You’re afraid you don’t have the right kind of training or degree. You’re afraid you’re too fat. (I don’t know what this has to do with creativity, exactly, but experience has taught me that most of us are afraid we’re too fat, so let’s just put that on the anxiety list, for good measure.) You’re afraid of being exposed as a hack, or a fool, or a dilettante, or a narcissist. You’re afraid of upsetting your family with what you may reveal. You’re afraid of what your peers and coworkers will say if you express your personal truth aloud. You’re afraid of unleashing your innermost demons, and you really don’t want to encounter your innermost demons. You’re afraid your best work is behind you. You’re afraid you never had any best work to begin with. You’re afraid you neglected your creativity for so long that now you can never get it back. You’re afraid you’re too old to start. You’re afraid you’re too young to start. You’re afraid because something went well in your life once, so obviously nothing can ever go well again. You’re afraid because nothing has ever gone well in your life, so why bother trying? You’re afraid of being a one-hit wonder. You’re afraid of being a no-hit wonder
  • Perfectionism is a particularly evil lure for women, who, I believe, hold themselves to an even higher standard of performance than do men. There are many reasons why women’s voices and visions are not more widely represented today in creative fields. Some of that exclusion is due to regular old misogyny, but it’s also true that—all too often—women are the ones holding themselves back from participating in the first place. Holding back their ideas, holding back their contributions, holding back their leadership and their talents. Too many women still seem to believe that they are not allowed to put themselves forward at all, until both they and their work are perfect and beyond criticism. Meanwhile, putting forth work that is far from perfect rarely stops men from participating in the global cultural conversation. Just sayin’. And I don’t say this as a criticism of men, by the way. I like that feature in men—their absurd overconfidence, the way they will casually decide, Well, I’m 41 percent qualified for this task, so give me the job! Yes, sometimes the results are ridiculous and disastrous, but sometimes, strangely enough, it works—a man who seems not ready for the task, not good enough for the task, somehow grows immediately into his potential through the wild leap of faith itself. I only wish more women would risk these same kinds of wild leaps. But I’ve watched too many women do the opposite. I’ve watched far too many brilliant and gifted female creators say, I am 99.8 percent qualified for this task, but until I master that last smidgen of ability, I will hold myself back, just to be on the safe side. Now, I cannot imagine where women ever got the idea that they must be perfect in order to be loved or successful. (Ha ha ha! Just kidding! I can totally imagine: We got it from every single message society has ever sent us! Thanks, all of human history!) But we women must break this habit in ourselves—and we are the only ones who can break it. We must understand that the drive for perfectionism is a corrosive waste of time, because nothing is ever beyond criticism. No matter how many hours you spend attempting to render something flawless, somebody will always be able to find fault with it. (There are people out there who still consider Beethoven’s symphonies a little bit too, you know, loud.) At some point, you really just have to finish your work and release it as is—if only so that you can go on to make other things with a glad and determined heart. Which is the entire point. Or should be.

 

Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All (Tom Kelley & David Kelley)

