“Jootsing”: The Key to Creativity

Start somewhere bad to get somewhere good. A few weeks ago, I interviewed psychologist Adam Alter about his book Anatomy of a Breakthrough . In it, he writes about the “creative cliff illusion,” the notion that good creative ideas will either come quickly or not at all. Unfortunately, our intuition has that one approximately backward. In studies of... See more

To come up with new ideas, you have to have space to be messy, to procrastinate, and to let your mind wander and free-associate. But there needs to be a balance. You eventually need to channel it into something concrete, or you won’t produce anything.

Forget the myth of the 'Eureka!' moment, and allow me to suggest another way: the bucket theory of creativity.

Buckets are little homes for the things you want to explore deeper.

Maybe you’ll write or draw or build about them one day, but that’s not really the point.

All you gotta do is make some buckets.

Because making buckets creates a magnetic fo... See more