Articles

too often, we walk away from a creative life, a chance to be generous, an opportunity to solve problems. Or, if we pursue it, we do it gingerly, treating creativity as a fragile magic trick, the gift of the muse. If we must be creative, we try to do it out of the corner of our eye. Staring at the magic directly is frightening. Nonsense. It doesn’t

For centuries, the myth of the lone genius has towered over us like a colossus. The idea that new, beautiful, world-changing things come from within great minds is now so common that we don’t even consider it an idea. These bronze statues have come to seem like old-growth trees—monuments to modern thinking that we mistake for part of the natural wo

Thanks to digital technology, we can all become film directors, musicians and game-makers. Mass creativity is possible as never before. But this isn’t quite the imaginative golden age it should be. Instead, powerful forces seem to be stunting creativity and promoting conformism, complacency, institutional inertia and a fear of being too different.

The ways creative work gets done are always unpredictable, demanding room to roam, refusing schedules and systems. They cannot be reduced to replicable formulas.