Creativity

one, criticizing someone is easy; two, creating something original is very hard; three, but somebody’s got to do it.

“The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.”

—Carl Jung

Start somewhere bad to get somewhere good. A few weeks ago, I interviewed psychologist Adam Alter about his book Anatomy of a Breakthrough . In it, he writes about the “creative cliff illusion,” the notion that good creative ideas will either come quickly or not at all. Unfortunately, our intuition has that one approximately backward. In studies of... See more

Creativity, Tinker likes to say, is a function of the “library in your head.” “When you sit down to create something…what you create is a culmination of everything you’ve seen and done previous to that point.” What you pour out is a culmination of everything you’ve filled up on previous to that point.

Everyone supposes—it’s built into the idea—that creativity is scarce. It doesn’t come around every day. But, since it’s a good thing, it needs to be nourished and given special care, so that we can have more of it. Experts give seminars in how to do that. Consultants advise clients on the special methods needed to re-organize their enterprises so... See more

I believe that our creativity grows like sidewalk weeds out of the cracks between our pathologies—not from the pathologies themselves. But so many people think it’s the other way around. For this reason, you will often meet artists who deliberately cling to their suffering, their addictions, their fears, their demons. They worry that if they ever

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