Forgotten Employee. An epiphany was had this morning as I perused SA, sipping Code Red and toying with the notion of stepping outside for my third cigarette in an hour: Nine years and 2 months of my life have been devoted towards the goal of personal advancement within a small yet thriving company. I arrived one spring morning at the offices of a local company - just a 15 year old, acne-encrusted, bespectacled face in the crowd - with a dot-matrix printed resume extolling my massive abilities with the 386 computer and willingness to work after school. I was immediately hired at minimum wage and began a series of menial jobs within said company, including authorizing credit cards, and serving as a squeaky-voiced telephone operator. At 16, I graduated from High School, and moved off to the wonderful world of college.
Come graduate school, my contributions to said company began to become clear to some in positions of power. Then came September 11th. That, my friends, was 4 months ago to the day. SHIT. Quote: Philosopher Daniel Dennett Presents Seven Tools For Critical Thinking. Love him or hate him, many of our readers may know enough about Daniel C.
Dennett to have formed some opinion of his work. While Dennett can be a soft-spoken, jovial presence, he doesn’t suffer fuzzy thinking or banal platitudes— what he calls “deepities”—lightly. Whether he’s explaining (or explaining away) consciousness, religion, or free will, Dennett’s materialist philosophy leaves little-to-no room for mystical speculation or sentimentalism. So it should come as no surprise that his latest book, Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking, is a hard-headed how-to for cutting through common cognitive biases and logical fallacies. In a recent Guardian article, Dennett excerpts seven tools for thinking from the new book. 1. Dennett’s first tool recommends rigorous intellectual honesty, self-scrutiny, and trial and error. 2. 3.
A “Klaxon” is a loud, electric horn—such as a car horn—an urgent warning. 4. Like the use of “surely,” a rhetorical question can be a substitute for thinking. James Rhodes: 'Find what you love and let it kill you' After the inevitable "How many hours a day do you practice? " and "Show me your hands", the most common thing people say to me when they hear I'm a pianist is "I used to play the piano as a kid. I really regret giving it up". I imagine authors have lost count of the number of people who have told them they "always had a book inside them".
We seem to have evolved into a society of mourned and misplaced creativity. A world where people have simply surrendered to (or been beaten into submission by) the sleepwalk of work, domesticity, mortgage repayments, junk food, junk TV, junk everything, angry ex-wives, ADHD kids and the lure of eating chicken from a bucket while emailing clients at 8pm on a weekend. Do the maths. What if you could know everything there is to know about playing the piano in under an hour (something the late, great Glenn Gould claimed, correctly I believe, was true)? What if for a couple of hundred quid you could get an old upright on eBay delivered? Shut up and say something | AndrewKurjata.ca.
Posted on 30 April 2013 “A kid can make a feature film with an iPod touch, or learn how to code apps and make a million bucks. But what’s scary is that the options for entertainment on that same iPod touch are just so compelling that… well, why bother?” - Paul Miller, “How my creativity got killed” “I’m sure if you read around for long enough you might find an opinion that’s similar to yours, but their opinion isn’t yours and the way that you articulate your opinion is unique to you.” - Owen Williams, “Too busy consuming to create” “Speak only if it improves upon the silence.” - Mohandas Gandhi I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there is a lot of good stuff out there.
So why do we add to the noise? Faced with the deluge of information that is the year 2013, I constantly have two contradictory instincts. The shut up comes from the feeling that there’s already so much good stuff, why bother? And that’s why anyone and everyone should create. Shut up and say something. What storytelling does to our brains. 11.6K Flares Filament.io 11.6K Flares × In 1748, the British politician and aristocrat John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich used a lot of his free time for playing cards. One of the problems he had was that he greatly enjoyed eating a snack, whilst still keeping one hand free for the cards.
So he came up with the idea to eat beef between slices of toast, which would allow him to finally eat and play cards at the same time. Eating his newly invented “sandwich”, the name for 2 slices of bread with meat in between, became one of the most popular meal inventions in the western world. What’s interesting about this, is that you are very likely to never forget the story of who invented the sandwich ever again. For over 27,000 years, since the first cave paintings were discovered, telling stories has been one of our most fundamental communication methods. Here is the science around storytelling and how we can use it to make better decisions every day: It’s in fact quite simple. From Creative Writing to Studying Creativity. 4Share Synopsis I ended up applying my passion in creativity to the psychological realm, where I would like to think I have had a larger impact than if I were still working on my stories and plays.
A few weeks ago, I discovered a huge box filled with older papers and personal belongings. It was found as part of the packing process -- we are moving to Connecticut over the summer -- and I saw things I hadn't seen for many years. For the first two decades of my life, I wanted to be a creative writer. I wanted this more than anything in the world. One thought that struck me was that I would write nearly anything (and then submit it for publication in some obscure zine). Perhaps the predominant memory was that there was so damn much of it, and that I would try anything.
Beyond the obvious connection, the insights and ideas from my pursuit of creative writing have continued to play into my research career. This question taps into a hot topic about whether there is a general creativity factor.