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  • Failure sucks, but instructs.
  • The history of discovery is full of creative serendipity.
  • The first step toward a great answer is to reframe the question.
  • Belief in your creative capacity lies at the heart of innovation.
  • you are not limited to only what you have been able to do before.
  • A growth mindset, on the other hand, is a passport to new adventures.
  • So design your space for flexibility instead of inertia and the status quo.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche said, “All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.”
  • Like a muscle, your creative abilities will grow and strengthen with practice.
  • To keep your thinking fresh, constantly seek out new sources of information.
  • A creative mindset can be a powerful force for looking beyond the status quo.
  • It’s hard to be best right away, so commit to rapid and continuous improvements.
  • But to gain this creative, empowered mindset, sometimes you have to touch the snake.
  • Striving for perfection can get in the way during the early stages of the creative process.
  • The three circles represented three questions you should ask yourself: What are you good at?
  • The key is to be quick and dirty—exploring a range of ideas without becoming too invested in only one.
  • Noticing that something is broken is an essential prerequisite for coming up with a creative solution to fix
  • At its core, creative confidence is about believing in your ability to create change in the world around you.
  • Relentless practice creates a database of experience that you can draw upon to make more enlightened choices.
  • But to act, most of us must first overcome the fears that have blocked our creativity in the past. Tom Kelley
  • If you want a team of smart, creative people to do extraordinary things, don’t put them in a drab, ordinary space.
  • A creativity scar, a specific incident when they were told they weren’t talented as artists, musicians, writers, singers.
  • Everything in modern society is the result of a collection of decisions made by someone. Why shouldn’t that someone be you?
  • Their ultimate strokes of genius don’t come about because they succeed more often than other people—they just do more, period.
  • happen in a corporation or in the army, you had to be at the higher ranks, to be a general. But you just need to start a movement.
  • Mark Twain said a century ago, It’s not what you don’t know that gets you into trouble, it’s what you know for sure that ain’t so.
  • That combination of thought and action defines creative confidence: the ability to come up with new ideas and the courage to try them out.
  • New opportunities for innovation open up when you start the creative problem-solving process with empathy toward your target audience—whether
  • Empathy means challenging your preconceived ideas and setting aside your sense of what your think is true in order to learn what actually is true
  • Great groups believe they are on a mission from God. Beyond mere financial success, they genuinely believe they will make the world a better place.
  • Jim Collins began by drawing a Venn diagram of three overlapping circles in the air, challenging the audience to follow along using Theater of the mind.
  • Erik smiles wryly as he remembers what he asked: Isn’t it wonderful now that you have made it as professional musician that you don’t have to practice anymore?
  • It’s not about just coming up with the one genius idea that solves the problem, but trying and failing at a hundred other solutions before arriving at the best one.
  • The looks good, feel bad trap is all about avoiding a career that makes you feel unhappy – and finding the right fit in terms of your interests, skills, and values.
  • I used to think that to make something happen in a corporation or in the army, you had to be at the higher ranks, to be a general. But you just need to start a movement.
  • Think about how you approach clients or customers. Do you ask deep, probing questions, or are you hearing what you expect? Are you making a connection or just making contact?
  • In fact, early failure can be crucial to success in innovation. Because the faster you find weaknesses during an innovation cycle, the faster you can improve what needs fixing.
  • To learn from failure, however, you have to own it. You have to figure out what went wrong and what to do better next time. If you don’t, you’re liable to rpat your errors in the future.
  • Design thinking relies on the natural – and coachable – human ability to be intuitive, to recognize patterns, and to construct ideas that are emotionally meaningful as well as functional.
  • When you influence the dialogue around new ideas, you will influence broader patterns of behaviour. Negative or defeatist attitudes spawn negative or defeatists words. The opposite is also true.
  • Great groups are more optimistic than realistic. They believe they can do what no one else has done before. And the optimists, even when their good cheer is unwarranted, accomplish more, says Warren.
  • As Brown writes: When our self-worth isn’t on the line, we are far more willing to be courageous and risk sharing our raw talents and gifts. One way to embrace creativity, Brown says, is to let go of comparison.
  • Great groups ship. They are places of action, not think tanks or retreat centers devoted solely to the generation of ideas. Warren characterized the successful collaborations he studied as dreams with deadlines.
  • Whether you live in Silicon Valley or Shanghai, Munich or Mumbai, you’ve already felt the effects of seismic market shifts. Most businesses today realize that the key to growth, and even survival, is innovation.
  • As IDEO design director Tom Hulme puts it, Release your idea into the wild before it’s ready. Real-world market testing (even when you know you have more development to do) can be an invaluable source of insight.
  • And that’s the point. Work doesn’t have to feel like Work with a capital W. You should be able to feel passion, purpose, and meaning in whatever you do. And that shift in perspective can open up a world of possibilities.
  • Since then, Bandura’s research has shown that when people have this belief, they undertake tougher challenges, persevere longer, and are more resilient in the face of obstacles and failure. Bandura calls this belief self-efficacy.
  • When you unleash your creative confidence, you start to see new ways to improve on the status quo – from how you throw a dinner party to how you run a meeting. And once you become aware of those opportunities, you have to start seizing them.
  • No company that falls behind the competition is guilty of standing completely still. But sometimes our efforts fail because of the level of commitment to change. I’ll try can become a halfhearted promise of follow-through rather than decisive action.
  • Try to engage a beginner’s mind. For kids, everything is novel, so they ask lots of questions and look at the world wide-eyed, soaking it all in. Everywhere they turn, they tend to think, Isn’t that interesting? rather than I already know about that.
  • By adapting the best attributes of gaming culture, we can shift people’s view of failure and ratchet up their willingness and determination to persevere. We just need to hold out a Reasonable hope for success, as well as the possibility of a truly epic win.
  • No matter how high you rise in your career, no matter how much expertise you gain, you still need to keep your knowledge and your insights refreshed. Otherwise, you may develop a false confidence in what you already know that might lead you to the wrong decision.
  • Try recasting your changes as experiments to boost reception and increase creative confidence. Some will fail (that’s why it’s called trial and error). But many, protected under the non threatening umbrella of experimentation, may raise your chances of success.
  • At IDEO’s Munich office, we call the reframed challenge Question Zero, since it is a new starting point for seeking creative solutions. Reframing the problem not only gives you more successful solutions but also allows you to address brigger, more important problems.
  • The newfound courage, exhibited by the same people who once had to wear hockey masks to get near a snake, led Bandura to pivot toward a new line of research: how people come to believe that they can change a situation and accomplish what they set out to do in the world.
  • We didn’t know as children that we were creative. We just knew that it was okay for us to try experiments that sometimes succeeded and sometimes falied. That we could keep creating, keep tinkering, and trust that something interesting would result if we just stuck with it
  • Whether you consider yourself a born innovator or are new to creative confidence, you can get better faster at coming up with new ideas if you give yourself and those around you the leeway to make mistakes from time to time. Permission to fail comes more easily in some settings than others.
  • It turns out that creativity isn’t some rare gift to be enjoyed by the lucky few—it’s a natural part of human thinking and behavior. In too many of us it gets blocked. But it can be unblocked. And unblocking that creative spark can have far-reaching implications for yourself, yo . . . Read more
  • Mihay Csikszentmihalyi, an expert in the field of positive psychology, calls flow – that creative state in which time seems to slip away and you are completely immersed in an activity for its own sake. When you are in a state of flow, the world around you drops away and you are fully engaged.
  • But innovation – whether driven by an individual or a team – can happen anywhere. It’s fueled by a restless intellectual curiosity, deep optimism, the ability to accept repeated failure as the price of ultimate success, a relentless work ethic, and a mindset that encourages not just ideas, but action.
  • The notion of empathy and human-centeredness is still not widely practiced in many corporations. Business people rarely navigate their own websites or watch how people use their products in a real-world setting. And if you do a word association with business person, the word empathy doesn’t come up much.
  • How can you discover what you’re born to do, or even what you’re good at? One approach is to use your free time to pursue interests or hobbies. A new weekend project can make you feel more energized throughout the week, whether you’re learning how to play the piano or designing Lego robots with your kids. 
  • In our experience, one of the scariest snakes in the room is the fear of failure, which manifests itself in such ways as fear of being judged, fear of getting started, fear of the unknown. And while much has been said about fear of failure, it still is the single biggest obstacle people face to creative success.
  • People who have creative confidence make better choices, set off more easily in new directions, and are better able to find solutions to seemingly intractable problems. They see new possibilities and collaborate with others to improve the situations around them. And they approach challenges with newfound courage.
  • Rediscovering the familiar is a powerful example of how looking at something closely can affect what you see. So apply a beginner’s mind to something you do or see every day: commuting to work, eating dinner, or preparing for a meeting. Look for new insights about familiar things. Think of it as a treasure hunt.
  • As the American writer Mark Twain said a century ago, It’s not what you don’t know that gets you into trouble, it’s what you know for sure that ain’t so. Don’t be fooled by what you know for sure about your customer, yourself, your business, or the world. Seek out opportunities to observe and update your worldview.
  • To overcome inertia, good ideas are not enough. Careful planning is not enough. The organizations, communities, and nations that thrive are the ones that initiate action, that launch rapid innovation cycles, that learn by doing as soon as they can. They are sprinting forward, while others are still waiting at the starting line.
  • Ask yourself, what can you do to increase your deal flow of new ideas? When was the last time you took a class? Read some unusual magazines or blogs? Listened to new kinds of music? Traveled a different route to work? Had coffee with a friend or colleague who can teach you something new? Connected to big ideas people via social media?
  • By adopting the eyes of a traveler and a beginner’s mindset, you will notice a lot of details that you normally might have overlooked. You put aside assumptions and are fully immersed in the world around you. In this receptive mode, you’re ready to start actively searching out inspiration. And when it comes to inspiration, quantity matters.
  • …those under the influence of a fixed mindset were willing to sabotage their long-term chances for success rather than expose a potential weakness. If they let the same logic guide their choices throughout life, it’s easy to understand how their perception of their own abilities as permanently limited can become a self-fulfilling hypothesis.
  • The more fresh new ideas cross your field of vision each day, the greater your insights will be. As Nobel laureate Linus Pauling famously said, If you want a good idea, start with a lot of ideas. At IDEO, we try to keep a fast-running stream of conversations going about provocative new technologies, inspiring case studies, and emerging trends.
  • If you have a problem that you can’t analyze easily, or that doesn’t have a metric or enough data to draw upon, design thinking may be able to help you move forward using empathy and prototyping. When you need to achieve a breakthrough innovation or make a creative leap, this methodology can help you dive into the problem and find new insights.
  • Relaxed attention lies between meditation, where you completely clear your mind, and the laserlike focus you apply when tackling a tough math problem. Our brains can make cognitive leaps when we are not completely obsessed with a challenge, which is why good ideas sometimes come to us while we are in the shower, or taking a walk or a long drive.
  • In reality, we all have a little of both mindsets. Sometimes the fixed mindset whispers in one ear: We’ve never been good at anything creative, so why embarrass ourselves now? And the growth mindset whispers in the other ear: Effort is the path to mastery, so let’s at least give this a try. The question is, which voice are you going to listen to?
  • Author and educator Tina Seelig asks her students to write a failure resume that highlights their biggest defeats and screw-ups. She says that smart people accustomed to promoting their successes find it very challenging. In the process of compiling their failure resume, however, they come to own their setbacks, both emotionally and intellectually.
  • Like too many of us, Jeremy found himself trapped by the curse of competence. Yes, he could successfully perform all the requirements of his job, but he gained no real fulfillment from what he did. Raised with a tireless work ethic, Jeremy showed up at the office everyday, resigned to the fact that I would hate whatever I did for the next twenty years.
  • Creativity is much broader and more universal than what people typically consider the artistic fields. We think of creativity as using your imagination to create something new in the world. Creativity comes into play wherever you have the opportunity to generate new ideas, solutions, or approaches. And we believe everyone should have access to that resource.
  • You don’t have to switch careers or move to Silicon Valley to change your mindset. You don’t have to become a design consultant or quit your job. The world needs more creative policy makers, office managers, and real estate agents. Whatever your profession, when you approach it with creativity, you’ll come up with new and better solutions and more successes.
  • Steve Jobs was famous for his exhortation to make a dent in the universe, which he expressed this way in a interview: “The minute that you understand that you can poke life and actually something will…pop out the other side, that you can change it, you can mold it, that’s maybe the most important thing…Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.”
  • Bandura’s work scientifically validated something we’ve been seeing for years: Doubts in one’s creative ability can be cured by guiding people through a series of small successes. And the experience can have a powerful effect on the rest of their lives. The state of mind Bandura calls self-efficacy is closed related to what we think of as creative confidence.
  • Ever travel to a foreign city? We’ve all heard that travel broadens the mind. But beneath this cliche lies a deep truth. Things stand out because they’re different, so we notice every detail, from street signs to mailboxes to how you pay at a restaurant. We learn a lot when we travel not because we are any smarter on the road, but because we pay such close attention.
  • When our self-worth isn’t on the line, we are far more willing to be courageous and risk sharing our raw talents and gifts. One way to embrace creativity, Brene Brown says, is to let go of comparison. If you are concerned about conforming or about how you measure up to others’ successes, you won’ perform the risk taking and trailblazing inherent in creative endeavors.
  • The doctors and nurses translated the pit crew’s techniques into new behaviours. For example, they now map out tasks and timing for every role in order to minimize the need for conversation. And they step through a checklist to relay key patient information. As reported in the Wall street Journal, the Ferrari- inspired changes reduced technical errors by % and information errors by %.
  • When people transcend the fears that block their creativity, all sorts of new possibilities emerge. Instead of being paralyzed by the prospect of failure, they see every experience as an opportunity they can learn from. The need for control keeps some people stuck at the planning stage of a project. With creative confidence, they become comfortable with uncertainty and are able to leap into action.
  • The question hung in the air for a moment before Yo-Yo Ma delivered the bad news to Erik. Long after ascending to the top of his field, Yo-Yo Ma continues to practice as much as six hours a day. Erik was crushed. But Yo-Yo Ma’s lesson is a reminder to us all – passion doesn’t preclude effort. In fact, passion demands effort. But in the end, you are more likely to feel that all that effort was worthwhile.
  • What we’ve found is that we don’t have to generate creativity from scratch. We just need to help people rediscover what they already have: the capacity to imagine – or build upon – new-to-the-world ideas. But the real value of creativity doesn’t emerge until you are brave enough to act on those ideas. That combination of thought and action defines creative confidence: the ability to come up with new ideas and the courage to try them out.
  • Pressfield’s sleight of hand, substituting the word resistance for procrastination, is more than just semantics. In giving the phenomenon a different name, Pressfield redefines that enemy. Procrastination seems like a form of personal weakness. But Resistance is a force we can do battle with. Mentioning procrastination is a reminder of our failings. But invoking Resistance is a call to arms. It’s an obstacle we are challenged to overcome.
  • To fully appreciate the growth mindset, it helps to contrast it with its all-too-familiar evil twin, the fixed mindset have the deep-seated belief that everyone is born with only a certain amount of intelligence and a certain amount of talent. If invited on a journey to creative confidence, people with a fixed mindset will prefer to stay behind in their comfort zone, afraid that the limits of their capabilities will be revealed to others.
  • While the path of least resistance is usually to coast along in neutral, people with creative confidence have a do something mindset. They believe their actions can make a positive difference, so they act. They recognize that waiting for a perfect plan or forecast might take forever, so they move forward, knowing they will not always be right but optimistic about their ability to experiment and conduct midcourse corrections further down the road.
  • Diego Rodriguez in his blog Metacool says that innovation thinkers often use informed intuition to identify a great insight, a key need, or a core feature. In other words, relentless practice creates a database of experience that you can draw upon to make more enlightened choices. When it comes to bringing new stuff into the world, Diego argues that the number of product cycles you’ve gone through (what he calls mileage) trumps the number of years of experience. –
  • One prerequisite for achieving creative confidence is the belief that your innovation skills and capabilities are not set in stone. If you currently feel that you are not a creative person – if you think, I’m not good at that kind of thing – you have to let go of that belief before you can move on. You have to believe that learning and growth are possible. In other words, you need to start with what Stanford psychology professor Carol Dweck calls a growth mindset.
  • The tendency to label ourselves as noncreative comes from more than just our fear of being judged. As schools cut funding for the arts and high-stakes testing becomes more pervasive, creativity itself is devalued, compared to traditional core subjects like math and science. Those subjects emphasize ways of thinking and problem solving that have a clear-cut single right answer, while many real-world twenty-first-century challenges require more open-minded approaches.
  • One day, David and Brian were in art class, sitting at a table with half a dozen classmates. Brian was working on a sculpture, making a horse out of the clay that the teacher kept under the sink. Suddenly one of the girls saw what he was making, leaned over, and said to him, That’s terrible. That doesn’t look anything like a horse. Brian’s shoulders sank. Dejected, he wadded up the clay horse and throw it back in the bin. David never saw Brian attempt a creative project again.
  • The result was a way forward that the company called Design for Delight – referred to internally as DD. For the employees at Intuit, design for delight means evoking positive emotion by going beyond customer expectations in delivering ease and benefit so people buy more and tell others about the experience. Among the principles are: ) deep customer empathy; ) going broad to go narrow (ie. seeking many ideas before converging on a solution); and ) rapid experiments with customers.
  • Resilient people, in addition to being resourceful problem solvers, are more likely to seek help, have strong social support, and be better connected with colleagues, family, and friends. Resilience is often thought of as a solo effort – the lone hero who falls and rises up again to do battle. In reality, however, reaching out to others is usually a strategy for success. It doesn’t have to be an admission of weakness. We need others to help us bounce back from adversity and hardship.
  • How often does something like that happen in childhood? Whenever we mention lost-confidence stories like Brian’s to business audiences, someone always comes up to us afterward to share a similar experience when a teacher or parent or peer shut them down. Let’s face it, kids can be cruel to one another. Sometimes, people remember a specific moment when they decided, as children, that they weren’t creative. Rather than be judged, they simply withdrew. They stopped thinking of themselves as creative at all.
  • Coe Leta Stafford, a veteran IDEO design researcher with a PhD in cognitive development, has lots of experience asking questions of potential end users. One way she brings questions to life is by making them playful. Instead of asking “Why do you like this book so much?” she’ll turn it into a game: Pretend you wanted to convince a friend that they should read this book, what would you tell them? She reframes the question in a way that sidesteps some of the business as usual responses and elicits more meaningful answers.
  • A wandering mind can be a good thing. Researcher Jonathan Schooler of the University of California believes that our brains are often working on task-unrelated ideas and solutions when we daydream. That could explain studies showing that prolific mind wanderers score higher on tests of creativity. And new research on the network of the brain similarly found that our minds make unlikely connections between ideas, memories, and experiences when we are at rest and not focused on a specific task or project.
  • Successful scientists must have been extremely susceptible to such happy accidents because there are dozens of such stories in the history of science and invention. From penicillin to pacemakers, and from saccharin to safety glass, a lot of discoveries have come into this world because scientists noticed that one of their mishaps or mistakes had turned into a breakthrough. Their success-from-failure stories indicate not only that they were keen observers, but also that they were conducting a lot of experiments to begin with.
  • If you want to make something great, you need to start making. Striving for perfection can get in the way during the early stages of the creative process. So don’t get stuck at the planning stage. Don’t let your inner perfectionist slow you down. All the over-planning, all the procrastinating, and all the talking are signs that we are afraid, that we just don’t feel ready. You want everything to be just right before you commit further or share something with others. That tendency leads us to wait rather than act, to perfect rather than launch.
  • Karaoke confidence, like creative confidence, depends on an absence of fear of failure and judgement. But it does not necessarily require native singing ability or immediate success…Karaoke confidence seems to rely on a few key ingredients. And we’ve noticed that those same ingredients are essential for encouraging cultures of innovation everywhere. Here are five guidelines that can improve your next karaoke experience – and your innovation culture: – keep your sense of humor – Build on the energy of others  – Minimize hierarchy  – Value tam camaraderie and trust   – Defer judgement – at least temporarily
  • In his book Juggling for the Complete Klutz, Cass didn’t start us out juggling two balls, or even one. He began with something more basic: The Drop. Step one is simply to throw all three balls in the air and let them drop. Then repeat. In learning to juggle, the angst comes from failure – from having the ball fall to the floor. So with step one, Cass aims to numb aspiring jugglers to that. Having the ball fall to the floor becomes more normal than the ball not falling to the floor. After we address our fear of failure, juggling becomes a lot easier. The two of us were skeptical at first, but with the help of his simple approach, we really did learn to juggle.
  • A widely held myth suggests that creative geniuses rarely fail. Yet according to Professor Dean Keith Simonton of the University of California, Davis, the opposite is actually true: creative geniuses, from artists like Mozart to scientists like Darwin, are quite prolific when it comes to failure – they just don’t let that step them. His research has found that creative people simply do more experiments. Their ultimate strokes of genius don’t come about because they succeed more often than other people – they just do more, period. They take more shots at the goal. That is the surprising, compelling mathematics of innovation: if you want more success, you have to be prepared to shrug off more failure.
  • How do you make it safe to participate and engage in creative action? How do you gather the courage to try something new, knowing that you may be terrible at it initially? As toddlers, we were all bad at walking, but no one told us we should abandon the effort. As children, most of us had trouble mastering a bicycle, but we were encouraged to keep at it. As young adults, we discovered that driving a car wasn’t as easy as we thought it would be – but we had a lot of motivation to improve our driving skills so that we could get a driver’s license. So why is developing our creative confidence at work so fraught with peril? Why are we so prone to abandon a creative endeavor just because it’s difficult early on?
  • What will people pay you to do? and What were you born to do? If you focus on just what you’re good at, you can end up in a job you are competent at but that doesn’t fulfill you. As for the second circle, while people say, Do what you love and the money will follow, that’s not literally true. One of David’s favourite activities is tinerking in the studio above his workshop; one of Tom’s dreams is to travel the world, collecting stories and experiences from different cultures. So far no one has offered to pay us to do those things. The Third circle – what you were born to do – is about finding work that is intrinsically rewarding. The goal is to find a vocation that you’re good at, that you enjoy, and that someone will pay you to pursue. And of course it’s important to work with people you like and respect.
  • In the realm of video games, the level of challenge and reward rises proportionately with a gamer’s skills; moving forward always requires concentrated effort, but the next goal is never completely out of reach. This contributes to what Jane McGonigal calls urgent optimism: the desire to act immediately to tackle an obstacle, motivated by the belief that you have a reasonable hope of success. Gamers always believe that an epic win is possible – that it is worth trying, and trying now, over and over again. In the euphoria of an epic win, gamers are shocked to discover the extent of their capabilities. As you move from level to level, success can flip your mindset to a state of creative confidence. We’ve all seen this kind of persistence and gradual mastery of skills in children – from toddlers learning to walk to kids learning how to shoot a basketball.
  • Our version of the alternative to negative speech patterns is the phrase How might we…, introduced to us several years ago by Charles Warren, now salesforce.com’s senior vice president of product design. How might we…? is an optimistic way of seeking out new possibilities in the world. In a matter of weeks, the phrase went viral at IDEO and has stuck ever since. In three disarmingly simple words, it captures much of our perspective on creative groups. The how suggests that improvement is always possible – that the only question remaining is how we will find success. The word might temporarily lowers the bar a little. It allows us to consider wild or improbable ideas instead of self-editing from the very beginning, giving us more chance of a breakthrough. And the we establishes ownership of the challenge, making it clear that not only will it be a group effort, but it will be our group. –
  • Amy Wrzesniewski has found that people have one of three distinct attitudes toward the work they do: they think of it as either a job, a career, or a calling. And the difference is crucial. When work is strictly a job, it may effectively pay the bills, but you’re living mostly for the weekend and your hobbies. Those who see work as a career focus on a promotions and getting ahead, putting in long hours to achieve a more impressive title, a larger office, or a higher salary. In other words, you are focused on checking off achievements rather than pursuing deeper meaning. In contrast, for those who pursue a calling, their work is intrinsically rewarding in its own right – no just a means to an end. So, what you do professionally fulfills you personally as well. And often that work is meaningful because you are contributing to a larger purpose or feel part of a larger community. As Wrzesniewski points out, the origins of the word calling: are religious, but it maintains its meaning in the secular context of work: the sense that you are contributing to a higher value or to something bigger than yourself.

