Creativity: Theory and Practice
Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous 'I don’t know.'
Wisława Szymborska
Creativity is not a process. creativity is not scripted.
One of the most salient traits of creative visionaries like Walt Disney and Steve jobs is the absence of process.
Process is an organized way of doing things. But they didn’t have a process. They just did the work. No strict adherence to budget or timelines. Just figure things out on the fly.
... See moreYour brain works best when you are not instructing it on what to do. A lot of creative work is really just sitting around
Daniel Vassallo • Daniel Vassallo on Applied Antifragility – Visión Periférica Podcast • Podcast Notes
against efficiency in creative work
Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle, reinvent. Build a
Steven Johnson • Where Good Ideas Come From
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
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
... See moreDan Shipper • Why You're Not Doing Creative Work
Understand your own taste with the help of AI
Try writing about why the work is important, or spend some time reflecting on times in the past where you’ve felt most connected to it.