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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.
- Tim Harford collected some good insights on this in the Automation chapter of his book "Messy: How to Be Creative and Resilient in a Tidy-Minded World".
The essence of his complaint revolves around Air France Flight 447 and attributes the incident partially to the lack of experience the pilot had flying manually.
Essentially, the idea is that an autonomous vehicle allows the operator to relax, right up until the point at which it fails - leaving the operator with a difficult situation and a lack of skill to deal with it. Of course it also removes a whole range of more routine errors that could have been fatal.
There are a couple of ideas on how to solve the problem, but I'll let you read the excerpt yourself rather than parroting it here:
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=QPMeCgAAQBAJ&pg=PT121&lp...
- It seems that this is related to the Tim Harford book Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives, but that book is not about deep learning.
- In Messy: How to Be Creative and Resilient in a Tidy-Minded World, Tim Harford describe the strategy of the initial period of Amazon, and compare Bezos with Erwin Rommel, the desert Fox.
