A 5-Step Technique for Producing Ideas circa 1939. 4 Ways To Amplify Your Creativity. The holidays are over, the weather is lousy, and we’re sober again. We made all kinds of New Year’s promises, but the big one that will change our careers, if not our lives, is the promise to ourselves to become more creative. In my new book, Creative Intelligence, I show that creativity is learned behavior that gets better with training--like sports.
You can make creativity routine and a regular part of your life. That’s true for big companies as well as small startups, corporate managers as well as entrepreneurs. Creativity is scalable. The huge national policy storm brewing over “dwindling innovation” and an “innovation shortfall” also gives creativity an even greater agency. Creativity is the key to generating economic value and getting the U.S. economy to grow fast again. So here are four specific ways to lead a more creative life and boost your creative capacities. 1.
So you need to engage with creative people. 2. 3. Creativity is relational. 4. Cognitive Creativity. How Remix Culture Fuels Creativity and Invention: Kirby Ferguson at TED. By Maria Popova From Bob Dylan to Steve Jobs, or how copyright law came to hinder the very thing it set out to protect. Remix culture is something I think about a great deal in the context of combinatorial creativity, and no one has done more to champion the popular understanding of remix as central to creativity than my friend and documentarian extraordinaire Kirby Ferguson. So I’m enormously proud of Kirby’s recent TED talk about his Everything is a Remix project, exploring remix culture, copyright and creativity — watch and take notes: The Grey Album is a remix. It is new media created from old media. It was made using these three techniques: copy, transform and combine.
One thing to pay particularly close attention to are the many examples of how liberally and broadly Bob Dylan borrowed from other creators, appropriating, modifying, and building upon their work: Certainly, the integrity standards of science journalism and the popular arts can, and likely should, be very different. Research--You're Doing It Wrong. How Uncovering The Unconscious Is Key To Creativity. Businesses invest billions of dollars annually in market research studies developing and testing new ideas by asking consumers questions they simply can’t answer. Asking consumers what they want, or why they do what they do, is like asking the political affiliation of a tuna fish sandwich.
That’s because neuroscience is now telling us that consumers, i.e., humans, make the vast majority of their decisions unconsciously. Steve Jobs didn’t believe in market research. When a reporter once asked him how much research he conducted to develop the iPad, he quipped, “None. Marketers are living a delusion that the conscious mind, the self-chatter in their heads and the so-called “verbatims” in surveys and focus groups, are the guiding forces of action. Einstein once said: “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. I know this firsthand because I have been “that guy.” Freud once conceded: “Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me.
How Can I Turn My Mess of Ideas Into Something Organized and Useful? 10 talks about the beauty — and difficulty — of being creative. Radio host Julie Burstein has found the perfect analogy for creativity—raku pottery. A Japanese art form in which molded clay is heated for 15 minutes and then dropped in sawdust which bursts into flames, what makes this pottery so beautiful is its imperfections and cracks. Burstein interviewed hundred of artists, writers, musicians and filmmakers for her book, Spark: How Creativity Works, and heard many of them describe their process in similar terms — that the best parts of their work came from embracing challenges, misfortunes and the things they simply couldn’t control.
As Burstein explains in this talk given at TED2012, “I realized that creativity grows out of everyday experiences more often than you would think.” In this talk, Burstein identifies four lessons that creative people should embrace: To hear how Burstein learned these lessons from filmmaker Mira Nair, writer Richard Ford, sculptor Richard Serra and photographer Joel Meyerowitz, listen to her wonderful talk. 4 Steps To Breakthrough Ideas. Gentile has since managed the R&D efforts of new technologies for toy products, theme parks, computer input devices, video games, 3-D web graphics technology, and virtual reality systems, along with their related consumer launch and marketing campaigns. These products have generated over $5.2 billion in retail sales. You have likely come across some of his work. If you ever tried the Nintendo Power Glove, rode Disney World’s DisneyQuest (the first immersive virtual reality theme park ride) or watched Cablevision’s VOOM (the first all-HDTV cable channel), you have been a beneficiary of his technical creativity.
Beyond these, his boardroom walls are filled with figurines, toys, software boxes, and more of his inventions. So, when I got a chance to sit down with Gentile and pick his brain for a couple of hours, I felt like a young monk climbing the mountain to learn the secret. It started when his wife was pregnant. I’m surely oversimplifying a process that Gentile has honed over decades. If Miles Davis Taught Your Office To Improvise. 3 Storytelling Tips From "Breaking Bad" Creator Vince Gilligan. During our recent chat with Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan on subject of the fifth and final season of the show, he illuminated several storytelling principles that have helped make the series such a success.
Here are a few of them. Keep Getting to Know Your Characters While strong characters are essential to any good story, rigidity when it comes to character development can be dangerous. Instead, Gilligan suggests writers allow themselves to get to know their characters over time. “My knowledge of Walter White now is much richer than it was when I was working on the pilot,” he says, “I didn’t realize just how prideful and broken he was the way that I do now. Make It Your Mission To Surprise Predictability has become a hallmark of network television, but Gilligan has been trying to constantly surprise his audience. Embrace Curveballs Gilligan says that while working on Breaking Bad, he’s frequently been thrown curveballs. Irrelevant Ideas Lead To Breakthroughs. At Reebok, the cushioning in a best-selling basketball shoe reflects technology borrowed from intravenous fluid bags.
Semiconductor firm Qualcomm’s revolutionary color display technology is rooted in the microstructures of the Morpho butterfly’s wings. And at IDEO, developers designed a leak-proof water bottle using the technology from a shampoo bottle top. These examples show how so-called “peripheral” knowledge — that is, ideas from domains that are seemingly irrelevant to a given task — can influence breakthrough innovation. “The central idea of peripheral knowledge really resonates,” says Wharton management professor Martine Haas. After all, who can’t think of examples when ideas that seemed to bear almost no relation to a given problem paid off in some unexpected way? Haas and Wharton doctoral student Wendy Ham approached that problem by attempting to define the conditions under which peripheral knowledge is likely to influence breakthroughs.
Stocks vs. Cooking or Archery?