Ho‘ohana Aloha

Excerpt, with an Einstein quote I have always liked:

The connection between perspective and creative thinking has to do with habituation and over-familiarization. Over-familiarization with something ( an idea, a procedure, a system ) is a trap. Where creative thinking is concerned, that is the irony of the skill: the more adept you are at something, the less likely you are to look at it in a different way; the greater your skill of a particular discipline, the less you will be tempted to experiment with different approaches. Einstein put it best when he once said, “An expert is a person who has few new ideas; a beginner is a person with many.”

Talking Story Archive Aloha for the weaving:

• Book Review: Where Good Ideas Come From
• Are you able to discount your own certainty?
• What your Big Ideas do best
• Don’t get New Ideas caught in the ASA Trap!
• An idea is a fragile thing

I wholeheartedly concur with this: Great coaching in centering our attention, and honoring our own capacity for self-abundance.

creativesomething:

When you see something that inspires you – a new movie, a phrase in a book, or a beautifully designed poster, for example – how do you react?

A typical first response to great inspiration is to state how wonderful it is, bookmark it, post it on your website, or pin it to Pinterest. All of…

We get bombarded with sooo much stuff each and every day, and the ability to stop, and just pick something, has become a critical life skill. Make stuff useful to you.

Love articles like this which challenge convention. It’s a great thing about the times we live in: Everything can be questioned by the thinking mind, comfortable in the skin of their own values.

This one starts:

SOLITUDE is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in.

But there’s a problem with this view. Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption. And the most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted, according to studies by the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Gregory Feist. They’re extroverted enough to exchange and advance ideas, but see themselves as independent and individualistic. They’re not joiners by nature.

Found via: Office Space: Defending the Cubicle on The Etsy Blog

Structure is comforting, and I like structure. But nobody said it had to be stagnant, stodgy and boring…

I’ve tumbled quite a bit from The 99 Percent over the last year’s time… great to see this recap as a handy review of several articles I liked too.

Josh Linkner:

Brainstorming is big at most creative organizations today, but in becoming ubiquitous it has lost something. The invitation “let’s brainstorm about that” typically leads to a gathering in a conference room where the convener asks for ideas then shoots them down as fast as they come up. And brainstorming sessions have come to resemble any other meeting—veering off topic, sucking up time, and causing impatience or boredom. That’s in part because brainstorming has been compressed and made more efficient—killing its real purpose in the process. 

Avoid these five behaviors…

Is constant stimulation hurting our creativity—and the economy? Scott Adams pays tribute to tedium.