Most Popular Top 10s of 2012. John Cleese on the 5 Factors to Make Your Life More Creative. By Maria Popova “Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating.” Much has been said about how creativity works, its secrets, its origins, and what we can do to optimize ourselves for it. In this excerpt from his fantastic 1991 lecture, John Cleese offers a recipe for creativity, delivered with his signature blend of cultural insight and comedic genius. Specifically, Cleese outlines “the 5 factors that you can arrange to make your lives more creative”: The lecture is worth a watch in its entirety, below, if only to get a full grasp of Cleese’s model for creativity as the interplay of two modes of operating — open, where we take a wide-angle, abstract view of the problem and allow the mind to ponder possible solutions, and closed, where we zoom in on implementing a specific solution with narrow precision.
A few more quotable nuggets of insight excerpted below the video. Creativity is not a talent. We need to be in the open mode when pondering a problem — but! Thanks, Simon. Three Studies That Changed the Way We Think About Productivity. Productivity hints, tips, hacks and tricks for graduate students and professors. Contents Jump to: My philosophy: Optimize transaction costs Distilled into empirically-wrought principles, my high-level advice is: Reduce transaction costs to engaging in productive behavior.
In short, mold your life so that the path of least resistance is the path of maximum productivity. People are surprised when I tell them I'm lazy. I don't try to change the fact that I'm lazy: I exploit it. I try to make sure that the laziest thing I can do at any moment is what I should be doing. Update: Managing willpower Years after I wrote the first version of this article, I discovered a book that provided a basis for my philosophy in sound psychological science, Willpower The book surveys the literature on the science of self control. Deliberating shaping the past of least resistance optimizes the use of willpower.
Anecdote: Pull-ups In my first year as a new professor, I wanted to start doing pull-ups, so I attached a portable pull-up bar to the door outside our bedroom. Don't work from home Taming email. Most Popular How-To Guides of 2012.