 

 

Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered (Austin Kleon)

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  • First, be useful. Then necessary.
  • Become a documentarian of what you do.
  • The worst troll is the one that lives in your head.
  • Don’t show your lunch or your latte, show your work.
  • The real gap is between doing nothing and doing something.
  • it’s not enough to be good. In order to be found, you have to be findable.
  • Walt Disney: We don’t make movies to make money, we make money to make more movies.
  • Go back to your documentation and find one little piece of process that you can share.
  • You can’t be content with mastery; you have to push yourself to become a student again.
  • If you want people to know about what you do and the things you care about, you have to share.
  • Steve Albini says, being good at things is the only thing that earns you clout or connections.
  • George Orwell wrote: Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.
  • It sounds a little extreme, but in this day and age, if your work isn’t online, it doesn’t exist.
  • The people who get what they’re after are very often the ones who just stick around long enough.
  • This story shows what happens when a musician interacts with his fans on the level of a fan himself.
  • Don’t talk to people you don’t want to talk to, and don’t talk about stuff you don’t want to talk about.
  • Be open, share imperfect and unfinished work that you want feedback on, but don’t share absolutely everything.
  • Alain de Botton wrote, Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough.
  • Being open and honest honest about what you like is the best way to connect with people who like those things, too
  • Cartoonist Natalie Dee says: There’s never a space under paintings in a gallery where someone writes their opinion.
  • ask yourself ‘is it helpful? is it entertaining? is it something i’d be comfortable with my boss or my mother seeing?’
  • Show your work, and when the right people show up, pay close attention to them, because they’ll have a lot to show you.
  • Make stuff you love and talk about stuff you love and you’ll attract people who love that kind of stuff. It’s that simple.
  • Part of the art of creating is in discovering your own kind. They are everywhere. But don’t look for them in the wrong places”
  • Colin Marshall says: If you spend your life avoiding vulnerability, you and your work will never truly connect with other people.
  • Don’t try to be hip or cool. Being open and honest about what you like is the best way to connect with people who like those things, too.
  • Your influences are all worth sharing because they clue people in to who you are and what you do – sometimes even more than your own work
  • Once a day, after you’ve done your day’s work, go back to your documentation and find one little piece of your process that you can share.
  • Online, everyone – the artist and the curator, the master and the apprentice, the expert and the amateur – has the ability to contribute something.
  • The stories you tell about the work you do have a huge effect on how people feel and what they understand about your work, (…) affects how they value it.
  • Want to pick up a great book or two this season? Check out our recommendations of hot books selected by your fellow readers, bestselling authors, and more!
  • But now I realize that the only way to find your voice is to use it. It’s hardwired, built into you. Talk about the things you love. Your voice will follow.
  • The trouble with imaginative people is that we’re good at picturing the worst that could happen to us. Fear is often just the imagination taking a wrong turn.
  • iI sounds a little extreme, but in this day and age, if your work isn’t online, it doesn’t exist. (…) if you want people to know about you, you have to share.
  • Isak Dinesen wrote, You can’t count on success; you can only leave open the possibility for it, and be ready to jump on and take the ride when it comes for you.
  • You have to remember that your work is something you do, not who you are. This is especially hard for artists to accept, as so much of what they do is personal.
  • You should be able to explain your work to a kindergartner, a senior citizen, and everybody in between. of course, you always need to keep your audience in mind.
  • Once a good knuckleball is thrown, it’s equally unpredictable to the batter, the catcher, and the pitcher who threw it. (Sounds a lot like the creative process, huh?)
  • A successful or failed project is no guarantee of another success or failure. Whether you’ve just won big or lost big, you still have to face the question What’s next?
  • To all viewers but yourself, what matters is the product: the finished artwork. To you, and you alone, what matters is the process: the experience of shaping the artwork.
  • But whatever the nature of your work, there is an art to what you do, and there are people who would be interested in that art, if only you presented it to them in the right way.
  • When you find things you genuinely enjoy, don’t let anyone else make you feel bad about it. Don’t feel guilty about the pleasure you take in the things you enjoy. Celebrate them.
  • Artist Ben Shan says: An amateur is an artist who supports himself with outside jobs which enable him to paint. A professional is someone whose wife works to enable him to paint.
  • Social media sites are the perfect place to share daily updates. Don’t worry about being on every platform; pick and choose based on what you do and the people you’re trying to reach.
  • to be interest-ing is to be curious and attentive, and to practice the continual projection of interest. To put it more simply: If you want to be interesting, you have to be interested.
  • Colin Marshall says: Compulsive avoidance of embarrassment is a form of suicide. If you spend your life avoiding vulnerability, you and your work will never truly connect with other people.
  • Above all, recognize that if you have had success, you have also had luck — and with luck comes obligation. You owe a debt, and not just to your gods. You owe a debt to the unlucky. Michael Lewis
  • The world is changing at such a rapid rate that it’s turning us all into amateurs. Even for professionals, the best way to flourish is to retain an amateur’s spirit and embrace uncertainty and the unknown.
  • The impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes. —Annie Dillard
  • Don’t think of your website as a self-promotion machine, think of it as a self-invention machine. online, you can become the person you really want to be. fill your website with your work and your ideas and the stuff you care about.
  • Try new things. If an opportunity comes along that will allow you to do more of the kind of work you want to do, say Yes. If an opportunity comes along that would mean more money, but less of the kind of work you want o do, say No.
  • The best way to get started on the path to sharing your work is to think about what you want to learn, and make a commitment to learning it in front of others. (…) share what you love, and people who love the same things will find you.
  • Everybody loves a good story, but good storytelling doesn’t come easy to everybody. It’s a skill that takes a lifetime to master. So study the great stories and then go find some of your own. Your stories will get better the more you tell them.
  • Teaching people doesn’t subtract value from what you do, it actually adds to it. When you teach someone how to do your work, you are, in effect, generating more interest in your work. People feel closer to your work because you’re letting them in on what you know.
  • By taking advantage of the internet and social media, an artist can share whatever she wants, whenever she wants, at almost no cost. (…) she can share her sketches and work-in-progress, post pictures of her studio, or blog about her influences, inspiration, and tools.
  • We all love things that other people think are garbage. You have to have the courage to keep loving your garbage, because what makes us unique is the diversity and breadth of our influences, the unique ways in which we mix up the parts of culture others have deemed high and the low.
  • Stock and flow is an economic concept that writer Robin Sloan has adapted into a metaphor for media: Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that remind people you exist. Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today.
  • In their book, Rework, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson encourage businesses to emulate chefs by outteaching their competition. What do you do? What are your ‘recipes’? What’s your ‘cookbook’? What can you tell the world about how you operate that’s informative, educational, and promotional? They encourage businesses to figure out the equivalent of their own cooking show.
  • Think about what you want to learn, and make a commitment to learning it in front of others. Find a scenius, pay attention to what others are sharing, and then start taking note of what they’re not sharing. Be on the lookout for voids that you can fill with your own efforts, no matter how bad they are at first. . . . Share what you love, and the people who love the same things will find you.
  • Artists love to trot out the tired line, My work speaks for itself, but the truth is, our work doesn’t speak for itself. Human beings want to know where things came from, how they were made, and who made them. The stories you tell about the work you do have a huge effect on how people feel and what they understand about your work, and how people feel and what they understand about your work effects how they value it.
  • Writer David Foster Wallace said that he thought good nonfiction was a chance to watch somebody reasonably bright but also reasonably average pay far closer attention and think at far more length about all sorts of different stuff than most of us have a chance to in our daily lives. Amateurs fit the same bill: They’re just regular people who get obsessed by something and spend a ton of time thinking out loud about it.
  • Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. —Steve Jobs
  • As you put yourself and your work out there, you will run into your fellow knuckleballers. These are your real peers-the people who share your obsessions, the people who share a similar mission to your own, the people with whom you share a mutual respect. There will only be a handful or so of them, but they’re so, so important. Do what you can to nurture your relationships with these people. Show them work before you show anybody else. Keep them as close as you can.
  • Author John Gardner said the basic plot of nearly all stories is this: A character wants something, goes after it despite opposition (perhaps including his own doubts), and so arrives at a win, lose, or draw. I like Gardner’s plot formula because it’s also the shape of most creative work: You get a great idea, you go through the hard work of executing the idea, and then you release the idea out into the world, coming to a win, lose, or draw. Sometimes the idea succeeds, sometimes it fails, and more often than not, it does nothing at all.
  • Every client presentation, every personal essay, every cover letter, every fund-raising request – they’re all pitches. They’re stories with the endings chopped off. A good pitch is set up in three acts: The first act is the past, the second act is the present, and the third is the future. The first act is where you’ve been – what you want, how you came to want it, and what you’ve done so far to get it. The second act is where you are now in your work and how you’ve worked hard and used up most of your resources. The third act is where you’re going, and how exactly the person you’re pitching can help you get there. Like a Choose Your Own Adventure book, this story shape effectively turns your listener into the hero who gets to decide how it ends.
  • If you believe in the lone genius myth, creativity is an antisocial act, performed by only a few great figures — mostly dead men with names like Mozart, Einstein, or Picasso. The rest of us are left to stand around and gawk in awe at their achievements. Under the “scenius” model, great ideas are often birthed by a group of creative individuals — artists, curators, thinkers, theorists, and other tastemakers — who make up an ecology of talent. Being a valuable part of a scenius is not necessarily about how smart or talented you are, but about what you have to contribute—the ideas you share, the quality of the connections you make, and the conversations you start. If we forget about genius and think more about how we can nurture and contribute to a scenius, we can adjust our own expectations and the expectations of the worlds we want to accept us. We can stop asking what others can do for us, and start asking what we can do for others.

 

 

The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life (Twyla Tharp)

