Creativity: Theory and Practice
This doesn’t feel productive, even though it is.
Ozan Varol • You’re doing better than you think. Here’s why. - Ozan Varol
Anne-Laure Le Cunff • Creative aliveness: turning life into a creative adventure
In creative work there are two phases: exploration and execution. In the exploration phase, you don’t know what the thing is going to be, you don’t have all of the information or ideas you want to have, you don’t even know if what you’re thinking about is important, and any little breeze in the wrong direction might blow you off course. In the exec
... See moreDan Shipper • Why You're Not Doing Creative Work
Another key aspect of idea generation is to embrace variance. Research shows that, to find good novel ideas, we likely have to come up with many bad novel ideas because most new ideas are pretty bad. Fortunately, we are good at filtering out low-quality ideas, so if we can generate novel ideas quickly and at low cost, we are more likely to generate
... See moreEthan Mollick • Co-Intelligence: Living and Working With AI
As humans are good at filtering out low-quality ideas, generating lots of ideas quickly is a great use for AI
Daniel Vassallo • Daniel Vassallo on Applied Antifragility – Visión Periférica Podcast • Podcast Notes
Reframe non-productive time. One of the reasons the exploration phase of the work is low value is that most of it doesn’t look like work. It’s lots of reading, and sitting and thinking, and doodling, and trying things that lead to dead ends. Non-productive time feels like a waste—but it doesn’t have to! One way to think about this kind of time is
... See moreDan Shipper • Why You're Not Doing Creative Work
Non-productive is often framed wrongly so
The Rules of Brainstorming
Quantity over quality
No such thing as a bad idea
Build on each others ideas

Understand your own taste with the help of AI
This gives us a roadmap to doing more creative work. What we need to do is, in the exploration phase, raise the perceived value of doing the work, raise the perceived costs of not doing the work, and lower the perceived value of doing other things.
Dan Shipper • Why You're Not Doing Creative Work
Make it attractive to do more creative work