Creativity: Theory and Practice
To come up with new ideas, you have to have space to be messy, to procrastinate, and to let your mind wander and free-associate. But there needs to be a balance. You eventually need to channel it into something concrete, or you won’t produce anything.
Dasha Nekrasova • Jon Rafman and Dasha Nekrasova on the Horror We Call Life
Regardless of whether or not we’re formally making art, we are all living as artists. We perceive, filter, and collect data, then curate an experience for ourselves and others based on this information set. Whether we do this consciously or unconsciously, by the mere fact of being alive, we are active participants in the ongoing process of
... See moreRick Rubin • The Creative Act: A Way of Being
Understand your own taste with the help of AI
Creativity requires connecting the dots, and connecting the dots requires allowing time for my subconscious to consolidate my ideas and make associations. This means that, from time to time, I need to just stare out the window and do nothing.
This doesn’t feel productive, even though it is.
This doesn’t feel productive, even though it is.
Ozan Varol • You’re doing better than you think. Here’s why. - Ozan Varol
Curiosity is voracious–the more you know the more you want to know; the more connections you make between the different bits of knowledge; the more ideas you have. Which is why curiosity is really the wellspring of creativity.
Alan Moore • Do Design: Why Beauty Is Key to Everything
Curate inspiration every day. Find apps, sites, and publications where you can brows through steams of inspiration, and save anything you like into niche buckets of interests. You'll get more creative, and you'll start to see ideas and make connections you hadn't considered before.
Marty Bell • WePresent | Marty Bell’s 10 tips for a more fulfilling (and fun) life
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
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
Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous 'I don’t know.'
Wisława Szymborska