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  • Personality is a skill.
  • Perfect practice makes perfect.
  • In creative endeavors luck is a skill.
  • You are never lonely when the mind is engaged.
  • The more you know, the better you can imagine.
  • Challenge the assumptions. Act on the challenge.
  • The great ones never take fundamentals for granted.
  • You do your best work after your biggest disasters.
  • You filter the world through your particular prism.
  • An artist’s ultimate goal is the achievement of mastery.
  • If I stopped reading, I’d stop thinking. It’s that simple.
  • In theory, the only perfectly clean room is an empty room.
  • Never save for two meetings what you can accomplish in one.
  • Questioning what’s gone unquestioned gets the brain humming.
  • You won’t get very far relying on your audience’s ignorance.
  • Whom the gods wish to destroy, they give unlimited resources.
  • You can’t overthink when you don’t have time to think at all.
  • You can never spend enough time on the basics.
  • Art is competitive with yourself, with the past, with the future.
  • Before you can think out of the box, you have to start with a box
  • Better an imperfect dome in Florence than cathedrals in the clouds.
  • By acknowledging failure, you take the first step to conquering it.
  • Knowing when to stop is almost as critical as knowing how to start.
  • Learn to do for yourself. It’s the only way to broaden your skills.
  • You don’t have a really good idea until you combine two little ideas.
  • To force change, you have to attack the work with outrage and violence.
  • The willingness to take directions is a skill noticed mostly when absent.
  • As Freud said, “When inspiration does not come to me, I go halfway to meet it.”
  • It’s vital to know the difference between good planning and too much planning.
  • The goal is to connect with something old so it becomes new. Look and imagine.
  • In the words of T.S. Eliot, you’re distracted from distractions by distractions.
  • Japanese sword fighter Miyamoto Musashi counseled, “Never have a favorite weapon.”
  • Solitude is an unavoidable part of creativity. Self-reliance is a happy by-product.
  • There’s nothing wrong with fear; the only mistake is to let it stop you in your tracks.
  • The short answer is: everywhere. It’s like asking Where do you find the air you breathe?
  • It’s vital to be able to forget the pain of failure while retaining the lessons from it.
  • Mark Twain said, the man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.
  • My heroes are those who’ve prevailed over far greater losses than I’ve ever had to face.
  • Our ability to grow is directly proportional to an ability to entertain the uncomfortable.
  • We get into ruts when we run with the first idea that pops into our head, not the last one.
  • When you’re in a rut, you have to question everything except your ability to get out of it.
  • Alone is a fact, a condition where no one else is around. Lonely is how you feel about that.
  • Doing is better than not doing, and if you do something badly you’ll learn to do it better.
  • Ideas will come to you more quickly if you’ve been putting in the time at your chosen craft.
  • Sometimes you can’t identify a good idea until you’ve considered and discarded the bad ones.
  • Being blocked is most often a failure of nerve, with only one solution: Do something-anything.
  • The routine is as much a part of the creative process as the lightning bolt of inspiration, maybe more.
  • Scratching can look like borrowing or appropriating, but it’s an essential part of creativity.
  • The great ones shelve the perfected skills for a while and concentrate on their imperfections.
  • We’ve always done it this way is not a good enough reason to keep doing it if it isn’t working.
  • How to be lucky: Be generous. Generosity is luck going in the opposite direction, away from you.
  • That’s the true value of the box: It contains your inspirations without confining your creativity.
  • Giving yourself a handicap to overcome will force you to think in a new and slightly different way.
  • It’s not only how we express what we remember, it’s how we interpret it – for ourselves and others.
  • By making the start of the sequence automatic, they replace doubt and fear with comfort and routine.
  • New collaborators bring new vectors of energy into your static world – and they can be combustible.
  • Remember this when you’re struggling for a big idea. You’re much better off scratching for a small one.
  • Creativity is a habit, and the best creativity is a result of good work habits. That’s it in a nutshell.
  • I have learned over the years that you should never save for two meetings what you can accomplish in one.
  • Switching genres was Beethoven’s way of maintaining his inexperience, and as a result, enlarging his art.
  • Traveling the paths of greatness, even in someone else’s footprints, is a vital means to acquiring skill.
  • When you stimulate your body, your brain comes alive in ways you can’t simulate in a sedentary position.
  • Give me a writer who thinks he has all the time in the world and I’ll show you a writer who never delivers.
  • Inexperience erases fear. You do not know what is and is not possible and therefore everything is possible.
  • I became a choreographer because I longed to dance, and nobody was making the kinds of dances I felt inside me.
  • If you don’t have a broad base of skills, you’re limiting the number of problems you can solve when trouble hits.
  • That’s what the great ones do: They shelve the perfected skills for a while and concentrate on their imperfections.
  • There comes a point where you have to let your creation out into the world or it isn’t worth a tinkerer’s damn.
  • If you’re at a dead end, take a deep breath, stamp your foot, and shout “Begin!” You never know where it will take you.
  • One of her skills, and a great deal of her charm, was this built-in sense of humility. The greatest dancers have that.
  • If art is the bridge between what you see in your mind and what the world sees, then skill is how you build that bridge.
  • The only bad thing about having a good creative day is that it ends, and there’s no guarantee we can repeat it tomorrow.
  • What you are today and what you will be in five years depends on two things: the people you meet and the books you read.
  • Once you realize the power of memory, you begin to see how much is at your disposal in previously under-appreciated places.
  • Every act of creation is also an act of destruction or abandonment. Something has to be cast aside to make way for the new.
  • …get busy copying. Traveling the paths of greatness, even in someone else’s footprints, is a vital means to acquiring skill.
  • No one starts a creative endeavor without a certain amount of fear; the key is to learn how to keep free-floating fears from paralyzing you before you’ve begun.
  • Obligation is not the same as commitment, and it’s certainly not an acceptable reason to stick with something that isn’t working.
  • Analyze your own skill set. See where you’re strong and where you need dramatic improvement, and tackle those lagging skills first.
  • Obligation is a flimsy base for creativity, way down the list behind passion, courage, instinct, and the desire to do something great.
  • I am magnetically drawn to images, whether they’re paintings, photographs, film, or video. They are all lodestones of inspiration to me.
  • …there’s a fine line between good planning and overplanning. You never want the planning to inhibit the natural evolution of your work.”
  • Remember this the next time you moan about the hand you’re dealt: No matter how limited your resources, they’re enough to get you started.
  • The more you are in the room working, experimenting, banging away at your objective, the more luck has a chance of biting you on the nose.
  • You may wonder which came first: the skill or the hard work. But that’s a moot point. The Zen master cleans his own studio. So should you.
  • I want my dancers to grab my ideas and abandon common sense. I want them to give something of their own and to push everything to the edge.
  • You don’t get lucky without preparation, and there’s no sense in being prepared if you’re not open to the possibility of a glorious accident.
  • The golfer Ben Hogan said, “Every day you don’t practice you’re one day further from being good. If it’s something you want to do, make the time.”
  • Make it your priority. Work around it. Once your basic needs are taken care of, money is there to be used. What better investment than in yourself?
  • We need this breadth and passion if we’re going to keep perfecting our craft, whether or not there is approval, validation, or money coming from it.
  • But obligation, I eventually saw, is not the same as commitment, and it’s certainly not an acceptable reason to stick with something that isn’t working
  • Whether or not God has kissed your brow, you still have to work. Without learning and preparation, you won’t know how to harness the power of that kiss.
  • Confidence is a trait that has to be earned honestly and refreshed constantly; you have to work as hard to protect your skills as you did to develop them.
  • …the creative act is editing. You’re editing out all the lame ideas that won’t resonate with the public. It’s not pandering. It’s exercising your judgment.
  • Want to pick up a great book or two this season? Check out our recommendations of hot books selected by your fellow readers, bestselling authors, and more!
  • Someone has done it before? Honey, it’s all been done before. Nothing’s really original. Not Homer or Shakespeare and certainly not you. Get over yourself.”
  • You can’t be stoic and strong about everything. Some things in life are just meant to be enjoyed simply because you enjoy them. They are their own rationale.
  • I know it’s important to be prepared, but at the start of the process this type of perfectionism is more like procrastination. You’ve got to get in there and do.
  • I read for growth, firmly believing that what you are today and what you will be in five years depends on two things: the people you meet and the books you read.
  • I became my own rebellion. Going with your head makes it arbitrary. Going with your gut means you have no choice. It’s inevitable, which is why I have no regrets.
  • Practice without purpose, however, is nothing more than exercise. Too many people practice what they’re already good at and neglect the skills that need more work.
  • Knowing when to stop is almost as critical as knowing how to start. How do you know when something is not only the best that you can do but the best that it can be?
  • I start every dance with a box. I write the project name on the box, and as the piece progresses, I fill it up with every item that went into the making of the dance.
  • Metaphor is the lifeblood of all art, if it is not art itself. Metaphor is our vocabulary for connecting what we’re experiencing to what we have experienced before.”
  • My perfect world does not exist, but it’s there as a goal. What are the conditions of your perfect world? Which of them are essential, and which can you work around?
  • Another thing about knowing who you are is that you know what you should not be doing, which can save you a lot of heartaches and false starts if you catch it early on.
  • Venturing out of your comfort zone may be dangerous, yet do it anyways because our ability to grow is directly proportional to an ability to entertain the uncomfortable.
  • You only need one good reason to commit to an idea, not four hundred. But if you have four hundred reasons to say yes and one reason to say no, the answer is probably no.
  • When you fail in public, you are forcing yourself to learn a whole new set of skills, skills that you have nothing to do with creating and everything to do with surviving.
  • One of the horrors of growing older is the certainty that you will lose memory and that the loss of vocabulary or incident or imagery is going to diminish your imagination.
  • I Guess that’s the real secret to creative preparation. If you’re at a dead end, take a deep breath, stamp your foot, and shout Begin! You never know where it will take you.
  • You may not think that doing a verb is practical or productive for anyone but a dancer. I disagree. The chemistry of the body is inseparable from the chemistry of the brain.
  • Reading, conversation, environment, culture, heroes, mentors, nature – all are lottery tickets for creativity. Scratch away at them and you’ll find out how big a prize you’ve won.
  • Scratching is where creativity begins. It is the moment where your ideas first take flight and begin to defy gravity. If you try to rein it in, you’ll never know how high you can go.
  • You can’t just dance or paint or write or sculpt. Those are just verbs. You need a tangible idea to get you going. The idea, however minuscule, is what turns the verb into a noun…
  • Creativity is an act of defiance. You’re challenging the status quo. You’re questioning accepted truths and principles. You’re asking three universal questions that mock conventional wisdom:
  • Nobody worked harder than Mozart. By the time he was twenty-eight years old, his hands were deformed because of all the hours he had spent practicing, performing, and gripping a quill pen to compose.
  • Every time you set out to create something new, you have to prove to yourself you can still do it at least as well as, if not better than, you did it before. You can not rest on your creative laurels.
  • You’re only kidding yourself if you put creativity before craft. Craft is where our best efforts begin. You should never worry that rote exercises aimed at developing skills will suffocate creativity.”
  • Never worry that rote exercises aimed at developing skills will suffocate creativity. At the same time, it’s important to recognize that demonstrating great technique is not the same as being creative.
  • Leon Battista Alberti, a fifteenth-centure architectural theorist, said, “Errors accumulate in the sketch and compound in the model. But better an imperfect dome in Florence than cathedrals in the clouds.”
  • Too much planning implies you’ve got it all under control. That’s boring, unrealistic, and dangerous. It lulls you into a complacency that removes one of the artist’s most valuable conditions: being pissed.
  • Without passion, all the skill in the world won’t lift you above craft. Without skill, all the passion in the world will leave you eager but floundering. Combining the two is the essence of the creative life.
  • To generate ideas, I had to move. It’s the same if you’re a painter: You can’t imagine the work, you can only generate ideas when you put pencil to paper, brush to canvas-when you actually do something physical.
  • Everything that happens in my day is a transaction between the external world and my internal world. Everything is raw material. Everything is relevant. Everything is usable. Everything feeds into my creativity.”
  • A plan is like the scaffolding around a building. When you’re putting up the exterior shell, the scaffolding is vital. But once the shell is in place and you start work on the interior, the scaffolding disappears.
  • Every creative person has to learn to deal with failure, because failure, like death and taxes, is inescapable. If Leonardo and Beethoven and Goethe failed on occasion, what makes you think you’ll be the exception?
  • Without passion, all the skill in the world won’t lift you above your craft. Without skill, all the passion in the world will leave you eager but floundering. combining the two is the essence of the creative life.”
  • In Hollywood, an adventure movie with two guys doesn’t quite qualify as an idea. Two guys and a bear does. It adheres to the unshakable rule that you don’t have a really good idea until you combine two little ideas.
  • Creativity is not just for artists. It’s for businesspeople looking for a new way to close a sale; it’s for engineers trying to solve a problem; it’s for parents who want their children to see the world in more than one way.
  • Every work of art needs a spine – an underlying theme, a motive for coming into existence. It doesn’t have to be apparent to the audience. But you need it at the start of the creative process to guide you and keep you going.
  • Every young person grows up with an overwhelming sense of possibility, and how life, in some ways, is just a series of incidents in which that possibility is either enlarged or smacked out of you. How you adapt is your choice.
  • If you’re in a creative rut, the easiest way to challenge assumptions is to switch things around them and make the switch work. The process goes like this: Identify the concept that isn’t working. Write down your assumptions about it.
  • As Tracy Kidder wrote in The Soul of a New Machine, Good engineers ship. In other words, while perfection is a wonderful goal, there comes a point where you have to let your creation out into the world or it isn’t worth a tinkerer’s damn.
  • I believe that every work of art needs a spine – an underlying theme, a motive for coming into existence. It doesn’t have to be apparent to the audience. But you need it at the start of the creative process to guide you and keep you going.
  • There’s an emotional lie to overplanning; it creates a security blanket that lets you assume you have things under control, that you are further along than you really are, that you’re home free when you haven’t even walked out the door yet.
  • It doesn’t matter if it’s a book, magazine, newspaper, billboard, instruction manual, or cereal box — reading generates ideas, because you’re literally filling your head with ideas and letting your imagination filter them for something useful.
  • It’s tempting to believe that the quantity and quality of our creative productivity would increase exponentially if only we could afford everything we’ve imagined, but I’ve seen too many artists dry up the moment they had enough money in the bank.
  • My daily routines are transactional. Everything that happens in my day is a transaction between the external world and my internal world. Everything is raw material. Everything is relevant. Everything is usable. Everything feeds into my creativity.
  • …there’s a lesson here about finding your groove. Yes, you can find it via a breakthrough in your craft. But you can also find it in other means — in congenial material, in a perfect partner, in a favorite character or comfortable subject matter.”
  • There’s no point in analyzing it. If you could figure out how you get into a groove you could figure out how to maintain it. That’s not going to happen. The best you can hope for is the wisdom and good fortune to occasionally fall into a groove. (196)
  • When people who have demonstrated talent fizzle out or disappear after early creative success, it’s not because their gifts, that famous one percent inspiration, abandoned them; more likely they abandoned their gift through a failure of perspiration.
  • No matter how limited your resources, they’re enough to get you started. Time, for example, is our most limited resource, but it is not the enemy of creativity that we think it is. The ticking clock is our friend if it gets us moving with urgency and passion.
  • Habitually creative people are, in E.B. white’s phrase, ‘prepared to be lucky.’ You don’t get lucky without preparation, and there’s no sense in being prepared if you’re not open to the possibility of a glorious accident. In creative endeavors luck is a skill.
  • I’m often asked, Where do you get your ideas? This happens to anyone who is willing to stand in front of an audience and talk about his or her work. The short answer is: everywhere. It’s like asking Where do you find the air you breathe? Ideas are all around you.
  • You can’t just dance or paint or write or sculpt. Those are just verbs. You need a tangible idea to get you going. The idea, however minuscule, is what turns the verb into a noun—paint into a painting, sculpt into sculpture, write into writing, dance into a dance.
  • As Mozart himself wrote to a friend, People err who think my art comes easily to me. I assure you, dear friend, nobody has devoted so much time and thought to composition as I. There is not a famous master whose music I have not industriously studied through many times.
  • In those long and sleepless nights when I’m unable to shake my fears sufficiently, I borrow a biblical epigraph from Dostoyevsky’s The Demons: I see my fears being cast into the bodies of wild boars and hogs, and I watch them rush to a cliff where they fall to their deaths.
  • Art is not about minimizing risk and delivering work that is guaranteed to please. Artists have bigger goals. If being an artist means pushing the envelope, you don’t want to stuff your material in someone else’s envelope. You don’t want to know the envelope has been invented.
  • Creativity is an act of defiance. You’re challenging the status quo. You’re questioning accepted truths and principles. You’re asking three universal questions that mock conventional wisdom: Why do I have to obey the rules? Why can’t I be different?  Why can’t I do it my way?
  • In the end, there is no one ideal condition for creativity. What works for one person is useless for another. The only criterion is this: Make it easy on yourself. Find a working environment where the prospect of wrestling with your muse doesn’t scare you, doesn’t shut you down.
  • This, to me, is the most interesting paradox of creativity: In order to be habitually creative, you have to know how to prepare to be creative, but good planning alone won’t make your efforts successful; it’s only after you let go of your plans that you can breathe life into your efforts.
  • Get busy copying. That’s not a popular notion today, not when we are all instructed to find our own way, admonished to be original and find our own voice at all costs! But it’s sound advice. Traveling the paths of greatness, even in someone else’s footprints, is a vital means to acquiring skill.
  • When you’re in scratching mode, the tiniest microcell of an idea will get you going. Musicians know this because compositions rarely come to them whole and complete. They call their morsels of inspiration lines or riffs or hooks or licks. That’s what they look for when they scratch for an idea.”
  • Jerry Robbins made a point of going to see everything because he could find something useful in even the worst productions. He’d sit there, viewing the catastrophe onstage, and imagine how he would have done it differently. A bad evening at the theater for everyone else was a creative workout for him.
  • Part of the excitement of creativity is the headlong rush into action when we latch onto a new idea. Yet, in the excitement, we often forget to apply pressure to the idea, poke it, challenge it, push it around, see if it stands up. Without that challenge, you never know how far astray your assumptions may have taken you.”
  • All I have is the certainty of experience that looking foolish is good for you. It nourishes the spirit. You appreciate this more and more over the years as the need to not look foolish fades with youth. (Remember the centenarian who when asked about the best part of living such a long life replied, No more peer pressure.)
  • Creativity is more about taking the facts, fictions, and feelings we store away and finding new ways to connect them. What we’re talking about here is metaphor. Metaphor is the lifeblood of all art, if it is not art itself. Metaphor is our vocabulary for connecting what we’re experiencing now with what we have experienced before.
  • Immerse yourself in the details of the work. Commit yourself to mastering every aspect. At the same time, step back to see if the work scans, if it’s intelligible to an unwashed audience. Don’t get so involved that you lose what you’re trying to say. This was the yin and yang of my work life: Dive in. Step back. Dive in. Step back.
  • No matter what system you use, I recommend having a goal and putting it in writing. I read once that people who write down their New Year’s resolutions have a greater change of achieving them than people who don’t. This is the sort of factoid tat is probably apocryphal but, like many urban legends, sounds as though it should be true.
  • Your creative endeavors can never be thoroughly mapped out ahead of time. You have to allow for the suddenly altered landscape, the change in plan, the accidental spark- and you have to see it as a stroke of luck rather than a disturbance of your perfect scheme. Habitually creative people are, in E. B. White’s phrase, prepared to be lucky.
  • A Manhattan writer I know never leaves his apartment without reminding himself to come back with a face. Whether he’s walking down the street or sitting on a park bench or riding the subway or standing on a checkout line, he looks for a compelling face and works up a rich description of it in his mind. When he has a moment, he writes it all down in his notebook.
  • Beethoven, despite his unruly reputation and wild romantic image, was well organized. He saved everything in a series of notebooks that were organized according to the level of development of the idea. He had notebooks for rough ideas, notebooks for improvements on those ideas, and notebooks for finished ideas, almost as if he was pre-aware of an idea’s early, middle, and late stages.
  • Skill gives you the wherewithal to execute whatever occurs to you. Without it, you are just a font of unfulfilled ideas. Skill is how you close the gap between what you can see in your mind’s eye and what you can produce; the more skill you have, the more sophisticated and accomplished your ideas can be. With absolute skill comes absolute confidence, allowing you to dare to be simple.
  • Destiny, quite often, is a determined parent. Mozart was hardly some naive prodigy who sat down at the keyboard and, with God whispering in his ears, let music flow from his fingertips. It’s a nice image for selling tickets to movies, but whether or not God has kissed your brow, you still have to work. Without learning and preparation, you won’t know how to harness the power of that kiss.
  • When Homer composed the Iliad and Odyssey, he was drawing on centuries of history and folklore handed down by oral tradition. When Nicolas Poussin painted The Rape of the Sabine Women, he was re-creating Roman history. When Marcel Proust dipped his petites madeleines into his tea, the taste and aroma set off a flood of memories and emotions from which modern literature has still not recovered.
  • A math professor at Williams College bases ten percent of his students’ grades on failure. Mathematics is all about trying out new ideas — new formulas, theorems, approaches — and knowing that the vast majority of them will be dead ends. To encourage his students not to be afraid of testing their quirkiest ideas in public, he rewards rather than punishes them for coming up with wrong answers.”
  • More than anything, I associate mastery with optimism. It’s the feeling at the start of a project when I believe that my whole career has been preparation for this moment and I am saying, Okay, let’s begin. Now I am ready. Of course, you’re never one hundred percent ready, but that’s a part of mastery, too: It masks the insecurities and the gaps in technique and lets you believe you are capable of anything.
  • The golfer Davis Love III was taught by his father to think of practice as a huge circle, like a clock. You work on a skill until you master it, and then you move on to the next one. When you’ve mastered that, you move on to the next, and the next, and the next, and eventually you’ll come full circle to the task that you began with, which will now need remedial work because of all the time you’ve spent on other things.
  • Jerome Robbins liked to say that you do your best work after your biggest disasters. For one thing, it’s so painful it almost guarantees that you won’t make those mistakes again. Also, you have nothing to lose; you’ve hit bottom, and the only place to go is up. A fiasco compels you to change dramatically. The golfer Bobby Jones said, I never learned anything from a match I won. He respected defeat and he profited from it.
  • Ideas take on many forms. There are good ideas and bad ideas. Big ideas and little ideas. A good idea is one that turns you on rather than shuts you off. It keeps generating more ideas and they improve on one another. A bad idea closes doors instead of opening them. It’s confining and restrictive. The line between good and bad ideas is very thin. A bad idea in the hands of the right person can easily be tweaked into a good idea.
  • When I look back on my best work, it was inevitably created in what I call The Bubble. I eliminated every distraction, sacrificed almost everything that gave me pleasure, placed myself in a single-minded isolation chamber, and structured my life so that everything was not only feeding the work but subordinated to it. It is not a particularly sociable way to operate. It’s actively anti-social. On the other hand, it is pro-creative.
  • Sadly, some people never get beyond the box stage in their creative life. We all know people who have announced that they’ve started work on a project– say, a book– but some time passes, and when you politely ask how it’s going, they tell you that they’re still researching. Weeks, months, years pass and they produce nothing. They have tons of research but it’s never enough to nudge them toward the actual process of writing the book.
  • Repetition is a problem if it forces us to cling to our past successes. Constant reminders of the things that worked inhibit us from trying something bold and new. We lose sight of the fact that we weren’t searching for a formula when we first did something great; we were in unexplored territory, following our instincts and passions wherever they might lead us. It’s only when we look back that we see a path, and it’s only there because we blazed it.
  • You’ve got two minutes to come up with sixty uses for the stool. A lot of interesting things happen when you set an aggressive quota, even with ideas. People’s competitive juices are stirred. Instead of panicking they focus, and with that comes an increased fluency and agility of mind. People are forced to suspend critical thinking. To meet the quota, they put their internal critic on hold and let everything out. They’re no longer choking off good impulses.
  • When I’ve learned all I can at the core of a piece, I pull back and become the Queen of Detachment. I move so far back that I become a surrogate for the audience. I see the work the way they will see it. New, fresh, objectively. In the theater, I frequently go to the back and watch the dancers rehearse. If I could watch from farther away, from outside the theater in the street, I would. That’s how much detachment I need from my work in order to understand it.
  • I cannot overstate how much a generous spirit contributes to good luck. Look at the luckiest people around you, the ones you envy, the ones who seem to have destiny falling habitually into their laps. What are they doing that singles them out? It isn’t dumb luck if it happens repeatedly. If they’re anything like the fortunate people I know, they’re prepared, they’re always working at their craft, they’re alert, they involve their friends in their work, and they tend to make others feel lucky to be around them.
  • There are mighty demons, but they’re hardly unique to me. You probably share some. If I let them, they’ll shut down my impulses (‘No, you can’t do that’) and perhaps turn off the spigots of creativity altogether. So I combat my fears with a staring-down ritual, like a boxer looking his opponent right in the eye before a bout. 1. People will laugh at me? Not the people I respect; they haven’t yet, and they’re not going to start now…. 2. Someone has done it before? Honey, it’s all been done before. Nothing’s original. Not Homer or Shakespeare and certainly not you. Get over yourself. 3. I have nothing to say? An irrelevant fear. We all have something to say. I will upset someone I love? A serious worry that is not easily exorcised or stared down because you never know how loved ones will respond to your creation. The best you can do is remind yourself that you’re a good person with good intentions. You’re trying to create unity, not discord.  5. Once executed, the idea will never be as good as it is in my mind? Toughen up. Leon Battista Alberti, the 15th century architectural theorist, said, ‘Errors accumulate in the sketch and compound in the model.’ But better an imperfect dome in Florence than cathedrals in the clouds.
  • A lot of habitually creative people have preparation rituals linked to the setting in which they choose to start their day. By putting themselves into that environment, they start their creative day. The composer Igor Stravinsky did the same thing every morning when he entered his studio to work: He sat at the piano and played a Bach fugue. Perhaps he needed the ritual to feel like a musician, or the playing somehow connected him to musical notes, his vocabulary. Perhaps he was honoring his hero, Bach, and seeking his blessing for the day. Perhaps it was nothing more than a simple method to get his fingers moving, his motor running, his mind thinking music. But repeating the routine each day in the studio induced some click that got him started. In the end, there is no ideal condition for creativity. What works for one person is useless for another. The only criterion is this: Make it easy on yourself. Find a working environment where the prospect of wrestling with your muse doesn’t scare you, doesn’t shut you down. It should make you want to be there, and once you find it, stick with it. To get the creative habit, you need a working environment that’s habit-forming. All preferred working states, no matter how eccentric, have one thing in common: When you enter into them, they compel you to get started.
  • Your Creative Autobiography 1. What is the first creative moment you remember? 2. Was anyone there to witness or appreciate it? 3. What is the best idea you’ve ever had? 4. What made it great in your mind? 5. What is the dumbest idea? 6. What made it stupid? 7. Can you connect the dots that led you to this idea? 8. What is your creative ambition? 9. What are the obstacles to this ambition? 10. What are the vital steps to achieving this ambition? 11. How do you begin your day? 12. What are your habits? What patterns do you repeat? 13. Describe your first successful creative act. 14. Describe your second successful creative act. 15. Compare them. 16. What are your attitudes toward: money, power, praise, rivals, work, play? 17. Which artists do you admire most? 18. Why are they your role models? 19. What do you and your role models have in common? 20. Does anyone in your life regularly inspire you? 21. Who is your muse? 22. Define muse. 23. When confronted with superior intelligence or talent, how do you respond? 24. When faced with stupidity, hostility, intransigence, laziness, or indifference in others, how do you respond? 25. When faced with impending success or the threat of failure, how do you respond? 26. When you work, do you love the process or the result? 27. At what moments do you feel your reach exceeds your grasp? 28. What is your ideal creative activity? 29. What is your greatest fear? 30. What is the likelihood of either of the answers to the previous two questions happening? 31. Which of your answers would you most like to change? 32. What is your idea of mastery? 33. What is your greatest dream?

