is one of the most mysterious human qualities. Seemingly effortless for a rare few, it can be elusive for the majority. While the most extensive training in the world can’t turn an average Joe into Paul McCartney, these simple techniques can help edge the creative muse closer. 1. Limit your options.Studies show that restricting one’s choices can more effectively trigger creative thought. That’s because leaving every door open makes it difficult to focus on which way to go, while having a more specific target helps you channel your thought process. And the target doesn’t even have to be logical. Recently I was having trouble finishing a chapter of a novel... posted on Mar 23 2015 (62,063 reads)

Oscar Wilde has to do with Hippocrates and the neurochemistry of romance. It’s often said that every song, every poem, every novel, every painting ever created is in some way “about” love. What this really means is that love is a central theme, an underlying preoccupation, in humanity’s greatest works. But what exactly is love? How does its mechanism spur such poeticism, and how does it lodge itself in our minds, hearts and souls so completely, so stubbornly, as to permeate every aspect of the human imagination? Today, we turn to 5 essential books that are “about” love in a different way — they turn an inquisitive lens towards this grand ... posted on Jan 24 2012 (14,550 reads)

creative activities like knitting and cooking can boost your levels of serotonin and decrease anxiety. Photo by Asife/ Shutterstock. Do you consider yourself creative? If the answer is "no," you are not alone. We have been working as creativity facilitators for close to two decades, and whenever we ask people this question, shockingly few hands go up. It turns out that you don't have to be a great artist to be creative. Creativity is simply our ability to dream things up and make them happen. Cooking breakfast, planting a garden, even developing a business plan are all creative acts. But here is where the arts do come in. Participating in the ar... posted on Jun 5 2014 (1,828 reads)

get a little shaky, your stomach flips. I know in my own life that it tends to be [that] fear is a sort of propellant. So is excitement. [I think] the difference is that fear tends to make me want to run in the opposite direction, and excitement makes me want to run toward the thing. [Laughs.] So, I think it’s more of a navigational question. Do you want to get away from this, or are you trying to get closer to it? That’s probably the way that I distinguish it. I think—creatively speaking—I’ve learned to make friends with fear over the years in ways that I haven’t quite yet been able to in other emotional realms in my life. But I’ve been able... posted on Sep 16 2014 (23,829 reads)

the more manageable part of our experience of nature. We experience the logos of the world as a form of logic and reason, but we can also experience the logos as discourse or speech. As a communication, it inherently places us into relationship. This is a more intimate experience of nature, and it is less manageable because it connects us to things more closely without our fully understanding or being in control. We experience a living logos,  a creative, living language that embodies our fundamental connection to nature. This “language of life,” the conscious and unconscious experience of the world as imbued with life-giving lang... posted on Oct 26 2020 (5,918 reads)

psychology of spaghetti sauce and why too many jams make you lose your appetite. Why are you reading this? How did you decide to click the link, load the page and stay? How do we decide to do anything at all and, out of the myriad choices we face each day, what makes one option more preferable over another? This is one of the most fundamental questions of the social sciences, from consumer psychology to economic theory to behavioral science. Today, at the risk of meta-irony, we look at not one but five fantastic books and talks that explore the subject. Take your pick(s) — if you can, that is.   JONAH LEHRER HOW WE DECIDE Among other things, Jonah Lehrer writes the excell... posted on Oct 10 2011 (36,085 reads)

creative activities like knitting and cooking can boost your levels of serotonin and decrease anxiety. Photo by Asife/ Shutterstock. Do you consider yourself creative? If the answer is "no," you are not alone. We have been working as creativity facilitators for close to two decades, and whenever we ask people this question, shockingly few hands go up. It turns out that you don't have to be a great artist to be creative. Creativity is simply our ability to dream things up and make them happen. Cooking breakfast, planting a garden, even developing a business plan are all creative acts. But here is where the arts do come in. Partici... posted on Jun 5 2014 (37,508 reads)

naturally love to play and explore and use their imaginations -- but as adults, we often get so sucked into work and the demands of daily life that hobbies and creative outlets completely fall by the wayside. When you ask the average working adult what their hobbies are, there's a good chance they'll say "none." But in forgoing hobbies and personal creative projects, we may be doing ourselves a major disservice. "Finding time for ourselves is key to our own sanity," Joyce E. A. Russell writes in a "Career Coach" article in the Washington Post. "It can actually improve all the other aspects of our lives. Having a hobby may be even m... posted on Aug 19 2014 (27,751 reads)

more than a hundred literary journals worldwide. He's the author of the books Beamish Boy: A Memoir, Letters to Early Street, and Walking Tooth and Cloud. With Sounds True, Albert Flynn DeSilver has written a new book called Writing as a Path to Awakening: A Year to Becoming an Excellent Writer and Living an Awakened Life, where he invites the reader on a year-long journey of growth and discovery to enhance writing through the practice of meditation while using the creative process to accelerate spiritual evolution. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Albert and I spoke about the difference between the creative pursuit of writing and writing as a pa... posted on Sep 20 2018 (10,453 reads)

secret of success is concentrating interest in life… interest in the small things of nature… In other words to be fully awake to everything.” With Father’s Day around the corner, let’s take a moment to pay heed to some of the wisest, most heart-warming advice from history’s famous dads. Gathered here are five timeless favorites, further perpetuating my well-documented love of the art of letter-writing. F. SCOTT FITZGERALD In a 1933 letter to his 11-year-old daughter Scottie, F. Scott Fitzgeraldproduced this poignant and wise list of things to worry, not worry, and think about, found in the altogether excellent F. ... posted on Jun 17 2012 (19,921 reads)

