Creativity: Theory and Practice

When nature finds itself in need of new ideas, it strives to connect, not protect.

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.

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

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.

Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous 'I don’t know.'

Wisława Szymborska

Data collection is inherently creative. Depending on the data you choose to collect from the world, you can begin to see the world from a different perspective. Being a data collector means observing the world with curiosity.