 

 

Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative (Austin Kleon)

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  • Validation is for parking.
  • You’re ready. Start making stuff.
  • Be nice. The world is a small town.
  • Keep all your passions in your life.
  • Practice productive procrastination.
  • Copying is about reverse-engineering.
  • All fiction, in fact, is fan fiction.
  • Side projects and hobbies are important
  • Read deeply. Stay open. Continue to wonder.
  • What is originality? Undetected plagiarism.
  • Enjoy your obscurity while it lasts. Use it.
  • Show just a little bit of what you’re working on.
  • Creative people need time to just sit around and do nothing.
  • The only mofos in my circle are people that I can learn from.
  • Pretend to be making something until you actually make something.
  • So go on, get angry. But keep your mouth shut and go do your work.
  • Complain about the way other people make software by making software.
  • Step 1: Wonder at something. Step 2: Invite others to wonder with you.
  • Eat breakfast. Do some push-ups. Go for long walks. Get plenty of sleep.
  • Every new idea is just a mashup or a remix of one or more previous ideas.
  • You don’t want to look like your heroes, you want to see like your heroes.
  • Don’t worry about unity – what unifies your work is the fact that you made it. –
  • As Salvador Dalí said, Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.
  • It’s in the act of making things and doing our work that we figure out who we are.
  • when people give you advice, they’re really just talking to themselves in the past.
  • Whether you’re in school or not, it’s always your job to get yourself an education.
  • Find the most talented person in the room, and if it’s not you, go stand next to him.
  • Establishing and keeping a routine can be even more important than having a lot of time.
  • If you find that you’re the most talented person in the room, you need to find another room.
  • If you ever find that you’re the most talented person in the room, you need to find another room.
  • My grandpa used to tell my dad, Son, it’s not the money you make, it’s the money you hold on to.
  • If you’re worried about giving your secrets away, you can share your dots without connecting them.
  • Look things up. Chase down every reference. Go deeper than anybody else – that’s how you’ll get ahead.
  • In the end, creativity isn’t just the things we choose to put in, it’s the things we choose to leave out.
  • You are, in fact, a mashup of what you choose to let into your life. You are the sum of your influences.
  • Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work. —Gustave Flaubert
  • Dress for the job you want, not the job you have, and you have to start doing the work you want to be doing.
  • If all your favorite makers got together and collaborated, what would they make with you leading the crew?
  • Whenever I’ve become lost over the year, I just look at my website and ask myself, What can I fill this with?
  • Personally, I think bad weather leads to better art. You don’t want to go outside, so you stay inside and work.
  • It’s one of my theories that when people give you advice, they’re really just talking to themselves in the past.
  • Start copying what you love. Copy copy copy copy. At the end of the copy, you will find yourself. Yohji Yamamoto
  • The thing is: It takes a lot of energy to be creative. You don’t have that energy if you waste it on other stuff.
  • Gustave Flaubert said, be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.
  • Your job is to collect good ideas. The more good ideas you collect, the more you can choose from to be influenced by.
  • Amassing a body of work or building a career is a lot about the slow accumulation of little bits of effort over time.
  • Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But, since no one was listening, everything must be said again.
  • Get comfortable with being misunderstood, disparaged, or ignored – the trick is to be too busy doing your work to care.
  • In Conan O’Brien’s words, “It is our failure to become our perceived ideal that ultimately defines us and makes us unique.”
  • Scratch your own itch – Draw the art you want to see, start the business you want to run, build the products you want to use.
  • If you love different things, you just keep spending time with them. Let them talk to each other. Something will begin to happen.
  • Pretend to be something you’re not until you are—fake it until you’re successful, until everybody sees you the way you want them.
  • Step 1: Wonder at something. Step 2: Invite others to wonder with you. You should wonder at the things nobody else is wondering about.
  • Write the kind of story you like best – write the story you want to read. The same principle applies to your life and your career.
  • You’ll never get that freedom back again once people start paying you attention, and especially not once they start paying you money.
  • Don’t just steal the style, steal the thinking behind the style. You don’t want to look like your heroes, you want to see like your heroes.
  • If you feel like you have two or three real passions, don’t pick and choose between them. Don’t discard. Keep all your passions in your life.
  • What a good artist understands is that nothing comes from nowhere. All creative work builds on what came before. Nothing is completely original.
  • The artist is a collector… Your job is to collect good ideas. The more good ideas you collect, the more you can choose from to be influenced by.
  • Be curious about the world in which you live. Look things up. Chase down every reference. Go deeper than anybody else–that’s how you’ll get ahead.
  • Collect books, even if you don’t plan on reading them right away. Filmmaker John Waters has said, “Nothing is more important than an unread library.”
  • The most important thing is that you show your appreciation without expecting anything in return, and that you get new work out of the appreciation.
  • Step one, do good work, is incredibly hard. There are no shortcuts. Make stuff every day. Know you’re going to suck for a while. Fail. Get better.
  • French writer Andre Gide put it, Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But, since no one was listening, everything must be said again.
  • Copy your heroes. Examine where you fall short . What’s in there that makes you different? That’s what you should amplify and transform into your own work.
  • School is one thing. Education is another. The two don’t always overlap. Whether you’re in school or not, it’s always your job to get yourself an education.
  • Telling yourself you have all the time in the world, all the money in the world, all the colors in the palette, anything you want—that just kills creativity.
  • When you get sick of one project, move over to another, and when you’re sick of that one, move back to the project you left. Practice productive procrastination. –
  • Nobody is born with a style or a voice. We don’t out of the womb knowing who we are. In the beginning, we learn by pretending to be our heroes. We learn by copying.
  • Try it: Instead of keeping a rejection file, keep a praise file. Use it sparingly — don’t get lost in the past glory — but keep it around for when you need the lift.
  • Ironically, really good work often appears to be effortless. People will say, Why didn’t I think of that? They won’t see the years of toil and sweat that went into it.
  • Harold Ramis once laid out his rule for success: Find the most talented person in the room, and if it’s not you, go stand next to him. Hang out with him. Try to be helpful.
  • The latest post is the first post that visitors see, so you’re only as good as your last post. This keeps you on your toes, keeps you thinking about what you can post next.
  • Distance and difference are the secret tonic of creativity. When we get home, home is still the same. But something on our mind has been changed and that changes everything.
  • If we’re free from the burden of trying to be completely original, we can stop trying to make something out of nothing, and we can embrace influence instead of running from it.
  • The great thing about remote or dead masters is that they can’t refuse you as an apprentice. You can learn whatever you want from them. They left their lesson plans in their work.
  • In this age of information abundance and overload, those who get ahead will be the folks who figure out what to leave out, so they can concentrate on what’s really important to them.
  • The artist is a collector. Not a hoarder, mind you, there’s a difference: Hoarders collect indiscriminately, artists collect selectively. They only collect things that they really love.
  • A wonderful flaw about human beings is that we’re incapable of making perfect copies. Our failure to copy our heroes is where we discover where our own thing lives. That is how we evolve.
  • If you’re not into the world you live in, you can build your own world around you. Surround yourself with books and objects that you love. Tape things up on the wall. Create your own world.
  • Cartoonist Gary Panter said, If you have one person you’re influenced by, everyone will say you’re the next whoever. But if you rip off a hundred people, everyone will say you’re so original.
  • The manifesto is this: Draw the art you want to see, start the business you want to run, write the books you want to read, build the products you want to use – do the work you want to see done.
  • Google everything. I mean everything. Google your dreams, Google your problems. Don’t ask a question before you Google it. You’ll either find the answer or you’ll come up with a better question.
  • At some point, you’ll have to move from imitating your heroes to emulating them. Imitation is about copying. Emulation is when imitation goes one step further, breaking through into your own thing.
  • Draw the art you want to see, start the business you want to run, play the music you want to hear, write the books you want to read, build the products you want to use – do the work you want to see done.
  • It’s the side projects that really take off. By side projects I mean the stuff that you thought was just messing around. Stuff that’s just play. That’s actually the good stuff. That’s when the magic happens.
  • The trouble with creative work: Sometimes by the time people catch on to what’s valuable about what you do, you’re either a) bored to death with it, or b) dead. You can’t go looking for validation from external sources.
  • Not everybody will get it. People will misinterpret you and what you do. They might even call you names. So get comfortable with being misunderstood, disparaged, or ignored — the trick is to be too busy doing your work to care.
  • The computer is really good for editing your ideas, and it’s really good for getting your ideas ready for publishing out into the world, but it’s not really good for generating ideas. There are too many opportunities to hit the delete key.
  • Nicholson Baker says, if you ask yourself ‘what’s the best thing that happened today?’ it actually forces a certain kind of cheerful retrospection that pull up from the recent past things to write about that you wouldn’t otherwise think about.
  • I think it’s good to have a lot of projects going at once so you can bounce between them. When you get sick of one project, move over to another, and when you’re sick of that one, move back to the project you left. Practice productive procrastination.
  • Your brain gets too comfortable in your everyday surroundings. You need to make it uncomfortable. You need to spend some time in another land, among people that do things differently than you. Travel makes the world look new, and when the world looks new, our brains work harder.
  • The best advice is not to write what you know, it’s to write what you like. Write the kind of story you like best – write the story you want to read. The same principle applies to your life and career: Whenever you’re at a loss for what move to make next, just ask yourself, What would make a better story?
  • Chew on one thinker-writer, activist, role model- you really love. Study everything there is to know about that thinker. Then find three people the thinker loved and find out everything about them. Repeat this as many times as you can. Climb up the tree as far as you can go. Once you built your tree, it’s time to start your own branch.
  • The reason to copy your heroes and their style is so that you might somehow get a glimpse into their minds. That’s what you really want – to internalize their way of looking at the wold. If you just mimic the surface of somebody’s work without understanding where they are coming from, your work will never be anything more that a knockoff.
  • Don’t wait until you know who you are to get started. If I’d waited to know who I was or what I was about before I started “being creative,” well, I’d be sitting around trying to figure myself out instead of making things. In my experience, it’s in the act of making things and doing our work that we figure out who we are. You’re ready. Start making stuff.
  • You don’t get to pick your family, but you can pick your teachers and you can pick your friends and you can pick the music you listen to and you can pick the books you read and you can pick the movies you see. You are, in fact, a mashup of what you choose to let into your life. You are the sum of your influences. The German writer Goethe said, “We are shaped and fashioned by what we love.
  • Always be reading. Go to the library. There’s magic in being surrounded by books. Get lost in the stacks. Read bibliographies. It’s not the book you start with, it’s the book that book leads you to. Collect books, even if you don’t plan on reading them right away. Filmmaker John Waters has said, Nothing is more important than an unread library. Don’t worry about doing research. Just search.
  • Creative people need time to just sit around and do nothing. I get some of my best ideas when I’m bored, which is why I never take my shirts to the cleaners. I love ironing my shirts-it’s so boring, I almost always get good ideas. If you’re out of ideas, wash the dishes. Take really long walk. Stare at a spot on the wall for as long as you can. As the artist Maira Kalman says, “Avoiding work is the way to focus my mind.”

