May 2010
13 posts
New book! Over 100 ways to think creatively.
What if there was a resource packed full of over 100 ways to think creatively? Something you could carry with you and look to for inspiration whenever you needed it? That something is here, and it’s called “Think Unstuck.”
Think Unstuck is a book with over 120 pages of creative inspiration, strategies, examples, and insights from creative thinkers like Sir Ken Robinson, Scott Adams,...
The mystery of evolution, creativity, and...
If you look back over the past thousand or so years and compare it with one‒hundred thousand years ago, you’ll notice that innovation and change hasn’t occurred as it once did.
For centuries this decrease in creative productivity has puzzled researchers, historians, philosophers, psychologists, and general creative thinkers. What once fueled stone‒age man to adopt new tools and...
Julie Heffernan between dreams and reality.
Julie Heffernan paints elaborate and beautiful paintings. Paintings with powerful, yet hidden, messages.
Her work is inspired by the world between wake and dreaming, a place many have searched for creative inspiration through‒out history. Julie refers to the process of looking to half‒dream, half‒reality images as “image streaming” and has found it to be a unique source of inspiration.
In...
Motivation Monday: Sip the management Kool-Aid
Author and creative thinker Gregg Fraley wrote a very interesting article titled Creativity Has Always Been The “New” Management Kool Aid.
In the article, Gregg looks at a newly released report from IBM that states that “the creative management style – which is marked by taking calculated risks and communicating in new ways – will lead to more success as companies struggle to find their way...
Art made of human bones.
When creative photographer and artist Francois Robert won a collection of old school lockers at an auction for $50, he didn’t have a clue as to what his creativity had in store for him.
Inside one of the purchased lockers, Francois found a human skeleton wired together. Immediately Francois didn’t know what to do with the skeleton, until more than a decade later:
The skeleton lay...
Gaining perspective through travel.
If you want to be creative you need to have an understanding of the idea that there are countless different ways to see and interpret the world.
This is why we travel, or so claims Jonah Lehrer in his article Why we travel. Jonah explains:
“Seasoned travellers are alive to ambiguity, more willing to realise that there are different (and equally valid) ways of interpreting the world. This in...
Motivation Monday: Don't be cool, be yourself.
Does cool kill creativity?
In a day and age where the internet makes it effortlessly easy to become someone cool, or to see what’s cool at the moment, we have to question whether it’s a step in the right direction for creative thinking.
Consider the words of creative genius Sir Ken Robinson: “If you’re not prepared to be wrong you will never come up with anything...
Creativity is the ocean of our minds.
95% of the Earth’s underwater oceans remain explored. This according to NOAA.
For the thousands of years that humans have walked across continents, built and destroyed empires, traveled to the Moon, and crafted a technology that allows us to connect to one another across the globe almost instantly, we still know very little about the world we live in.
In this way, creativity is the...
Motivation Monday: How journals inspire.
Denise Gershbein needed a break from routine, so she did the obvious and took a brief sabbatical.
In this GOOD article titled Why to Take a Sabbatical Denise writes about the benefits of taking a break and refreshing yourself ‒ and your creativity.
What stands out in the article isn’t necessarily how or why Denise took a sabbatical, but the tools she used to help refresh her creativity....
Does schooling lead away from creativity?
Schooling has been promoted as a road to success for quite some time now. However, as the perceived importance of formal education has grown, true creativity appears to be on the decline. But why?
For all of the education we are getting as a society ‒ in the United States specifically ‒ we seem to have lost sight of what it takes to be a modern‒day Edison, Wright, or Einstein.
It’s...
Google uses creativity to prove their point.
Google’s Chrome internet browser is fast. But exactly how fast is fast?
To answer that question the Chrome team got together with a few specialists to literally show how fast Chrome can load web pages on a computer. Take a look at the video below to see how the team used a bit of creativity to prove their point: Chrome is really fast.
What makes the video so fun is that it’s an...
Organic art, natural and cheap?
Natalie Angier explores the rising popularity of organic art ‒ work that depends on natural and organic materials such as hair, compost, and even cockroaches ‒ in the New York Times article: Of Compost, Molecules and Insects, Art Is Born.
Natural materials allow anyone to be an artist, with a little creativity. When you work with natural supplies you are working with more than cost‒effective...
Motivation Monday: You can be a genius too.
There’s a common myth that is popular to follow. The myth states that genius is a class you must be born into.
To be a genius, to match the abilities and creativity of those who have changed the world in some form or another ‒ Mozart, Edison, Einstein, to name a few ‒ you must be a naturally born genius. If you don’t have genius genes in you, then you can’t become a great...