works in mysterious and often paradoxical ways. Creative thinking is a stable, defining characteristic in some personalities, but it may also change based on situation and context. Inspiration and ideas often arise seemingly out of nowhere and then fail to show up when we most need them, and creative thinking requires complex cognition yet is completely distinct from the thinking process. Neuroscience paints a complicated picture of creativity. As scientists now understand it, creativity is far more complex than the right-left brain distinction would have us think (the theory being that left brain = rational and analytical, right brain = creative and emotional). In fa... posted on Mar 24 2014 (178,911 reads)

the love of honey has to do with ancient wisdom, our capacity for hope, and the future of technology. Every once in a while, we all get burned out. Sometimes, charred. And while a healthy dose of cynicism and skepticism may help us get by, it’s in those times that we need nothing more than to embrace life’s promise of positivity with open arms. Here are seven wonderful books that help do just that with an arsenal ranging from the light visceral stimulation of optimistic design to the serious neuroscience findings about our proclivity for the positive. THE LITTLE PRINCE Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, one of our must-read&nb... posted on Jun 5 2012 (40,059 reads)

know, it's interesting because I love people and I love my work with people, but I think by my nature, I'm a person who gets a lot of energy from solitude. And so I think if you're a writer, you'd have to be comfortable with being in solitude for long periods of time. So I’m having some solitude right now and continuing my spiritual practices. I do live out in the middle of the woods, and I make sure that I'm out in the natural world each day, staying in creative community connection right now. I'm looking at my wholeness and wellness right now as very multilayered. There's the physical wellness -- and moving and making sure you're eating ... posted on Jul 15 2023 (2,673 reads)

a tricky word. Consultants peddle it, brands promise it, we all strive for it, often without really knowing quite what “it” really is. Put simply, there’s a lot of snake oil around creativity. But now here’s author Elizabeth Gilbert (TED Talk, Your elusive creative genius) to cut through the guff with her distinctly refreshing take on the topic. For her, we’re all creative souls already, we just need to figure out how to harness inspiration and unleash the creative spirit within. Here, she shares her best pieces of advice for living a meaningfully creative life. 1. If you’re alive, you’re a creative person. How many... posted on Jan 11 2017 (28,225 reads)

feel yourself into action.” One of the greatest preoccupations not only of our culture but of our civilization is the question of what creativity is, dating back to the dawn of recorded thought. But it wasn’t until the advent of modern psychology in the early twentieth century that our answers to the question began to take the shape of something more structured and systematic than metaphysical hunches — there’s Graham Wallace’s model of the four stages of the creative process from 1926, a five-step “technique for producing ideas” from 1939, Arthur Koestler’s famous “bisociation” theory of how creativity works from 1964, and a ... posted on Jul 31 2014 (21,255 reads)

by creativity as a child. “I grew up in a pink stucco house in New Orleans where my mom was always a maker. All the curtains in our house were homemade, all the art in our house was from us kids. I had dresses that matched my mom’s that matched my dolls’.”  “I never thought about creativity as an act separate from self,” says Brown, who has spent the last two decades studying courage, vulnerability, shame, and empathy. “To be human is to be creative.” Brown’s environment changed abruptly, however, when her family moved to the suburbs of Houston. “No one there wore homemade clothes. Everything was from the mall. Every... posted on May 29 2023 (3,076 reads)

by Alletta Cooper Krista Tippett: I’m in conversation today with the rock star music producer Rick Rubin, but I’m not really going to talk to him about music. Yes, he has been a singular, transformative creative muse for artists across genres and generations — from the Beastie Boys to Johnny Cash, from Public Enemy to the Red Hot Chili Peppers, from Adele to Jay-Z — to name just a few. But Rick has been looking back these past few years at what he’s learned about the creative process itself, and he’s published his first book, The Creative Act, about that: the flow and the ingredients by which an idea becomes an offering; life prac... posted on Nov 30 -0001 (30 reads)

most regretful people on earth,” Mary Oliver wrote in her exquisite meditation on 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.” The past century has sprouted a great many theories of how creativity works and what it takes to master it, and yet its innermost nature remains so nebulous and elusive that the call of creative work may be as difficult to hear as it is to answer. What to listen for and how to tune the listening ear is what the trailblazing physicist David Bohm (Decem... posted on Jan 7 2017 (20,920 reads)

are creative. The artist is not a special person, each one of us is a special kind of artist. Every one of us is born a creative, spontaneous thinker. The only difference between people who are creative and people who are not is a simple belief. Creative people believe they are creative. People who believe they are not creative, are not. Once you have a particular identity and set of beliefs about yourself, you become interested in seeking out the skills needed to express your identity and beliefs. This is why people who believe they are creative become creative. If you believe you are not creative, then there is no need to learn how to ... posted on Jan 18 2012 (60,245 reads)

and how to best follow it is something artists have been grappling with since the dawn of recorded time and psychologists have spent decades trying to decode, outlining the stages of creativity, its essential conditions, and the best technique for producing ideas. In 1978, a few months after she stopped drinking, artist, poet, playwright, novelist, filmmaker, composer, and journalist Julia Cameron began teaching artists — by the broadest possible definition — how toovercome creative block and get back on their feet after a “creative injury.” What began as one-on-one lessons with a handful of artists became a larger workshop, then a course, which Cameron was i... posted on Sep 3 2014 (25,011 reads)