 

The Practice: Shipping Creative Work (Seth Godin)

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  • Your work is too important to be left to how you feel today.
  • Writers write. Runners run. Establish your identity by doing your work.
  • We have unlimited reasons to hide our work and only one reason to share it: to be of service.
  • The only choice we have is to begin. And the only place to begin is where we are. Simply begin. But begin.”
  • In order to say no with consistency and generosity, we need to have something to say ‘yes’ to. Justine Musk
  • If the problem can be solved, why worry? And if the problem can’t be solved, then worrying will do you no good.
  • Any idea withheld is an idea taken away. It’s selfish to hold back when there’s a chance you have something to offer.
  • The ability to eagerly suggest an alternative to your work is a sign that your posture is one of generosity, not grasping.
  • Excerpt: If you’re a creator of any kind (current or future) this list of quotes from The Practice should be required reading—they’re THAT good.
  • When we get really attached to how others will react to our work, we stop focusing on our work and begin to focus on controlling the outcome instead.
  • You are not your work. Your work is a series of choices made with generous intent to cause something to happen. We can always learn to make better choices.
  • If the only measure of your worth is in the outcome of a transaction, not in the practice to which you’ve committed, then of course it makes sense to cut corners and to hustle.
  • If you want to change your story, change your actions first. When we choose to act a certain way, our mind can’t help but rework our narrative to make those actions become coherent. We become what we do.
  • You can’t really decide to paint a masterpiece. You just have to think hard, work hard, and try to make a painting that you care about. Then, if you’re lucky, your work will find an audience for whom it’s meaningful.
  • When we do the work for the audience, we open the door to giving up our attachment to how the audience will receive the work. That’s up to them. Our job is to be generous, as generous as we know how to be, with our work.
  • If you want to complain that you don’t have any good ideas, please show me all your bad ideas first. Befriending your bad ideas is a useful way forward. They’re not your enemy. They are essential steps on the path to better.
  • The time we spend worrying is actually time we’re spending trying to control something that is out of our control. Time invested in something that is within our control is called work. That’s where our most productive focus lies.
  • Lost in all the noise around us is the proven truth about creativity: it’s the result of desire—the desire to find a new truth, solve an old problem, or serve someone else. Creativity is a choice, it’s not a bolt of lightning from somewhere else.
  • Everything that matters is something we’ve chosen to do. Everything that matters is a skill and an attitude. Everything that matters is something we can learn. The practice is choice plus skill plus attitude. We can learn it and we can do it again.
  • If our focus is on external validation, then the journey will always be fraught. It’s culturally impossible to do important work that will be loved by everyone. The very act of being ‘important’ means that it will have a different impact on people.
  • Ultimately, the goal is to become the best in the world at being you. To bring useful idiosyncrasy to the people you seek to change, and to earn a reputation for what you do and how you do it. The peculiar version of you, your assertions, your art.
  • It’s insulting to call a professional talented. She’s skilled, first and foremost. Many people have talent, but only a few care enough to show up fully, to earn their skill. Skill is rarer than talent. Skill is earned. Skill is available to anyone who cares enough.
  • The Bhagavad-Gita says, “It is better to follow your own path, however imperfectly, than to follow someone else’s perfectly.” Consider the people who have found their voice and made a real impact: their paths always differ, but their practices overlap in many ways.
  • If we failed, would it be worth the journey? Do you trust yourself enough to commit to engaging with a project regardless of the chances of success? The first step is to separate the process from the outcome. Not because we don’t care about the outcome. But because we do.
  • The infinite game is the game we play to play, not to win. The infinite game is a catch in the backyard with your four-year-old son. You’re not trying to win catch; you’re simply playing catch. The most important parts of our lives are games that we can’t imagine winning.
  • As Susan Kare, designer of the original Mac interface, said, “You can’t really decide to paint a masterpiece. You just have to think hard, work hard, and try to make a painting that you care about. Then, if you’re lucky, your work will find an audience for whom it’s meaningful.
  • Selling can feel selfish. We want to avoid hustling people, and so it’s easy to hold back in fear of manipulating someone. Here’s an easy test for manipulation: if the people you’re interacting with discover what you already know, will they be glad that they did what you asked them to?
  • Yes, you’re an imposter. But you’re an imposter acting in service of generosity, seeking to make things better. When we embrace imposter syndrome instead of working to make it disappear, we choose the productive way forward. The imposter is proof that we’re innovating, leading, and creating.
  • No one can possibly do a better job of being you than you can. And the best version of you is the one who has committed to a way forward. Your work is never going to be good enough (for everyone). But it’s already good enough (for someone). Committing to a practice that makes our best better is all we can do.
  • Every creator who has engaged in the practice has a long, nearly infinite string of failures. All the ways not to start a novel, not to invent the light bulb, not to transform a relationship. Again and again, creative leaders fail. It is the foundation of our work. We fail and then we edit and then we do it again.
  • When we stop worrying about whether we’ve done it perfectly, we can focus on the process instead. Saturday Night Live doesn’t go on at 11:30 p.m. because it’s ready. It goes on because it’s 11:30. We don’t ship because we’re creative. We’re creative because we ship. Take what you get and commit to a process to make it better.
  • Of course, at first, all work is lousy. At first, the work can’t be any good—not for you and not for Hemingway. But if you’re the steam shovel that keeps working at it, bit by bit, you make progress, the work gets done, and more people are touched. There’s plenty of time to make it better later. Right now, your job is to make it.
  • If you run a marathon, you’re going to get tired. It would make no sense to hire a coach and say, ‘I want you to help me train so I don’t get tired when I run a marathon.’ The only difference between the tens of thousands of people who finish the marathon and those that don’t is that the finishers figured out where to put their tired.
  • Flying across the country is safer than driving. If your goal is to get to Reno, the safest choice is to fly there, not to drive. And if you know of someone who dies in a plane crash on the way to Reno, they didn’t make a bad decision when they chose to fly. There was certainly a bad outcome, though. Decisions are good even if the outcomes aren’t.
  • Who wants to do difficult work that doesn’t fulfill us? Who wants to commit to a journey before we know it’s what we were meant to do? The trap is this: only after we do the difficult work does it become our calling. Only after we trust the process does it become our passion. ‘Do what you love’ is for amateurs. ‘Love what you do’ is the mantra for professionals.
  • Money supports our commitment to the practice. Money permits us to turn professional, to focus our energy and our time on the work, creating more impact and more connection, not less. And more importantly, money is how our society signifies enrollment. The person who has paid for your scarce time and scarce output is more likely to value it, to share it, and to take it seriously.
  • A key component of practical empathy is a commitment to not be empathic to everyone. A contemporary painter must ignore the criticism or disdain that comes from someone who’s hoping for a classical still life. The tech innovator has to be okay with leaving behind the laggard who’s still using a VCR. That’s okay, because the work isn’t for them. ‘It’s not for you’ is the unspoken possible companion to ‘Here, I made this.’
  • Where is the fuel to keep us going? Anger gets you only so far, and then it destroys you. Jealousy might get you started, but it will fade. Greed seems like a good idea until you discover that it eliminates all of your joy. The path forward is about curiosity, generosity, and connection. These are the three foundations of art. Art is a tool that gives us the ability to make things better and to create something new on behalf of those who will use it to create the next thing.
  • One of the problems with art is that it is self-anointing: Anyone can be an artist by simply pointing to themselves and saying so. The truth is that there are very few artists. [Making the world a better place through art] is the highest attainment of the specialization. It is to recognize that it is not all about you, and that you have a communal function you can serve to help everyone get along. This is important for people to understand, especially in a capitalist society.
  • To Be of Service Isn’t that what we’re here to do? To do work we’re proud of. To put ourselves on the hook. To find the contribution we’re capable of. The only way to be on this journey is to begin. But there isn’t a guarantee. In fact, most of what we seek to do will not work. But our intent—the intent of being of service, of making things better, of building something that matters—is an essential part of the pattern. Because most of us, most of the time, act without intent.
  • Who Can You Reach? How is it possible for three cowboys to herd a thousand cattle? Easy. They don’t. They herd ten cattle, and those cattle influence fifty cattle and those cattle influence the rest. That’s the way every single widespread movement/product/service has changed the world. And so we ignore all the others. We ignore the masses and the selfish critics and those in love with the status quo. First, find ten. Ten people who care enough about your work to enroll in the journey and then to bring others along.
  • All of us get an endless supply of ideas, notions, and inklings. Successful people, often without realizing it, ignore the ones that are less likely to ‘work,’ and instead focus on the projects that are more likely to advance the mission. Sometimes we call this good taste. It’s possible to get better at this pre-filtering. By doing it out loud. By writing out the factors that you’re seeking, or even by explaining to someone else how your part of the world works. Instinct is great. It’s even better when you work on it.

