can we reconcile the immensely destructive force of fire with its equally limitless creative potential? Forest managers light intentional blazes to clear overgrowth and begin anew the cycle of life. A fireplace becomes a hearth, offering heat, light, and survival for the home’s residents. And fiery volcanic activity can obliterate what stands in its path all the while creating new land in a matter of hours and days that becomes highly fertile soil in thousands or millions of years. The element of fire—and its life-giving results in the form of heat and light—represent both a powerful metaphor and an undeniable fact of organic and spiritual transformation. Evelyn Underhil... posted on Aug 10 2021 (2,747 reads)

process as the tension between a seed’s affirming force to sprout and the soil’s denying force – only to awaken a previously unimagined possibility. Third pillar of Heartivism is Ahimsa. That’s a Sanksrit word that is typically translated as “non-violence”, but that’s a loose translation. Ahimsa is not the absence of violence, but rather, as Dr. King put it, a shift from the "darkness of destructive selfishness" to the "light of creative altruism." Below is Vimala Thakar, defining Ahimsa as an active presence of a creative love that gracefully responds to the challenges of the world. Gandhi referre... posted on Feb 2 2023 (8,670 reads)

to attack. A for attack. We attack the other side and then we know where it goes. So the question that we face is, how do we get out of the 3A trap? This is where I’ve learned that the best way out of the 3A trap is to do the exact opposite of avoiding, which is paradoxically to lean into the conflict. Instead of freezing where it paralyzes your ability to bring your full potential to the situation, you lean in. You lean in with curiosity. You lean in with natural creativity, maybe some creative ways to actually engage that because the best creative ideas come from actually when there are divergent opinions and collaboration. Is this easy? No, it’s not easy. This is some of the... posted on May 13 2024 (2,097 reads)

Keith Sawyer looks to comedians and jazz groups for 10 keys to more creative, successful teams in the office, on the field, and beyond. In 1949, the comedian Sid Caesar brought together a legendary group of comedy writers and created one of the biggest television hits of the 1950s, Your Show of Shows. Caesar’s team included Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, and Neil Simon. It may have been the greatest writing staff in the history of television. They developed the show in a small suite of rooms on the sixth floor of 130 West 56th Street in Manhattan. Caesar created a fun and improvisational environment, where the team would riff on each other’s idea... posted on Feb 1 2012 (41,353 reads)

Descartes has to do with C. P. Snow and the second law of thermodynamics. When legendary theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking was setting out to release A Brief History of Time, one of the most influential science books in modern history, his publishers admonished him that every equation included would halve the book’s sales. Undeterred, he dared include E = mc², even though cutting it out would have allegedly sold another 10 million copies. The anecdote captures the extent of our culture’s distaste for, if not fear of, equations. And yet, argues mathematician Ian Stewart in In Pursuit of the Unknown: 17 Equations That Changed ... posted on May 8 2012 (15,414 reads)

things seem more American than the pursuit of happiness, but are we going about it all wrong? That’s one of the questions raised by The Myths of Happiness, the new book by Sonja Lyubomirsky. Lyubomirsky is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside, and one of the leading researchers in the field of positive psychology. Her previous, best-selling book, The How of Happiness, published in 2008, is chock full of the best research-based practices for increasing happiness. The Myths of Happiness follows up on that work by explaining how our assumptions about what will and won’t bring us happiness are often flat-out wrong. Und... posted on Jun 12 2013 (27,090 reads)

bloomer, such as Ian Fleming, who, after succeeding as a journalist, banker, and stockbroker, went on to create James Bond when he was 45. Such achievers are only the tip of the rosebush. Late bloomers are actually plentiful, and each has his or her own story and distinctive pathway. Stopping to look at all the paths together calls into question some of society's most cherished beliefs— about the nature of human development, the roles of intelligence and education in creative achievement, and the ingredients of success at any age. All too often, what society thinks is a limiting factor—harsh early life experiences, such as parental loss—may turn out to... posted on Sep 24 2013 (36,648 reads)

Bennett-Goleman and Daniel Goleman explain the science behind "mind whispering"—a technique for overcoming self-defeating habits of mind. Tara Bennett-Goleman and her husband Daniel Goleman form a kind of intellectual dream team—one almost exclusively preoccupied with emotions. In best-selling books like Emotional Intelligence and Social Intelligence, Daniel Goleman has laid out the cognitive science and theories behind our emotions and social interactions. In her work as a psychotherapist and in her best-selling book Emotional Alchemy, Bennett-Goleman has applied those theories to overcoming self-defeating habits of mind and improving our relationships. ... posted on Oct 6 2013 (30,660 reads)

we don’t teach it. JM: All that said, in Focus you also touch on the value of letting your mind go adrift sometimes. DG: There are many kinds of attention, and each has its value. When we think of focus, we tend to think of one point of concentration—‘I’m going to get this thing done if it kills me,’ just keep your eye on the target. Well, that’s useful in many respects—in school, at work. But not always. If you want to be creative, actually, that is a creativity killer. To be in a creative state of mind, you want to let your mind wander. You do want to focus on the problem at first and gather all the information tha... posted on Feb 18 2014 (31,532 reads)

counts for a whole lot. With the many landmines out there, ready to derail even the most talented of people, “showing up” regularly offers undeniable benefits. Some of these perks often go overlooked. For those excited to make progress this year, let’s keep in mind all of the advantages at our disposal when we have an enviable attendance record: Consistency begets consistency. A person in motion stays in motion, unless acted upon by a Netflix binge session. The creative mind is much like machinery. Too much work and you overload it, too little and a decrepit state of rusty thinking awaits you. Keep the process humming by allowing the steady flow of work to n... posted on Apr 23 2015 (168,606 reads)

