The Pace of Productivity: How to Master Your Creative Routine. By Maria Popova “When you work regularly, inspiration strikes regularly.”
We seem to have a strange but all too human cultural fixation on the daily routines and daily rituals of famous creators, from Vonnegut to Burroughs to Darwin — as if a glimpse of their day-to-day would somehow magically infuse ours with equal potency, or replicating it would allow us to replicate their genius in turn. And though much of this is mere cultural voyeurism, there is something to be said for the value of a well-engineered daily routine to anchor the creative process. Manage Your Day-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind (public library), edited by Behance’s 99U editor-in-chief Jocelyn Glei and featuring contributions from a twenty of today’s most celebrated thinkers and doers, delves into the secrets of this holy grail of creativity. It’s time to stop blaming our surroundings and start taking responsibility.
Step by step, you make your way forward. Donating = Loving. The Art of Chance-Opportunism in Creativity and Scientific Discovery: A 1957 Guide. By Maria Popova “To be perfectly original one should think much and read little, and this is impossible, for one must have read before one has learnt to think.”
What a magical Rube Goldberg machine of discovery literature is — the original “inter-net,” if you will, with the allusions, citations, and references in one work opening doors to countless others. One such Rube Goldberg chain reaction began in last month’s Dancing About Architecture: A Little Book of Creativity, which first led me to the 1939 gem A Technique for Producing Ideas, and then to The Art of Scientific Investigation (public library; public domain) — an absolutely fantastic treatise on creativity in science and, by extension, in all endeavors of the mind, originally written by Cambridge University animal pathology professor W.
I. B. One recurring emphasis by Beveridge is the eclecticism of influence necessary for true originality and the idea that creativity is combining and connecting things: Beveridge dives deeper: What Is Science? From Feynman to Sagan to Curie, an Omnibus of Definitions. By Maria Popova “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious — the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.”
“We live in a society absolutely dependent on science and technology,” Carl Sagan famously quipped in 1994, “and yet have cleverly arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. That’s a clear prescription for disaster.” Little seems to have changed in the nearly two decades since, and although the government is now actively encouraging “citizen science,” for many “citizens” the understanding of — let alone any agreement about — what science is and does remains meager. So, what exactly is science, what does it aspire to do, and why should we the people care? Stuart Firestein writes in the excellent Ignorance: How It Drives Science: The Happiness of Pursuit: What Science and Philosophy Can Teach Us About the Holy Grail of Existence. By Maria Popova “When fishing for happiness, catch and release.”
The secret of happiness is arguably humanity’s longest-standing fixation, and its mechanisms are among the most consuming obsessions of modern science. In The Happiness of Pursuit: What Neuroscience Can Teach Us About the Good Life, Cornell University psychology professor Shimon Edelman takes an unconventional — and cautiously self-aware of its own unorthodoxy — lens to the holy grail of human existence, blending hard science with literature and philosophy to reverse-engineer the brain’s capacity for well-being.
What emerges is a kind of conceptual toolbox that lets us peer into the computational underbelly of our minds and its central processes — memory, perception, motivation and emotion, critical thinking, social cognition, and language — to better understand not only how the mind works but also how we can optimize it for happiness. The reason for this predictability is the sheer physical inertia of the universe. How To Break A Bad Habit. Ira Glass on the Secret of Success in Creative Work, Animated in Kinetic Typography. Full Spectrum Reading List: 7 Great Books by TED 2012 Speakers. By Maria Popova Anatomy of introversion, inside the brain’s optimism bias, and a blueprint for doomsday from PC Guy.
TED time is once again upon us, with this year’s conference, themed Full Spectrum, a mere week away. In preparation, and true to the Brain Pickings pre-TED tradition, here are seven exceptional books by some of this year’s TED speakers, spanning everything from psychology to children’s books to satire — a full spectrum, indeed. (Catch up on reading lists from years past: TEDGlobal 2010, TED 2011 Part 1 and Part 2, TEDGlobal 2011 Part 1 and Part 2.)
The question of what makes us happy is likely as old as human cognition itself and has occupied the minds of philosophers, prophets, and scientists for millennia. Underpinning the narrative is a fascinating and dimensional lens on the constant interplay of reason and emotion, intuition and rationality. Human rationality depends critically on sophisticated emotionality. Share on Tumblr.