 

The Artist’s Way (Julia Cameron)

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  • Art is born in attention.
  • Creating does move us on.
  • Leap, and the net will appear.
  • Serious art is born from serious play.
  • Art is an art of the soul, not the intellect.
  • Artists and intellectuals are not the same animal.
  • Pray to catch the bus, then run as fast as you can.
  • Creativity – like human life itself – begins in darkness
  • Creativity is an experience – to my eye, a spiritual experience.
  • Creativity is not and never has been sensible. Why should it be?
  • Anger is meant to be acted upon. It is not meant to be acted out.
  • Creativity occurs in the moment, and in the moment we are timeless.
  • Progress, not perfection, is what we should be asking of ourselves.
  • Creativity requires faith. Faith requires that we relinquish control.
  • Do what intrigues you, explore what interests you; think mystery not mastery.
  • All too often, it is audacity and not talent that moves an artist to center stage.
  • As you expect God to be more generous, God will be able to be more generous to you.
  • Over any extended period of time, being an artist requires enthusiasm more than discipline.
  • Food, work, and sex are all good in themselves. It is the abuse of them that makes them creativity issues.
  • Difficult as it is to remember, it is our work that creates the market, not the market that creates our work.
  • By being willing to be a bad artist, you have a chance to be an artist, and perhaps, over time, a very good one.
  • Making art begins with making hay while the sun shines. It begins with getting into the now and enjoying your day.
  • But do you know how old I will be by the time I learn to really play the piano / act / paint / write a decent play?”
  • Listening to the siren song of more, we are deaf to the still small voice waiting in our soul to whisper, Youre enough.
  • One of the chief barriers to accepting Gods generosity is our limited notion of what we are in fact able to accomplish.
  • Growth is an erratic forward movement; two steps forward, one step back. Remember that and be very gentle with yourself.
  • It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that they are difficult. SENECA
  • Survival lies in sanity, and sanity lies in paying attention…the capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention.
  • In order to work freely on a project, an artist must be at least functionally free of resentment (anger) and resistance (fear).
  • Life is what we make of it. Whether we conceive of an inner god force or another outer God, doesnt matter. Relying on that force does.
  • All too often it is audacity and not talent that moves an artist to center stage. As you move toward a dream, the dream moves toward you.
  • For many of us, raised to believe that money is the real source of security, a dependence on God feels foolhardy, suicidal, even laughable.
  • Once you accept that it is natural to create, you can begin to accept a second idea – that the creator will hand you whatever you need for the project.
  • By seeking the creator within and embracing our own gift of creativity, we learn to be spiritual in this world, to trust that the universe is good and so are we and so is all of creation.
  • Stumbles are normal. But do you know how old I’ll be by the time I learn to really play the piano/act/paint/write a decent play? Yes…the same age you will be if you don’t. So let’s start.
  • Making a piece of art may feel a lot like telling a family secret. Secret telling, by its very nature, involves shame and fear. It asks the question, “What will they think of me once they know this?
  • No matter what your age or your life path, whether making art is your career or your hobby or your dream, it is not too late or too egotistical or too selfish or too silly to work on your creativity.
  • Our tears prepare the ground for our future growth. Without this creative moistening, we may remain barren. We must allow the bolt of pain to strike us. Remember, this is useful pain; lightning illuminates.
  • Boredom is just Whats the use? in disguise. And Whats the use? is fear, and fear means you are secretly in despair. So put your fears on the page. Put anything on the page. Put three pages of it on the page.
  • People frequently believe the creative life is grounded in fantasy. The more difficult truth is that creativity is grounded in reality, in particular, the focused, the well-observed or specifically imagined.
  • Creativity is GOD ENERGY flowing through us, shaped by us, like light flowing through a crystal prism. When we are clear about who we are and what we are doing, the energy flows freely and we experience no strain.
  • In times of pain, when the future is too terrifying to contemplate and the past too painful to remember, I have learned to pay attention to right now. The precise moment I was in was always the only safe place for me.
  • It is my experience that this is the case. I have learned, as a rule of thumb, never to ask whether you can do something. Say, instead, that you are doing it. Then fasten your seat belt. The most remarkable things follow.
  • God has lots of money. God has lots of movie ideas, novel ideas, poems, songs, paintings, acting jobs. God has a supply of loves, friends, houses that are available to us. By listening to the creator within, we are led to our right path.
  • Judging your early artistic efforts is artist abuse. This happens in any number of ways: beginning work is measured against masterworks of other artists; beginning work is exposed to premature criticism, shown to overly critical friends.
  • In order to thrive as artists – and, one could argue, as people – we need to be available to the universal flow. When we put a stopper on our capacity for joy by anorectically declining the small gifts of life, we turn aside the larger gifts as well.
  • In filling the well, think magic. Think delight. Think fun. Do not think duty. Do not do what you should do—spiritual sit-ups like reading a dull but recommended critical text. Do what intrigues you, explore what interests you; think mystery, not mastery.
  • Often people attempt to live their lives backwards: they try to have more things, or more money, in order to do more of what they want so that they will be happier. The way it actually works is the reverse. You must first be who you really are, then, do what you need to do, in order to have what you want.
  • As artists, we cannot afford to think about who is getting ahead of us, and how they dont deserve it. The desire to be better than can choke off the simple desire to be. As artists, we cannot afford this thinking. It leads us away from our own voices and choices and into a defensive game that centers outside of ourselves and our sphere of influence.
  • Most of us are not raised to actively encounter our destiny. We may not know that we have one. As children, we are seldom told we have a place in life that is uniquely ours alone. Instead, we are encouraged to believe that our life should somehow fulfill the expectations of others, that we will (or should) find our satisfactions as they have found theirs.
  • Blocked creatives like to think they are looking at changing their whole life in one fell swoop. This form of grandiosity is very often its own undoing.  By setting the jumps too high and making the price tag too great, the recovering artist sets defeat in motion. . . Creative people are dramatic, and we use negative drama to scare ourselves out of our creativity with this notion of wholesale and often destructive change.  Fantasizing about pursuing our art full-time, we fail to pursue it part-time—or at all.
  • Rather than being taugh to ask ourselves who we are, we are schooled to ask others. We are, in effect, trained to listen to others’ versions of ourselves. We are brought up in our life as told to us by someone else! When we survey our lives, seeking to fulfill our creativity, we often see we had a dream that went glimmering because we believed, and those around us believed, that the dream was beyond our reach. Many of us would have been, or at least might have been, done, tried something, if…If we had known who we really were.
  • Most of us are not raised to actively encounter our destiny. We may not know that we have one. As children, we are seldom told we have a place in life that is uniquely ours alone. Instead, we are encouraged to believe that our life should somehow fulfill the expectations of others, that we will (or should) find our satisfactions as they have found theirs. Rather than being taugh to ask ourselves who we are, we are schooled to ask others. We are, in effect, trained to listen to others’ versions of ourselves. We are brought up in our life as told to us by someone else! When we survey our lives, seeking to fulfill our creativity, we often see we had a dream that went glimmering because we believed, and those around us believed, that the dream was beyond our reach. Many of us would have been, or at least might have been, done, tried something, if… If we had known who we really were.

 

 

The Pursuit of Perfect (Tal Ben-Shahar)

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  • If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate.
  • Our behavior toward others is often a reflection of our treatment of ourselves.
  • Change is not a threat but a challenge; the unknown is not frightening but fascinating.
  • As J. P. Morgan once remarked, ‘I can do a year’s work in nine months, but not in twelve.’
  • The pain associated with the fear of failure is usually more intense than the pain following an actual failure.
  • Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard noted ‘To dare is to lose one’s footing momentarily. Not to dare, is to lose oneself.
  • The problem in today’s corporate world, as well as in many other realms, is not hard work; the problem is insufficient recovery.
  • If the only dream we have is of a perfect life, we are doomed to disappointment since such dreams simply cannot come true in the real world.
  • Taking the constraints of reality into consideration, the Optimalist then works toward creating not the perfect life but the best possible one.
  • Focusing on the good does not mean ignoring the bad, but rather the understanding that the most effective way to eradicate the bad is to do good.
  • Abraham Lincoln once jokingly asked, ‘How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg?’ His answer? ‘Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.
  • Those who understand that failure is inextricably linked with achievement are the ones who learn, grow, and ultimately do well. Learn to fail, or fail to learn.
  • Acceptance is not a call for mediocrity, for compromise, but rather a prerequisite for the attainment of optimal success and happiness on a personal as well as interpersonal level.
  • It is doubtful whether any heavier curse could be imposed on man than the complete gratification of all his wishes without effort on his part, leaving nothing for his hopes, desires or struggles.
  • Your joy is your sorrow unmasked. And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears. And how else can it be? The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.
  • Paradoxically, our overall self-confidence and our belief in our own ability to deal with setbacks may be reinforced when we fail, because we realize that the beast we had always feared—is not as terrifying as we thought it was.
  • Matt, the student who jokingly threatened to report me to his roommate if he saw me unhappy, thought that a person teaching happiness should radiate joy 24-7. Matt’s idea was not only unrealistic, it was in fact a recipe for unhappiness.
  • The notion that we can enjoy unlimited success or live without emotional pain and failure may be an inspiring ideal, but it is not a principle by which to lead one’s life, since in the long run it leads to dissatisfaction and unhappiness.
  • The first step was to accept the reality that I could not have it all. While it seems obvious that you cannot work fourteen hours a day and remain fit and healthy and be a devoted father and husband, in my perfectionist fantasy world, nothing was impossible.
  • Helen Keller, who in her lifetime knew much suffering, as well as joy, noted that ‘character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired, and success achieved.
  • In essence, Perfectionists reject everything that deviates from their flawless, faultless ideal vision, and as a result they suffer whenever they do not meet their own unrealistic standards. Optimalists accept, and make the best of, everything that life has to offer.
  • Why the double standard, the generosity toward our neighbor and the miserliness where we ourselves are concerned? And so I propose that we add a new rule, which we can call the Platinum Rule, to our moral code: ‘Do not do unto yourself what you would not do unto others.’
  • If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.
  • low self-esteem, eating disorders, sexual dysfunction, depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, psychosomatic disorders, chronic fatigue syndrome, alcoholism, social phobia, panic disorder, a paralyzing tendency to procrastination, and serious difficulties in relationships.
  • Optimalists tend to be benefit finders—the sort of people who find the silver lining in the dark cloud, who make lemonade out of lemons, who look on the bright side of life, and who do not fault writers for using too many cliches. With a knack for turning setbacks into opportunities, the Optimalist goes through life with an overall sense of optimism.
  • The emotional life that the Perfectionist expects is one of a constant high; the Optimalist expects his life to include emotional ups, emotional downs, and everything in between. The Perfectionist rejects painful emotions that do not meet his expectation of an unwavering flow of positive emotions; the Optimalist permits himself to experience the full range of human emotions.
  • In the psychological realm, injuries come in the form of emotional harm; feeling lethargic, anxious, or depressed are some of the signals that we need some time to recover. These signals, unlike physical injuries, are more subtle and easier to discount. And it is not uncommon for a person to continue working just as hard, if not harder, while the mind and the heart are pleading for a break.
  • When the Dalai Lama was then asked to clarify whether indeed the object of compassion may be the self, he responded: ‘Yourself first, and then in a more advanced way the aspiration will embrace others. In a way, high levels of compassion are nothing but an advanced state of that self-interest. That’s why it is hard for people who have a strong sense of self-hatred to have genuine compassion toward others. There is no anchor, no basis to start from.’
  • The rising levels of mental health problems, coupled with improved psychiatric medication, are thrusting us toward a brave new world. To reverse direction, rather than listening to advertisers who promise us the wonder drug, the magic pill that will improve performance and mood, we need to listen to our nature and rediscover its wonders. Regular recovery, on the micro-, mid-, and macrolevels, can often do the work of psychiatric medicine, only naturally.
  • … psychologists today differentiate between positive perfectionism, which is adaptive and healthy, and negative perfectionism, which is maladaptive and neurotic. I regard these two types of perfectionism as so dramatically different in both their underlying nature and their ramifications that I prefer to use entirely different terms to refer to them. Throughout this book, I will refer to negative perfectionism simply as perfectionism and to positive perfectionism as optimalism.
  • Perfectionism and optimalism are not distinct ways of being, an either-or choice, but rather they coexist in each person. And while we can move from perfectionism toward optimalism, we never fully leave perfectionism behind and never fully reach optimalism ahead. The optimalism ideal is not a distant shore to be reached but a distant star that guides us and can never be reached. As Carl Rogers pointed out, The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction, not a destination.
  • The word appreciate has two meanings. The first meaning is ‘to be thankful,’ the opposite of taking something for granted. The second meaning is ‘to increase in value’ (as money appreciates in the bank). Combined, these two meanings point to a truth that has been proved repeatedly in research on gratitude: when we appreciate the good in our lives, the good grows and we have more of it. The opposite, sadly, is also true: when we fail to appreciate the good—when we take the good in our lives for granted—the good depreciates.
  • The basic premise of cognitive therapy is that we react to our interpretation of events rather than directly to the events themselves, which is why the same event may elicit radically different responses from different people. An event leads to a thought (an interpretation of the event), and the thought in turn evokes an emotion. I see a baby (event), recognize her as my daughter (thought), and feel love (emotion). I see the audience waiting for my lecture (event), interpret it as threatening (thought), and experience anxiety (emotion).
  • One of the wishes that I always have for my students is that they should fail more often (although they are understandably not thrilled to hear me tell them so). If they fail frequently, it means that they try frequently, that they put themselves on the line and challenge themselves. It is only from the experience of challenging ourselves that we learn and grow, and we often develop and mature much more from our failures than from our successes. Moreover, when we put ourselves on the line, when we fall down and get up again, we become stronger and more resilient.
  • We all have an image of our ideal self, an elaborate construct of the kind of person we would like to be. While it is not always possible to feel as this constructed self would (fearless and compassionate at all times, for example), we can act in accordance with its ideals (courageous, generous, and so on). Active acceptance is about recognizing things as they are and then choosing the course of action we deem appropriate and worthy of ourselves. It is about recognizing that at every moment in our life we have a choice—to be afraid and yet to act courageously, to feel jealous and yet to act benevolently, to accept being human and act with humanity.
  • The goal of cognitive therapy is to restore a sense of realism by getting rid of distorted thinking. When we identify an irrational thought (a cognitive distortion), we change the way we think about an event and thereby change the way we feel. For example, if I experience paralyzing anxiety before a job interview, I can evaluate the thought that elicits the anxiety (if I am rejected, it will all be over and I will never find a job) and reinterpret the event by disputing and replacing the distorted evaluation with a rational one (although I really want this job, there are many other desirable jobs out there). The distortion elicits an intense and unhealthy fear of failure; the rational thought reframes the situation and puts it in perspective.