dialogue for the Greeks were: "Don't argue," "Don't interrupt," and "Listen carefully." CLARIFY YOUR THINKING. To clarify your thinking, you must suspend all untested assumptions. Being aware of your assumptions and suspending them allows thought to flow freely. Free thought is blocked if we are unaware of our assumptions, or unaware that our thoughts and opinions are based on assumptions. For instance, if you believe that certain people are not creative, you=re not likely to give their ideas fair consideration. Check your assumptions about everything and try to maintain an unbiased view. BE HONEST. Say what you think, even if your t... posted on Jul 17 2012 (22,399 reads)

herself resonates with just about every woman who looks in the mirror. With Eat, Pray, Love and its follow-up, Committed, Gilbert’s connection to readers has been immediate and enduring. What woman hasn’t sobbed in secret on the bathroom floor, after all? Yet Gilbert is more than these two books. Her collection of short stories, Pilgrims, was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, and her debut novel, Stern Men, was a New York Times Notable Book. Her 2009 TED Talk on creative genius, where she claimed mysticism and the divine as allies in the creative process, has been viewed nearly five million times. Currently, she is putting the final touches on her next novel,... posted on Apr 7 2013 (32,289 reads)

Japanese stuffed toys have to do with The Bible and child mortality in Mali. We’re longtime fans of photojournalist Peter Menzel, whose visual anthropology captures the striking span of humanity’s socioeconomic and cultural spectrum. His Hungry Planet and What I Eat portrayed the world’s sustenance with remarkable graphic eloquence, and today we’re turning to some of his earliest work, doing the same for the world’s shelter: Material World: A Global Family Portrait — an engrossing visual time-capsule of life in 30 countries, captured by 16 of the world’s leading photographers. In each of the 30 countr... posted on Dec 16 2013 (42,448 reads)

What I wanted to do was break open the little silos of education where scientists  never see artists. Then I met Diane Ullman. She came into the studio and started to make some bugs out of clay.     I said, “Wow, these are really terrific. You know what you’re looking at.”     You look back at Charles Darwin, the people who changed the way that we see evolution, and they did it by doing little drawings. The art-scientists are the amazing creative people who I admire.   RW:  He looked. He used his seeing.   Donna:  He looked. Visual thinking and creative confidence.. So Diane and I feel like the students need to... posted on Apr 30 2016 (9,881 reads)

many ways, 2016 was a banner year for books related to our themes of compassion, kindness, empathy, happiness, and mindfulness. Judging from the number of books to arrive at our office, the science of a meaningful life is hitting its full stride, with more and more people recognizing how to apply new insights to our daily lives. Yet, while the number of books was encouraging, many of them seemed to repeat old themes and research, without offering much new in the way of insight. That’s why many of our favorite books of 2016 do something a little bit extra: They take our science to a new level, looking at how schools, organizations, and society at large can appl... posted on Dec 23 2016 (29,627 reads)

most regretful people on earth,” the poet Mary Oliver wrote in contemplating the artist’s task and the central commitment of the creative life, “are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.” That is what Rainer Maria Rilke (December 4, 1875–December 29, 1926), another great poet with a philosophical bent and uncommon existential insight, explored a century earlier in the third letter collected in his indispensable Letters to a Young Poet (public library) — the wellspring of wisdom on art and life, which Rilke bequ... posted on Jul 8 2018 (11,465 reads)

all goes away, and I'm just ... there. And that feeling, that is what I love, that, to me, is creativity. And that's the biggest reason I'm so grateful that I get to be an actor.  So, there's these two powerful feelings. There's getting attention and paying attention. Of course, in the last decade or so, new technology has allowed more and more people to have this powerful feeling of getting attention. For any kind of creative expression, not just acting. It could be writing or photography or drawing, music -- everything. The channels of distribution have been democratized, and that's a good thin... posted on Feb 24 2020 (5,595 reads)

the social stigma around late risers, or what Einstein has to do with teens’ risk for smoking. “Six hours’ sleep for a man, seven for a woman, and eight for a fool,” Napoleon famously prescribed. (He would have scoffed at Einstein, then, who was known to require ten hours of sleep for optimal performance.) This perceived superiority of those who can get by on less sleep isn’t just something Napoleon shared with dictators like Hitler and Stalin, it’s an enduring attitude woven into our social norms and expectations, from proverbs about early birds to the basic scheduling structure of education and the workplace. But in Internal Time: C... posted on May 20 2012 (18,006 reads)

and to move Samantha elsewhere in the organisation. Samantha says wisdom, an inner capacity within each of us, is beyond technology, and that it is the foundation for sustainable change. So she dares, like Jessica in another institution, to redesign programmes. She generates results by navigating the system with all that it takes in a large, global, established organisation where change is usually perceived as rocking the boat. Samantha is a living example of what Rollo May calls the creative courage to discover new forms, new symbols and new patterns on which society can be built.   Distinguish one’s wisdom from social, professional and personality identities. ... posted on Jul 20 2012 (17,475 reads)

Kafka is considered one of the most creative and influential writers of the 20th century, but he actually spent most of his time working as a lawyer for the Workers Accident Insurance Institute. How did Kafka produce such fantastic creative works while holding down his day job? By sticking to a strict schedule. He would go to his job from 8:30 AM to 2:30 PM, eat lunch and then take a long nap until 7:30 PM, exercise and eat dinner with his family in the evening, and then begin writing at 11 PM for a few hours each night before going to bed and doing it all over again. Kafka is hardly unique in his commitment to a schedule. As Mason Currey notes in his popular b... posted on Oct 13 2014 (21,766 reads)