Criticizing is easy and fast. Creating is difficult and slow. The two hours you spent on a book or movie usually took two years to produce. Anyone can tear down someone else’s work. The true test of insight is whether you can help them improve it or build something of your own.
Author: Adam Grant | Subjects: Communication, Concepts, Creativity and Innovation, Personal Improvement
To the zealot overcome by his piety and to the journeyman of ideas concerned only with his marketable mental skills, the beginning and end of ideas lies in their efficacy with respect to some goal external to intellectual processes.
Author: Richard Hofstadter | Subjects: Concepts, Creativity and Innovation, Education | Scholarship, Thought | Inquiry
All creative work is at bottom a means of self-liberation and a coping mechanism — for the loneliness, the despair, the chaos and contradiction within. It is the best means we have of transmuting that which gnaws at us into something that nourishes, and yet how little of that private ferment is visible in the finished work.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Art, Concepts, Creativity and Innovation, Psychology | Behavior
Some inventions result from theorizing how something should work and then building it. Others result from building something that works before understanding it.
Author: George Dyson | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Creativity and Innovation, Math & Science
When you can give ideas away and retain them at the same time, you can afford to be generous. In contrast, it is less easy to maintain allegiance to any number of contradictory ideas, and especially to act in line with all of them. Thus, if somebody accepts your ideas and therefore has to discard or reject competing ideas, in belief or in action, he … [ Read more ]
Author: Ulf Hannerz | Subjects: Concepts, Creativity and Innovation, Education | Scholarship, Personal Improvement, Thought | Inquiry
Inseparable from the question of freedom is the nature of the imagination — that ultimate frontier of our freedom of thought.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Creativity and Innovation, Freedom | Liberty
The common trait of people who supposedly have vision is that they spend a lot of time reading and gathering information, and then they synthesize it until they come up with an idea.
Author: Fred Smith | Subjects: Concepts, Creativity and Innovation, Education | Scholarship
The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.
Author: Mary Oliver | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Art, Concepts, Creativity and Innovation
This is the great and terrifying truth about the creative life: Anything we make — all this longing for beauty and meaning, all these reckonings and raptures, these most passionate and personal fragments of being — is just a tiny seed compacting everything we are, blown into the wind that is the world.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Art, Concepts, Creativity and Innovation
You are just as likely to solve a problem by being unconventional and determined as by being brilliant.
Author: James Dyson | Subjects: Concepts, Creativity and Innovation, Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Personal Improvement, Success / Failure
History is shaped by two types of minds: one that sees things in new and creative ways, and without traditional limitations; and one that sees things in the same, limited ways, as countless others have done in the past.
Author: Jeff Blum | Subjects: Change, Concepts, Creativity and Innovation, History
[The] generative possibility of being wrong is by definition a function of the friction around being right — contention is the crucible of creation, within us and between us.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Creativity and Innovation
I kept my idea a secret from anyone who could not directly help to move it forward. That was my gut instinct at the time, but it’s now one of the best pieces of advice I have to give. Ideas are the most vulnerable at the moment you have them; that’s also the time people are most inclined to run around seeking validation from everyone … [ Read more ]
Author: Sarah Blakely | Source: Farnam Street | Subjects: Concepts, Creativity and Innovation
Most geniuses—especially those who lead others—prosper not by deconstructing intricate complexities but by exploiting unrecognized simplicities.
Author: Andy Benoit | Source: Farnam Street | Subjects: Concepts, Creativity and Innovation, Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Personal Improvement
Big ideas come from the unconscious. This is true in art, in science and in advertising. But your unconscious has to be well informed, or your idea will be irrelevant. Stuff your conscious mind with information, then unhook your rational thought process. You can help this process by going for a long walk, or taking a hot bath, or drinking half a pint of claret. … [ Read more ]
Author: David Ogilvy | Subjects: Concepts, Creativity and Innovation
Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.
Author: Albert Einstein | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Creativity and Innovation, Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge
All ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources.
Author: Mark Twain | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Creativity and Innovation
While we are born wakeful to wonder, our cultural conditioning and indoctrination — what we call our education — often schools us out of it.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Creativity and Innovation, Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior
You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.
Author: Mark Twain | Subjects: Concepts, Creativity and Innovation, Insight, Personal Improvement
Substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources.
Author: Mark Twain | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Creativity and Innovation