 

 

Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi)

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  • But consuming culture is never as rewarding as producing it.
  • To change personality means to learn new patterns of attention.
  • Paradoxically, the self expands through acts of self-forgetfulness.
  • No worthwhile effort in one’s life is either a success or a failure.
  • Human beings are the only creatures who are allowed to fail. If an ant fails, it’s dead.
  • Creative people usually enjoy not only their work but also the many other activities in their lives.
  • What drove me on to be my own boss was that the thing that I wanted most was to be able to have a nap every day.
  • Creative persons definitely know both extremes and experience both with equal intensity and without inner conflict.
  • Creativity must, in the last analysis, be seen not as something happening within a person but in the relationships within a system.
  • Second, to have a good life, it is not enough to remove what is wrong from it. We also need a positive goal, otherwise why keep going?
  • Finally, the openness and sensitivity of creative individuals often exposes them to suffering and pain yet also a great deal of enjoyment.
  • Creative individuals are remarkable for their ability to adapt to almost any situation and to make do with whatever is at hand to reach their goals.
  • The second reason creativity is so fascinating is that when we are involved in it, we feel that we are living more fully than during the rest of life.
  • Therefore, the novelty that survives to change a domain is usually the work of someone who can operate at both ends of these polarities—and that is the kind of person we call ‘creative.’
  • The insight presumably occurs when a subconscious connection between ideas fits so well that it is forced to pop out into awareness, like a cork held underwater breaking out into the air after it is released.
  • Indeed, it could be said that the most obvious achievement of these people is that they created their own lives. And how they achieved that is something worth knowing, because it can be applied to all our lives.
  • Like the climber who reaches the top of the mountain and, after looking around in wonder at the magnificent view, rejoices at the sight of an even taller neighboring peak, these people never run out of exciting goals.
  • When people are asked to choose from a list the best description of how they feel when doing whatever they enjoy doing most—reading, climbing mountains, playing chess, whatever—the answer most frequently chosen is “designing or discovering something new.
  • One can be creative by living like a monk, or by burning the candle at both ends. Michelangelo was not greatly fond of women, while Picasso couldn’t get enough of them. Both changed the domain of painting, even though their personalities had little in common.
  • Creative persons differ from one another in a variety of ways, but in one respect they are unanimous: They all love what they do. It is not the hope of achieving fame or making money that drives them; rather, it is the opportunity to do the work that they enjoy doing.
  • In all cultures, men are brought up to be ‘masculine’ and to disregard and repress those aspects of their temperament that the culture regards as ‘feminine,’ whereas women are expected to do the opposite. Creative individuals to a certain extent escape this rigid gender role of stereotyping.
  • But if you don’t learn to be creative in your personal life, the chances of contributing to the culture drop even closer to zero. And what really matters, in the last account, is not whether your name has been attached to a recognized discovery, but whether you have lived a full and creative life.
  • For example, Leonardo da Vinci, certainly one of the most creative persons… was apparently reclusive, and almost compulsive in his behavior. If you had met him at a cocktail party, you would have thought that he was a tiresome bore and would have left him standing in a corner as soon as possible.
  • Generally, creative people are thought to be rebellious and independent. Yet it is impossible to be creative without having first internalized a domain of culture. And a person must believe in the importance of such a domain in order to learn its rules; hence, he or she must be to a certain extent a traditionalist.
  • I mean, we’re only here for a short while. And I think it’s such a lucky accident, having been born, that we’re almost obliged to pay attention. In some ways, this is getting far afield. I mean, we are—as far as we know—the only part of the universe that’s self-conscious. We could even be the universe’s form of consciousness.
  • After curiosity, this quality of concentrated attention is what creative individuals mention most often as having set them apart in college from their peers. Without this quality, they could not have sustained the hard work, the ‘perspiration.’ Curiosity and drive are in many ways the yin and the yang that need to be combined in order to achieve something new.
  • One thing about creative work is that it’s never done. In different words, every person we interviewed said it was equally true that they had worked every minute of their careers, and that they had never worked a day in all their lives. They experienced even the most focused immersion in extremely difficult tasks as a lark, an exhilarating and playful adventure.
  • To create flow: There are clear goals every step of the way. There is immediate feedback to one’s actions. There is a balance between challenges and skills. Action and awareness are merged. Distractions are excluded from consciousness. There is no worry of failure.   Self-consciousness disappears. The sense of time becomes distorted.  The activity becomes autotelic
  • A large majority of our respondents were inspired by a tension in their domain that became obvious when looked at from the perspective of another domain. Even though they do not think of themselves as interdisciplinary, their best work bridges realms of ideas. Their histories tend to cast doubt on the wisdom of overspecialization, where bright young people are trained to become exclusive experts in one field and shun breadth like the plague.
  • So the definition that follows from this perspective is: Creativity is any act, idea, or product that changes an existing domain, or that transforms an existing domain into a new one. And the definition of a creative person is: someone whose thoughts or actions change a domain, or establish a new domain. It is important to remember, however, that a domain cannot be changed without the explicit or implicit consent of a field responsible for it.
  • While we cannot foresee the eventual results of creativity—of the attempt to impose our desires on reality, to become the main power that decides the destiny of every form of life on the planet—at least we can try to understand better what this force is and how it works. Because for better or for worse, our future is now closely tied to human creativity. The result will be determined in large part by our dreams and by the struggle to make them real.
  • It has been said that all the stories have already been told, that there is nothing left to say. At best, a writer’s job is to pour new wine in old bottles, to retell in a new way the same emotional predicaments that humans have felt since the beginnings of time. Yet many authors find this a worthwhile challenge; they think of themselves as gardeners whose task is to cultivate perennial ideas generation after generation. The same flowers will bloom each spring, but if the gardener slacks off, weeds will take over.
  • The flow experience was described in almost identical terms regardless of the activity that produced it. Athletes, artists, religious mystics, scientists, and ordinary working people described their most rewarding experiences with very similar words. And the description did not vary much by culture, gender or age; old and young, rich and poor, men and women, Americans and Japanese seem to experience enjoyment in the same way, even though they may be doing very different things to attain it. Nine main elements were mentioned over and over again to describe how it feels when an experience is enjoyable.
  • All our contemporaries…had some big ideology to live for. Everybody thought he had to either fight in Spain or die for something else, and most of us had to be in prison for one reason or another. And then at the end it turns out that none of these great ideologies was worth your sacrificing anything for. Even doing personal good is very difficult to be absolutely sure about. It’s very difficult to know exactly whether to live for an ideology or even to live for doing good. But there cannot be anything wrong in making a pot, I’ll tell you. When making a pot you can’t bring any evil into the world. – Eva Zeisel, ceramist.
  • Most creative individuals find out early what their best rhythms are for sleeping, eating, and working, and abide by them even when it is tempting to do otherwise. They wear clothes that are comfortable, they interact only with people they find congenial, they do only things they think are important. Of course, such idiosyncrasies are not endearing to those they have to deal with, and it is not surprising that creative people are generally considered strange and difficult to get along with. But personalizing patterns of action helps to free the mind from the expectations that make demands on attention and allows intense concentration on matters that count.
  • Try to be surprised by something every day. It could be something you see, hear, or read about. Stop to look at the unusual car parked at the curb, taste the new item on the cafeteria menu, actually listen to your colleague at the office. How is this different from other similar cars, dishes or conversations? What is its essence? Don’t assume that you already know what these things are all about, or that even if you knew them, they wouldn’t matter anyway. Experience this once thing for what it is, not what you think it is. Be open to what the world is telling you. Life is nothing more than a stream of experiences – the more widely and deeply you swim in it, the richer your life will be.
  • Creative individuals have a great deal of physical energy, but they are also often quiet and at rest. Creative individuals tend to be smart, yet also naive at the same time.  A third—paradoxical trait refers to the related combination of playfulness and discipline.   Creative individuals alternate between imagination and fantasy at one end, and a rooted sense of reality at the other.  Creative people seem to harbor opposite tendencies on the continuum between extroversion and introversion. Creative individuals are also remarkably humble and proud at the same time.  Creative individuals are also remarkably humble and proud at the same time.   Most creative persons are very passionate about their work, yet they can be extremely objective about it as well. 
  • This book is about creativity, based on histories of contemporary people who know about it firsthand. It starts with a description of what creativity is, it reviews the way creative people work and live, and it ends with ideas about how to make your life more like that of the creative exemplars I have studied. There are no simple solutions in these pages and a few unfamiliar ideas. The real story of creativity is more difficult and strange than many overly optimistic accounts have claimed. For one thing, as I will try to show, an idea or product that deserves the label ‘creative’ arises from the synergy of many sources and not only from the mind of a single person. It is easier to enhance creativity by changing conditions in the environment than by trying to make people think more creatively. And a genuinely creative accomplishment is almost never the result of a sudden insight, a lightbulb flashing on in the dark, but comes after years of hard work.
  • Another consequence of limited attention is that creative individuals are often considered odd—or even arrogant, selfish, and ruthless. It is important to keep in mind that these are not traits of creative people, but traits that the rest of us attribute to them on the basis of our perceptions. When we meet a person who focuses all of his attention on physics or music and ignores us and forgets our names, we call that person ‘arrogant’ even though he may be extremely humble and friendly if he could only spare attention from his pursuit. If that person is so taken with his domain that he fails to take our wishes into account we call him ‘insensitive’ or ‘selfish’ even though such attitudes are far from his mind. Similarly, if he pursues his work regardless of other people’s plans we call him ‘ruthless.’ Yet, it is practically impossible to learn a domain deeply enough to make a change in it without dedicating all of one’s attention to it and thereby appearing to be arrogant, selfish, and ruthless to those who believe they have a right to the creative person’s attention.
  • Are there then no traits that distinguish creative people? If I had to express in one word what makes their personalities different from others, it would be complexity. By this I mean that they show tendencies of thought and action that in most people are segregated. They contain contradictory extremes—instead of being an ‘individual,’ each of them is a ‘multitude.’ Like the color white that includes all the hues of the spectrum, they tend to bring together the entire range of human possibilities within themselves. These qualities are present in all of us, but usually we are trained to develop only one pole of the dialectic. We might grow up cultivating the aggressive, competitive side of our nature, and disdain or repress the nurturing, cooperative side. A creative individual is more likely to be both aggressive and cooperative, either at the same time or at different times, depending on the situation. Having a complex personality means being able to express the full range of traits that are potentially present in the human repertoire but usually atrophy because we think one or the other pole is ‘good,’ whereas the other extreme is ‘bad.’
  • Wake up in the morning with a specific goal to look forward to. Creative individuals don’t have to be dragged out of bed; they are eager to start the day. This is not because they are cheerful, enthusiastic types. Nor do they necessarily have something exciting to do. But they believe that there is something meaningful to accomplish each day, and they can’t wait to get started on it. Most of us don’t feel our actions are that meaningful. Yet everyone can discover at least one thing every day that is worth waking up for. It could be meeting a certain person, shopping for a special item, potting a plant, cleaning the office desk, writing a letter, trying on a new dress. It is easier if each night before falling asleep, you review the next day and choose a particular task that, compared to the rest of the day, should be relatively interesting and exciting. Then next morning, open your eyes and visualize the chosen event—play it out briefly in your mind, like an inner videotape, until you can hardly wait to get dressed and get going. It does not matter if at first the goals are trivial and not that interesting. The important thing is to take the easy first steps until you master the habit, and then slowly work up to more complex goals. Eventually most of the day should consist of tasks you look forward to, until you feel that getting up in the morning is a privilege, not a chore.
  • It is often surprising to hear extremely successful, productive people claim that they are basically lazy. Yet the claim is believable. It is not that they have more energy and discipline than you or I; but they do develop habits of discipline that allow them to accomplish seemingly impossible tasks. These habits are often so trivial that the people who practice them seem strange and obsessive. At first many people were mildly shocked that the great Albert Einstein always wore the same old sweater and baggy trousers. Why was he being so weird? Of course, Einstein wasn’t trying to upset anybody. He was just cutting down on the daily effort involved in deciding what clothes to wear, so his mind could focus on matters that to him were more important. It may seem that choosing slacks and shirts takes so little time that it is pretentious to worry about it. But suppose it takes only two minutes each day to decide how to dress. That adds up to 730 minutes, or twelve hours a year. Now think of the other repetitive things we have to do throughout the day—comb hair, drive cars, eat and so on. And then think not only of the time it takes to do each of these things but of the interruption in the train of thought they cause, both before and after. Having to choose a tie could derail a whole hours’ worth of reflection! No wonder Einstein preferred to play it safe and wear the same old clothes.

 

How to Have a Beautiful Mind (Edward de Bono)

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A beautiful mind doesn’t age.

  • A beautiful body and a beautiful face age and grow old. A beautiful mind does not age and, in fact, can become ever more beautiful.

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The key to having a beautiful mind is in the conversations that you have.

  • The beauty of your mind should show in your conversation. Just as people can look at your physical beauty they can listen to the beauty of your mind.
  • If you want to make your mind more beautiful you can. It is not a matter of innate intelligence or great knowledge. It is how you use your mind that matters.
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Listening is more important in conversation than talking.

  • A good listener is very nearly as attractive as a good talker. You cannot have a beautiful mind if you do not know how to listen.
  • Talking can show how smart you are. Talking can convince others of your views. Talking can help you clarify your own thinking. But talking only rarely gives you something new. Listening, on the other hand, can give you new ideas – if you try to receive them.
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Find points of agreement with others and learn how to disagree the right way.

  • To have a beautiful mind you must genuinely seek to find points of agreement with the person to whom you are talking. It is so difficult because the agreement must be genuine and not just sycophantic pretence.
  • If you do not know how to disagree you will never have a beautiful mind. This is the critical operation. If you get this wrong then your mind will be ugly even if it is effective. Even though disagreement can be unpleasant, it is often necessary both for the sake of the truth and in order to investigate any issue objectively and fully.

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Be open to changing your mind.

  • If you never change your mind, why have one?
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The end goal of conversation is not to ‘win’ the argument, but to be interesting.

  • If you insist on always winning an argument you end up with nothing more than you started with – except showing off your arguing ability. When you lose an argument you may well have gained a new point of view. Being right all the time is not the most important thing in the world and it is certainly not very beautiful.
  • Being interesting is much more important than winning an argument. If you are interesting people will want to be with you. People will seek your company. People will enjoy talking to you.
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Make your conversations a genuine attempt to discuss ideas.

  • A discussion should be a genuine attempt to explore a subject rather than a battle between competing egos.
  • Putting forward alternatives and other possibilities can make the discussion more interesting. The possibilities can then be explored – even if they are finally rejected.
  • You need to get into the habit of saying: ‘Now that is interesting.’ You will need to explain why you find that point interesting. You will need to build up and lay out the interesting aspects. You invite the other party to join you in exploring the point.

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Don’t be afraid of bringing feelings and emotions into your conversations, and be honest and truthful about your opinions.

  • If we had no emotions and feelings it would be very difficult to make decisions or choices. Logic, and thinking itself, are only ways of presenting the world so that we can apply our values through our feelings.
  • A beautiful mind is capable of forming opinions and is not afraid to do so. At the same time, the beautiful mind is always conscious of the basis for that opinion. Furthermore, any opinion held is open to change.