Creativity Is a Process, Not an Event

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something.… [T]hey’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.”

More importantly, creative people — the makers of things — benefit from expanding their horizons, taking on new challenges, and placing many irons in the fire. Creativity and productivity are spurred by allowing novel disciplines, new learning, constant experimentation, and varied interests to mix. The blending of original ideas and new learning of

Often the worst thing you can do with a difficult question is to try to answer it too quickly. When the mind is coming up with What If possibilities, these fresh, new ideas can take time to percolate and form. They often result from connecting existing ideas in unusual and interesting ways. Einstein was an early believer in this form of “combinator

The difference between the creative and the uncreative mind isn’t, therefore, that the creative person has different thoughts, but that the creative person takes what is in their mind more seriously. What enables them to do this is a quality very dear to Emerson: a capacity to resist the fear of humiliation.

Creativity is simply the ability to generate fresh ideas, think of new ways to solve old problems, and create original work.