Can you learn creativity? Can you practice creativity? Or are some people just creative and others not?
Scott Berkun answers some of these questions and many others about creativity, which is seen by many as something innate, but as the saying goes, “It takes 10 years to be an overnight success”. So yes, there is something innate in being creative, but there is also a lot of work involved, and many methodologies. For example, writing down every day all the ideas you had, even if they are not feasible, weird, or plain stupid. But as time goes and ideas accumulate, you may find that a mix of some of these ideas might actually be good. And that is when you get a breakthrough.
There are many interesting concepts throughout the book, but alas, I read it the old-fashion way (i.e. not kindle) and I don’t like to write on books… so I don’t have many quotes even though I’m sure the book is filled with them.
- The great surprise for people with good ideas is the gap between how an idea feels in their mind and how it feels when they put the idea to work… When we do sit down to work on the details of an idea, the euphoria fades away… It might take an hour or a day, but soon the tasks at hand feel surprisingly ordinary.
- Many people say, “This idea is very important to me, but I don’t have the time.” This is a lie because importance is relative… We all have the same time limit of 24 hours every day, which means that the difference between a productive creative person and an unsatisfied dreamer is in how they choose to use it.
- We are victims of survivorship bias in our popularizing of breakthrough stories, giving attention only to successful accidental outcomes while ignoring the majority of accidents and mistakes that led to absolutely nowhere
Great read. Buy it/lend it from your preferred location