Creativity

Even if you know what it feels like to be completely open to where your curiosity wants you to go, like Grothendieck, it is a fragile state. It often takes considerable work to keep the creative state from collapsing, especially as your work becomes successful and the social expectations mount. When I listen to interviews with creative people or

But to yell at your creativity, saying, “You must earn money for me!” is sort of like yelling at a cat; it has no idea what you’re talking about, and all you’re doing is scaring it away, because you’re making really loud noises and your face looks weird when you do that.

Good ideas, he argues, arrive when someone commits to playing with ideas that are just at the periphery of lived experience, just beyond the present state. It takes intentional effort to get to these ideas, because you must take the time and expend the energy to toy with combinations of ideas that might not work.