Zig Zag

AMBITIOUS PRO. You identify as a serious, professional creator—even if your work isn’t your primary source of income—and you want to take your work and its public reception to the next level. STUCK CREATOR. You want to make work, but you’re not getting anywhere, whether because of conformity, economic pressure, or fear. You’re open to a creative re

While others defined creativity as the ability to produce something new and useful, his rather idiosyncratic definition read, “a process of becoming sensitive to problems, deficiencies, gaps in knowledge, missing elements, disharmonies, and so on; identifying the difficulty; searching for solutions, making guesses, or formulating hypotheses about t

Greitens constructively applied the principle of taking small steps that are under your control as you progress toward a big, compelling goal; focusing on results while being creative about the means to achieve them.

You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say, “How did he do it?