creativity

May we all aspire to be as observant and confident to notice root stairs and call them root stairs, so others could then use the phrase “root stairs.”

Attention + Novelty + Creative Exposition = Insight

Author Robert Greene once said to me, “The more species you have in an ecosystem, the more diverse and rich it will be.” By diversifying your inputs, you build a rich creative ecosystem.

In other words, to produce work and build an audience in the digital context is a dynamic choreography, and to succeed depends on the degree to which your mindset is emergent: Adaptable, responsive, and always in the process of becoming something new.

Create more than you consume.

9. Welcoming the unpredictable. For curious minds, the fact that the world keeps on changing is a feature, not a bug. They believe that their response determines how much disruptions affect them, and they choose to respond with curiosity.

Recently, New York Times Magazine writer Sam Anderson and I spoke about how describing something well is both an act of incredible generosity and a literary challenge of the highest order.

I think we adults have a similar innate drive to create, and that drive can be supported or stifled by the environment. And, I think that instead of creating environments where we are creative by default , we live in a world where we are distracted by default .

But busyness has a way of stealing creativity from you. Generative work, like art and writing, requires long periods of nothingness: it’s only in that wide empty space that ideas emerge. Long runs, hot showers, commutes that don’t involve harried Slack messages and listening to podcasts at 2x speed. Sitting at the edge of a dock, listening to the o... See more

Another good read: Ted Chiang on why Ai isn’t going to make great art, for The New Yorker . I rather liked this analogy:

As the linguist Emily M. Bender has noted, teachers don’t ask students to write essays because the world needs more student essays. The point of writing essays is to strengthen students’ critical-thinking skills; in the same way t

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