others in the long run. “The process may be a series of incremental changes, but when the process becomes a practice—a way of engaging with the world—there’s no doubt that it ignites revolutionary change,” she writes. In fact, if we all confessed our concerns about our perceived flaws and took the risk of being vulnerable with others, it would probably increase the sense of our shared humanity and lead to more connection, a sense of safety, the freedom to be creative, and more harmonious relationships in our homes, our workplaces, and our communities. That really would be a revolution. ... posted on Dec 26 2015 (17,667 reads)

do we feel shame and how does shame change us? According to Brené Brown, a researcher at the University of Houston, shame is an “intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.” It’s an emotion that affects all of us and profoundly shapes the way we interact in the world. But, depending on how we deal with it, shame can either shut us down or lead us to a new sense of bravery and authenticity. Brown’s research involved interviewing thousands of people about difficult, sensitive experiences in their lives, in order to uncover common themes around shameful experiences. Almost single-h... posted on Feb 25 2016 (20,685 reads)

Bateson, and her phrase is "composing a life," which is very — I hear echoes of that with what you’re saying. And as you’re saying, you had a reconfigured physical self, but you were composing a whole. Right? Your life as a whole, yourself as a whole. DR. MILLER: Yeah. That language resonates with me. I like that very much, the word “composing,” and I like its overlay with music, which has always been important for me. But, yeah, and seeing it as a creative enterprise, as well as an adaptive one, was really very rich, and it was really like an excuse. I wasn’t — I was sort of a melancholy child — my internal world was a little ... posted on Apr 4 2016 (25,733 reads)

struggle at a time “when something awful is happening to a civilization, when it ceases to produce poets, and, what is even more crucial, when it ceases in any way whatever to believe in the report that only the poets can make.” We no longer have Baldwin to awaken us to the gravest perils of our own era — one in which the poetic spirit isn’t merely neglected but is being forced to surrender at gunpoint. To produce poets, in this largest Baldwinian sense of creative seers of human truth, seems to be among the most urgent tasks of our time. The mastery of that task is what the poet Jane Hirshfield examines in her 1997 essay collection Ni... posted on Sep 6 2016 (10,902 reads)

day, and then suddenly there's an important meeting around what's happening with—let's say—profitability—or let's just say a strategy for a new initiative. Maybe there need to be more ideas put on the table so you could invite everybody in the room to do more listening and even put a structure into the room where each person takes a turn saying what they think the best strategy is and even maybe structure somebody else reflecting what they heard them say. A creative process or a strategic process might be a moment when we decide to do more listening. It might be that in the evening when we get home after a long day of work that that transition into kind ... posted on Oct 29 2017 (14,946 reads)

asked Simon & Schuster, the publisher who did Leonardo da Vinci, to “do it all on art paper and not one of these things where you put the things in the center.” I want it throughout to be that heavy quality, coated, color images because I wanted to show that paper is actually sometimes good for transmitting information. Grant: You’ve picked a lot of original thinkers throughout history. Why da Vinci? Isaacson: You’ve written a lot about innovation and creative leadership, and you’ve seen the patterns. It takes me a while to see the patterns. I started with Ben Franklin, then Einstein, then Steve Jobs. The pattern after a while wasn’t th... posted on Apr 6 2018 (12,375 reads)

task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art,” Susan Sontag wrote in 1964. “Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all.” I have thought about Sontag’s prescience again and again in my decade-plus on the internet, watching creative culture reduced to mere “content” as the life of the mind and world of substantive ideas collapse into an abyss of marketable sensationalism and cynicism; watching the cowardice of clickbaitable outrage eclipse the courage — at this point a countercultural courage — to create rather than tear down, to refuse to flatten life’s... posted on Oct 21 2018 (4,200 reads)

mouth and hands, but no head?  So Honey Bee Network builds upon the resource in which poor people are rich. And what has happened? An anonymous, faceless, nameless person gets in contact with the network, and then gets an identity. This is what Honey Bee Network is about. And this network grew voluntarily, continues to be voluntary, and has tried to map the minds of millions of people of our country and other parts of the world who are creative. They could be creative in terms of education, they may be creative in terms of culture, they may be creative in terms of institutions; but a lot of our work is in the fie... posted on Sep 3 2021 (3,773 reads)

this deeply moving episode, Fill to Capacity podcast host Pat Benincasa speaks with writer and life coach Jennifer Bichanich. Jennifer opens a window on her experiences with profound loss, including losing her beloved husband when the church they were remodeling went up in flames. Despite immense grief and despair, Jennifer found ways to rebuild her life and discover her own creative resilience. Working with a shamanic energy healer, delving into art therapy, and joining the Modern Widows Club, she found community, healing and the possibility of creating something beautiful from the ashes of her life. This podcast explores themes of grief, healing, and the power of creativity in navigatin... posted on Nov 20 2023 (2,537 reads)

2008, an interviewer admitted to Alfie Kohn that she considers herself a competitive person. “As long as you acknowledge that’s a problem to be solved; it’s not a good thing about us,” he responded. “People say to me, ‘Oh I’m really a competitive person,’ not realizing that it’s as if they’re saying, ‘I have a drinking problem.” Competition, which Kohn defines as any situation where one person can succeed only when others fail, seems to be something of a state religion in the United States. But Kohn is convinced that we’ve all bought into dangerous myths about the value of competition in our personal lives, wor... posted on Sep 23 2011 (18,333 reads)