I've done things differently just out of boredom caused by doing a task, the same way repeatedly.
Example: I sometimes get tired of a particular food and tweak it by adding a new ingredient or eating it with something different.
>Edison was unlucky—he failed to invent fuel cells. The first comercially successful fuel cells were developed in the mid-twentieth century, long after Edison moved on to pursuing other ideas. >Edison always had somewhere to channel his efforts whenever he ran into temporary obstacles
This is completely different from the "Edison never gave up and kept working till he succeeded" talks.
Yeah.. Its actually better, IMHO, because knowing when to move onto the next thing (and not letting your previous failure deter you from the next thing) is an important part of success. Sometimes the diversion lets you come back to the original thing with new insight later (or after your subconscious has worked on it for some time).
Creativity is not only in literature but also in other areas such as business models, Chinese Startups have most innovative business models.
the mistake was tech thought it was somehow righteously above all others, so its good that people are finally saying 'no, you are you are jerks', but I think we are all jerks and we should accept that and move on. Furthermore, we should accept that making mistakes is a necessary byproduct of innovation. I think these concepts are tied together, I am just doing a bad job at communicating it.
If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. And once you succeed, KEEP TRYING.
You can have creative endeavors that serve no purpose, and you still do it for the sake of the activity. Maybe it's the by product of practice, but it's still creative work.
Or even the a problem solving situation, it might solve a problem but no be the optimal solution.
So for me, definitely a numbers game.
But this whole lens on what creativity “is” smacks of someone really hoping something so mysterious can be explained using concrete and easy to understand concepts.
I’ve personally known and worked with some real creative powerhouses.
This sort of article doesn’t really address what makes them effective. It especially doesn’t describe how they seem to think about it, which, I would say is the most interesting topic.
But most salient might be the irrational belief that what you are doing matters.
Especially among great comedians, the process described in the article is essentially the process many people interviewed by Marc have followed.
Nothing has triggered more creative ideas than asking "what if?"
Trying repetitively, is the the same as asking "what if?" over and over.
Sure, I mean you can use statistics and wave your magic eugenics wand around but I see right through you. It's a disgrace that in the modern neoliberal hegemony a crock of shit like this gets published in an outlet like Scientific American.
Genius is genetic. Some people just seem to "stumble" upon ideas and methods, but its not random. Why there seems to be such pervasive efforts to prove anything other than the obvious is a mystery to me.
EDIT:
wikpedia page on it:
Citation? This seems far from obvious to me. I get that intelligence is some percent heritable, but that’s not the same.