likely to go to prison, 50% less likely to vote, more likely to need social welfare assistance, not eligible for 90% of jobs, are being paid 40 cents to the dollar of earned by a college graduate, and continuing the cycle of poverty.”   HOWARD GARDNER: FIVE MINDS FOR THE FUTURE Sociologist Howard Gardner, one of our all-time favorite nonfiction authors, is best-known as the father of the theory of multiple intelligences — a radical rethinking of human intellectual and creative ability, arguing that traditional psychometrics like IQ tests or the SAT fail to measure the full scope and diversity of intelligence. In Five Minds for the Future, Gardner’s highly ant... posted on Jul 6 2011 (40,852 reads)

engage in creative thinking every day, whether they realize it or not. Ekaterina Chizhevskaya/iStock via Getty Images Lily Zhu, Washington State University Do you think that creativity is an innate gift? Think again. Many people believe that creative thinking is difficult – that the ability to come up with ideas in novel and interesting ways graces only some talented individuals and not most others. The media often portrays creatives as those with quirky personalities and unique talent. Researchers have also identified numerous personality traits that are associated with creativity, such as openness to new experiences, ideas and perspectives. Together, they ... posted on Feb 7 2023 (3,247 reads)

Oliver on Time, Concentration, the Artist’s Task, and the Central Commitment of the Creative Life. “The most regretful people on earth 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.” “In the wholeheartedness of concentration,” the poet Jane Hirshfield wrote in her beautiful inquiry into the effortless effort of creativity, “world and self begin to cohere. With that state comes an enlarging: of what may be known, what may be felt, what may be done.” But concentration is indeed a difficult art, art’s art, and its difficulty... posted on Apr 23 2018 (13,849 reads)

is the author of the national bestselling book The Artist's Way. With Sounds True, Julia has released Reflections on the Artist's Way, a teaching program on many of the key themes introduced in The Artist's Way, and also, along with writer Natalie Goldberg, a program called The Writing Life, filled with ideas and inspiration for anyone who wants to write. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Julia and I spoke about how to break through creative blocks, the Censor, and how her relationship with her own Censor has changed throughout the course of her life. We also talked about why creativity requires that we take risks, and some big, ... posted on May 7 2013 (26,409 reads)

is for amateurs — the rest of us just show up and get to work,” Chuck Close scoffed. “A self-respecting artist must not fold his hands on the pretext that he is not in the mood,” Tchaikovsky admonished.“Show up, show up, show up, and after a while the muse shows up, too,” Isabel Allende urged. But true as this general sentiment may be, it isn’t always an easy or a livable truth — most creative people do get stuck every once in a while, or at the very least hit the OK plateau. What then? Not too long ago, Alex Cornell rallied some of our time’s most celebrated artists, writers, and designers, and asked them to share t... posted on Apr 22 2014 (26,265 reads)

what you want, but it’s even worse to have an idea of what it is you want and find out at the end of the journey that it isn’t, in fact, what you wanted all along.” HUGH MACLEOD ON SETTING BOUNDARIES Cartoonist Hugh MacLeod is as well-known for his irreverent doodles as he is for his opinionated musings on creativity, culture, and the meaning of life. In Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity, he gathers his most astute advice on the creative life. Particularly resonant with my own beliefs about the importance of choices is this insight about setting boundaries: 16. The most important thing a creative per­son can learn... posted on Apr 22 2012 (55,828 reads)

you earlier because there was a time when Eat, Pray, Love was everywhere. And what I've been so interested in is watching this evolution and development of you, into, through, and beyond that. And so watching how you're processing that, and how you're articulating what you're learning about life, and kind of inhabiting this role you have in people's lives — whether you ask for it or not. And so much of that coalesces around this idea of what it means to be creative and, I think, kind of demystifying that. And then — so, on the one hand, demystifying creativity — what did you say? What's your definition? Creative living... MS. GILBERT:... posted on Sep 5 2016 (16,754 reads)

With that state comes an enlarging: of what may be known, what may be felt, what may be done.” But concentration is indeed a difficult art, art’s art, and its difficulty lies in the constant conciliation of the dissonance between self and world — a difficulty hardly singular to the particular conditions of our time. Two hundred years before social media, the great French artist Eugène Delacroix lamented the necessary torment of avoiding social distractions in creative work; a century and a half later, Agnes Martin admonished aspiring artists to exercise discernment in the interruptions they allow, or else corrupt the mental, emotional, and spiritual p... posted on Oct 23 2016 (18,907 reads)

values: Starting in the 1980s, cultivating creativity didn’t seem like the path to a stable job, and schools shifted to focus on improving standardized test scores in order to get funding, Kim writes. The Creativity Challenge addresses how to combat this disheartening trend. Her book is a challenge for all of us—particularly those in leadership positions—to create environments that encourage creativity and all of the benefits it brings. 
 Eight signs of a creative person One way to foster creativity is for managers, educators, and parents to understand the kinds of behaviors and attitudes creative people exhibit, and to recognize and support them. I... posted on Feb 21 2017 (13,605 reads)

Ronald Reagan has to do with gorilla costumes, Shakespeare and fake pennies.   The intricate mechanisms of the human mind are endlessly fascinating. We’ve previously explored various facets of how the mind works — from how we decide towhat makes us happy to why music affects us so deeply — and today we’re turning to when it doesn’t: Here are five fantastic reads on why we err, what it means to be wrong, and how to make cognitive lemonade out of wrongness’s lemons. BEING WRONG The pleasure of being right is one of the most universal human addictions and most of us spend an extraordinary amount of effort on avoidi... posted on Nov 11 2011 (9,125 reads)