Combinatorial Creativity
- Danny Meyer the restaurateur has called ABCD: “always be collecting dots, so that you can always be connecting dots.” Dots or breadcrumbs, if your whole life is oriented around that collection, which mine is, then you're always preparing.
from A Compulsive Search for the Most Interesting People with Patrick O'Shaughnessy - Compound Manual by Frederik Gieschen
alex added 1y ago
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. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that
... See morefrom Steve Jobs on Creativity by Steve Jobs
sari added 1y ago
sari added 1y ago
It’s okay to borrow ideas, but you have to make them your own.
sari added 9mo ago
- “You pile up associations the way you pile up bricks. Memory itself is a form of architecture.”
from A quote from Louise Bourgeois
alex added 1y ago
From Jorge Luis Borges:
I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.
sari added 1y ago
- In 1985, Nike held a 24-hour shoe design contest. Nike was struggling. Their stock dropped 50%. They had to lay off people. Adidas, Converse, and Reebok were all selling more shoes. So in a panicked attempt to find creative talent, Nike held a shoe design contest. The winner was a corporate architect named Tinker Hatfield. “Two days after the compe... See more
andrea added 6mo ago
andrea added 7mo ago
- It also helps to travel in topic space. You'll have more new ideas if you explore lots of different topics, partly because it gives the angle grinder more surface area to work on, and partly because analogies are an especially fruitful source of new ideas.
from How to Do Great Work
sari added 1y ago
