The accidental creative
Outlines a method for tapping one's creative potential in order to generate ideas without undue stress, providing coverage of such strategies as beginning with an end goal in mind, and managing energy efficiently.
Stats for nerds
2recommend
5mentions
2people
2014–2021years
100% recommend
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- > And generally speaking, in life, I feel like I'm pretty bad at having my own unique take/opinion on things, even though I'm trying. Most of my "controversial" thoughts and opinions came from the controversial/unpopular books/essays/posts I have read.
My position is that it's fine to stand on the shoulders of giants and adopt the opinions of others with due credit, especially for topics outside of your field of expertise. All great thinkers have their influences, so it doesn't make sense to me to expect anyone to have a completely unique take on everything. Your collection of ideas and opinions that you have adopted is in itself unique, so there's no need to build an opinion from scratch on every topic.
In terms of concrete techniques for creativity, there's a couple books on this subject that might interest you -- Messy by Tim Harford [0], The War of Art by Steven Pressfield and The Accidental Creative by Todd Henry. Harford talks about stuff like cross-pollination, with the idea that well-known solutions for one medium could be considered breakthroughs in a different context. Pressfield talks about discipline/professionalism and using that to create an environment for your muse to visit. Henry takes more of a productivity-oriented approach, with tips to manage energy, avoid "assassins of creativity", that sort of thing.
For me personally, if I'm in a rut I like to go to the local library and just walk around the shelves until I see something interesting -- it can be pretty hit or miss, but every now and then I'll check out a book that leads to a creative thread worth following.
But one I thing I will note for you specifically, just from your choice of language in your post, is that it sounds like you tend to hold yourself to a very high standard. This is generally a good thing, but consider that you may subconsciously be putting a lot of pressure on yourself to be uniquely great. This can run the risk of developing an excessively critical attitude that can preclude you from giving yourself the freedom and space to make mistakes and explore ideas and activities that may not seem like they will lead to anything worthwhile at first glance.
Creativity generally isn't something that you actively pursue -- it is a process that ensues from letting inspiration marinate in your subconscious. So if you want to be more creative, I suggest pursuing more potential sources of inspiration, and more opportunities for subconscious marination -- long walks, meditation, yoga, etc.
- I read this as a single article distillation of the principles in Deep Work by Cal Newport, very well done. It's been a while since I read Pragmatic Thinking and Learning by Andy Hunt, but the article feels familiar with that, as well (I recall a helpful section on meditation). The Accidental Creative by Todd Henry is another great resource.
Newport's sources showed that most people are capable of about four hours of deep work per day. If you hit that level, add in 2-3 hours of shallower tasks, and do it every day, you reach 200 "productive hours" in a month. I'm not sure how many people are willing or able to carve out two 3-hour blocks more than five days a week, but it seems highly worthwhile to step back once a month or quarter, with one's s.o. or family, if present, and think about what is possible and what makes sense in support of mutual goals. From there, in light of the goals and constraints, the article's breakdown for cultivating the environment, body, and mind are clarifying. Ok, I'm sitting down with my wife and doing this this weekend.
The gist of the article is what I try to practice, and I find the strategy refresher motivating. I have had good success with removing push notifications, removing the phone from the workspace, sleeping at the same time, regular breaks to stay limber, targeted muscle work (rowing during winter until it gets too boring, the Roam Strong workout plan currently), and reducing junk calories intake. I've had less success building deep work persistence by making streaks and subdividing tasks. I think it's time to force the break to a separate device for leisure.
How much is it worth spending on a CO2 monitor? As a remote worker, I'm in the same air space almost all day every day, so if there is a low grade problem, I'm cooked.
- It seems to me like a pretty big inductive leap to generalize that no skills whatsoever are transferrable across disciplines from anecdotal evidence and one study indicating the inability of ping pong players to improve their physical reflexes, which likely has a limit based purely on human neural and optimal hardware. At the very least, what about soft skills? Discipline? Attitude? Why else would Google be able to correlate success and college athletics when they released that blog post about revamping their interview process? (Notably, GPA and standardized test scores did not have any similar positive correlation...)
I recently read Fermat's Enigma about Andrew Wiles's successful quest to solve the centuries' old problem of proving Fermat's last theorem. His big breakthrough came from the application of insights from one mathematical field, modular forms, to his own field of elliptic curves. Randy Pausch also talks about "head fakes" in his Last Lecture, which similarly praises the ability to learn skills and lessons that are applicable in a wide variety of contexts, often without realizing that's what's happening.
Of course a certain level of fluency in a subject is required before any cross-disciplinary insights would have any additional return beyond pure study of that subject, so becoming a grandmaster at chess indicates little about you than the fact that you are good at chess. And even after obtaining fluency it may in fact be the case that the ability to apply insights from other disciplines may itself be a trainable skill, not an automatic benefit. There is probably an element of choice in the broadening of the subconscious scan that we undertake while solving problems, as well as the ability to generalize lessons learned into applicable insights and patterns. My own personal theory is that we create and myelinate neural models for patterns that we encounter frequently while solving problems, from which point it may then be possible to recognize some of those problems in other contexts, repurposing some of those neural models that we can access with deep fluency to offload some processing power required in solving problems, in addition to the new neural constructs we must create for each specific type of problem.
You are of course free to believe what you want to believe, but I think this particular instance of skepticism has the potential to hold you back from a wealth of insights. Keep in mind that this New York Times article is clearly written for a general audience rather than a technical audience, so it is understandable that many here would be put off by certain stylistic choices and oversimplifications. But I do think the core premise is a sound one, although I still wouldn't recommend getting a liberal arts education. If you are looking for a more convincing argument, try Todd Henry's book from the Accidental Creative, Bob Rice's book on chess and business or a few episodes of Barbara Oakley's Coursera course.
- It's a good insight that other systems may complement GTD for driving deep creative focus. Todd Henry covers this very well, both conceptually and tactically, in his book The Accidental Creative. He offers a flexible set of practices that work together as a system to help you put your money where your mouth is in terms of what you say is important in your creative work and how you spend your time and mental energy in light of that. He touches on a lot of the same principles as the OP but in book form. It's a good read and is backed by the author's personal experience and work experience helping others tackle their own creativity and productivity challenges.
One technique relevant to other commenters recognizing that a full task view is not always relevant for creative projects, or least for the creative aspect of projects, is to maintain a project list that focuses on the key challenges or questions that define the creative purpose or problem of the project. Review that regularly and set aside time to tackle the creative challenges. You can always use GTD or any other task list tool to track the concrete tasks generated from those times and work from those lists during pomodoros or heads down execution time. The point is nurturing creativity does require different techniques than task execution, but with some care you can manage it within the constraints of a given day, week, and month. The book says it much better and more comprehensively than I can and is highly recommended reading.
- Shop Class As Soulcraft by Matthew Crawford completely changed and focused how I think about work and mental healthy.
The Accidental Creative and Die Empty by Todd Henry provide excellent tools and background for adding practical discipline to creative work and life in general. As of now I can't prioritize one over the other. Either or both are well worth the time invested.
Toxic Charity by Robert Lupton takes a critical look at how charitable giving and service are done by the modern church and provides a better plan distilled from decades of experience helping troubled neighborhoods in Atlanta.
The Permanent Portfolio by Rowland and Lawson preaches Harry Browne's Permanent Portfolio but fills in all the implementation gaps left in Harry's rather thin original.
Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. This classic on what Christians believe cuts as deep today as it did in Lewis's day.
