Creativity

Before you build a second brain, you must feel things in your gut. Without this connection to your innermost self, your note-taking system will become a digital junkyard. You’ll capture cool ideas, tweets and articles. You may even build a fancy knowledge graph in Roam. But if you don’t have gut feelings about what’s worth keeping, you’ll confuse

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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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one of the latest big theories in neuroscience says that humans are fundamentally creatures of prediction, and not only is creativity not at odds with that, but it actually goes hand in hand with improving our predictive power. Life itself, in this view, is one big process of creatively optimizing prediction as a survival strategy in a universe... See more

Painter and visual artist Chuck Close on inspiration:

"The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who'll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are... See more