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Get PocketAs a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who studies creativity, I’ve had the pleasure of working with many gifted and high-profile subjects over the years, but Kurt Vonnegut—dear, funny, eccentric, lovable, tormented Kurt Vonnegut—will always be one of my favorites.
The image is from cartoonist Hugh MacLeod, who came up with such a brilliant way to express a concept that’s often not that easy to grasp. The image makes a clear point—that knowledge alone is not useful unless we can make connections between what we know.
Every seven years, designer Stefan Sagmeister (TED Talk: The power of time off) closes his New York design studio for a year-long sabbatical. During each sabbatical, he pursues “little experiments, things that are always difficult to accomplish during the regular working year.
For all the interest in the habits of highly creative people, there’s not much to learn from Don DeLillo’s manual typewriter or Maya Angelou’s mid-day showers. Charles Dickens wrote while blindfolded. Virginia Woolf took three baths a day, and always with ice-cold water.
The power of desperation, deadlines, and daydreaming. Beneath the eternal question of what creativity is lies the mystery of where good ideas come from and how we can coax them into manifesting.
One morning this summer, I got up at first light – I'd left the blinds open the night before – then drank a strong cup of coffee, sat near-naked by an open window for an hour, worked all morning, then had a martini with lunch.
A man in a town married twenty women. There have been no divorces or annulments, and everyone in question is still alive and well. The man is not a bigamist, and he has broken no laws. How is this possible?
Jacqueline Raposo has spent two years interviewing more than 100 of New York's most creative people—the city's top chefs. Restaurants are a notoriously competitive game, and New York is a city bursting with of serious food talent; staying on top means constantly pushing yourself.
Growing up, Ed Catmull was transfixed by two things: Disney films and computer science. He went on to earn his PhD in the latter, but he never forgot the magic he discovered in animation.
The designer, hotelier, and barber bent the universe to his vision of cool. But creativity can have a destructive side. You know the place, even if you haven't been there.
These rules were originally tweeted by Emma Coats, Pixar’s Story Artist. Number 9 on the list – When you’re stuck, make a list of what wouldn’t happen next – is a great one and can apply to writers in all genres.
“When you work regularly, inspiration strikes regularly.
In 1959, I worked as a scientist at Allied Research Associates in Boston. The company was an MIT spinoff that originally focused on the effects of nuclear weapons on aircraft structures.
Eric Barker writes Barking Up the Wrong Tree. If you read What are the four principles that will lead you to breakthrough creativity? and want more information, look no further.
Abraham Lincoln would still be remembered today as a self-taught prairie prodigy and an astute political operator who crushed the Confederate uprising, even without the Gettysburg Address, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the end of slavery.
We’ve heard many personal stories this week of how people in our industry have experienced hard times and how they managed to get out of them. We end this week with an article by Ann Holm, a personal development coach and expert in psychology and brain science.
It is 4.18am. In the fireplace, where logs burned, there are now orange lumps that will soon be ash. Orion the Hunter is above the hill. Taurus, a sparkling V, is directly overhead, pointing to the Seven Sisters.
Cocktail party trivia: Brainstorming was invented in the 1930s as a practical idea-generation technique for regular use by “creatives” within the ad agency BBDO.
“Creative individuals are more likely to have not only the strengths of their own gender but those of the other one, too.
I have spent nearly a decade experimenting with a single goal in mind: to create scalable, predictably insightful, inspirational environments.
Composer Erik Satie walked roughly 10 kilometers from Arcueil to Paris every morning. Saul Bellow rode his mountain bike. Novelist Haruki Murakami keeps a famously intense running schedule, which he described in the Paris Review: When I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get up at four a.m.
WHERE does creativity come from? For centuries, we’ve had a clear answer: the lone genius. The idea of the solitary creator is such a common feature of our cultural landscape (as with Newton and the falling apple) that we easily forget it’s an idea in the first place.
"My cell phone was blowing up. It was 7:30 in the morning, two hours before I usually get up. It kept ringing, buzzing. I finally checked it. People were sending me pictures of the place I bought, the Imagination Station, on fire. Mary and I got in the car and drove over.