http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/05/04/a-technique-for-producing-ideas-young/
How Creativity Works by Maria Popova Inside the ‘seething cauldron of ideas,’ or what Bob Dylan has to do with the value of the synthesizer mind. In his 1878 book, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, Nietzsche observed: Artists have a vested interest in our believing in the flash of revelation, the so-called inspiration… shining down from heavens as a ray of grace. In reality, the imagination of the good artist or thinker produces continuously good, mediocre or bad things, but his judgment, trained and sharpened to a fine point, rejects, selects, connects… All great artists and thinkers are great workers, indefatigable not only in inventing, but also in rejecting, sifting, transforming, ordering.” Some 131 years later, Elizabeth Gilbert echoed that observation in her now-legendary TED talk.
Fast Company – Creative Strategy Lessons from the 100 Most Creative People in Business 2012 The June 2012 issue of Fast Company highlights the magazine’s list of The 100 Most Creative People in Business 2012. I will admit to not reading all of previous Fast Company 100 Most Creative People in Business lists. This year, however, having Ceelo Green on the cover (along with Purrfect) compelled me to take a shot at reviewing the entire list in-depth for the first time. And of course, taking the time to read the whole list necessitated coming up with a way to turn the effort into a Brainzooming blog post. My starting idea was to pick one creative inspiration from each of the 100 people and turn the creative lessons into a massive 100-item list post. After going through and identifying the 100 creative lessons that stood out for me, however, I realized the post was about 3000 words!
Why professional logo design does not cost $5.00 Posted on 22'08 May Posted on May 22, 2008 along with 475 JUST™ Creative Comments Logo design in today’s world is totally under rated. People do not understand how important a good logo is and how valuable it is to their business and this is why I am going to outline some very important facts telling you exactly why logo design should not cost $5 and why your logo is not something you should take lightly. In broad terms, I will do this by comparing “cheap logo design” to “professional logo design” and I will outline the reasons why professional logo designers do not charge such low fees and why you should invest in a professional logo design.
10 Reasons Why We Struggle With Creativity “There is always room, if only in one’s own soul, to create a spot of Paradise, crazy though it may sound.” --Henry Miller, Preface to Stand Still Like the Hummingbird “I tell you: one must still have chaos in oneself, to give birth to a dancing star.” --Frederick Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra Austin Kleon on Cultivating Creativity in the Digital Age by Maria Popova The genealogy of ideas, why everything is a remix, or what T.S. Eliot can teach us about creativity. UPDATE: Kleon’s Steal Like an Artist synthesizes his ideas on creativity and is absolutely fantastic. Austin Kleon is positively one of the most interesting people on the Internet.
Fast Company – Creative Thinking Ideas from the 100 Most Creative People in Business 2012 Following up the previous post on the June 2012 Fast Company list of The 100 Most Creative People in Business 2012, today’s list of creative thinking ideas from the Fast Company issue focus on disruptive and divergent thinking along with suggestions for enhancing your creative perspective. As with the other lists in this series, these creative ideas were inspired by the profiles in Fast Company. My intent was to pull a single creative thinking idea or creative lesson from each of the 100 profiles. One interesting note about the Fast Company 100 Most Creative People in Business list is that the numbered rankings don’t seem to have any real meaning. At least I draw that conclusion from how certain groups of people who have similar characteristics (i.e., apps developers, two-person teams, fashion industry leaders, etc.) are given consecutive numbered rankings.
90 Things I've Learned From Founding 4 Technology Companies On October 27, 2010 I wrote a blog post about the “57 Things I Learned Founding 3 Tech Companies.” It has been awesome, flattering, and humbling to see that post went viral and has been seen by so many thousands of people — mainly aspiring entrepreneurs — and has been translated into many languages. This past week while I was in Tokyo for meetings with potential partners for Fab, I was invited to participate in a panel discussion on startups.
Test Your Creativity: 5 Classic Creative Challenges Fascinated by how brains and creativity work, we frequently share new research on the 99U twitter feed, showing how everything from drinking alcohol, to taking vacations, to moving your eyes from side to side can make you more creative. What’s particularly interesting, however, is that most of these studies rely on just a small group of core creativity tests – and you don’t need any special lab equipment to take them. Below, we’ve collected five of the most commonly used creativity challenges for your self-testing pleasure. How Creativity in Humor, Art, and Science Works: Arthur Koestler’s Theory of Bisociation by Maria Popova “The discoveries of yesterday are the truisms of tomorrow, because we can add to our knowledge but cannot subtract from it.” At a recent TED salon, New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff presented his theory of humor as “a conflict of synergies,” which reminded me of a wonderful concept from Arthur Koestler’s seminal 1964 anatomy of creativity, The Act Of Creation (public library). Koestler coins the term bisociation to illustrate the combinatorial nature of creativity — the reason it operates like a slot machine, relies on the mind’s pattern-recognition machinery, and requires the synthesis of raw material into “new” ideas. Koestler diagrams his theory and explains: The pattern underlying [the creative act] is the perceiving of a situation or idea, L, in two self-consistent but habitually incompatible frames of reference, M1 and M2.
Creative Inspirations from the Fast Company 100 Most Creative People in Business List In its June 2012 issue, Fast Company singled out its list of The 100 Most Creative People in Business 2012. The list is an intriguing compilation of people and teams applying creativity globally in both expected (entertainment, gaming), and unexpected (kidney donations, insurance) fields. My take on the Fast Company 100 Most Creative People in Business List was to read the profiles for each of the creative people in business and capture 100 creative inspirations, ideas, lessons, and tips that stood out among the write-ups. The discipline of imposing the one creative inspiration limit presented an intriguing challenge. On some longer profiles, it wasn’t always easy to pick a single creative idea.
Experimentation Is The New Planning Technology is a bitch. It affects every industry, often in ways that are difficult (if not impossible) to anticipate. There’s always the possibility that a Napster or a Netflix or a Wikipedia will arrive to completely disrupt your business or industry. So it makes sense to have some kind of system that allows you to continually develop options and explore possibilities, so that when the day of disruption does arrive, it finds you ready with a few alternatives in hand. The time to seek those alternatives is now--not later, after a crisis has already arrived. Let’s Be Deliberate: Real Strategy Emerges Explore how creativity is measured Learn how experts are measuring creativity ... Rarely do we ever see the terms “measuring” and “creativity” in the same sentence, let alone placed snuggly together causing the reader’s mind to do a double flip over the meaning. Some might even consider “measuring creativity” an oxymoron.
Networked Knowledge and Combinatorial Creativity by Maria Popova Why creativity is like LEGO, or what Richard Dawkins has to do with Susan Sontag and Gandhi. In May, I had the pleasure of speaking at the wonderful Creative Mornings free lecture series masterminded by my studiomate Tina of Swiss Miss fame. I spoke about Networked Knowledge and Combinatorial Creativity, something at the heart of Brain Pickings and of increasing importance as we face our present information reality.