December 2010
8 posts
The best of Creative Something 2010.
As the year 2010 comes to a close, January 1st, 2011 will mark the three year birthday of Creative Something!
Over the past three years I have been blogging about creative inspiration, ideas, and philosophy. For over three years this blog has grown into a powerful resource of creativity and thinking. Thanks to readers like you, who simply by reading these words inspire me to write regularly,...
Why you need power and a child-like mind.
“The perfect state of creative bliss is having power (you are 50) and knowing nothing (you are 9). This assures an interesting and successful outcome.” – Tibor Kalman
Imagine a high‒powered executive of a large international business. At any time she is ruffling through hundreds of important documents, making world‒changing decisions, and managing hundreds of thousands of people.
Now...
You and your passive creativity.
Sometimes creativity takes a bit of work.
The right attitude, the correct amount of light in the room, the people or objects that surround you, the training and preparation, all can amount to the most creative insight you have ever had.
But the opposite is true as well: sometimes creativity takes no work at all.
Like when you’re sitting and suddenly a bolt of lightening strikes in...
A good insight on the value of ideas.
You win some, and you lose some. Similarly: some ideas are winners, and some aren’t so much.
Even if you think that you have an idea worth jumping and down over, it could still be a dud. And sometimes an idea that you think isn’t very special could come out on‒top and change the world (literally).
You won’t know how powerful an idea is until you do something more with it,...
NYT on the spark of creativity.
If you missed it a few weeks ago, the New York Times had a surprisingly good article on “Tracing the Spark of Creative Problem-Solving” where‒in the effects of humor (or having a sense of humor) on creativity are explored.
From the article:
“This and other recent research suggest that the appeal of puzzles goes far deeper than the dopamine-reward rush of finding a solution. The very idea of...
On fear and failure.
Edwin Land once spoke of an essential aspect of creativity as being “not afraid to fail.” Being a talented scientist – and co‒founder of the historic electronic corporation Polaroid – you may assume that Land knew a few things about both creativity and failure.
However, is being unafraid of failure, as Land puts it, truly an aspect of creativity? When we look at the facts – what we know today...
Consider this...
When you want to buy something from the store or via the internet you are entering an ecosystem that made it possible for you to obtain the item you are purchasing.
There are literally hundreds of thousands of people who work together (sometimes unknowingly) in a unique ecosystem that allows you to buy the things that you need and want. The same is true of ideas.
Any item you buy has taken...
To live a creative life...
“To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.”
– Joseph Chilton Pearce