What follows is a collection of thoughts and pieces of wisdom I have gathered so far. Some are my own words, others are quotes or ideas that have resonated with me along the way. This project is intended as a live commonplace online notebook, updated often.
Some parts may seem inconsistent, even contradictory. Life itself tends to disagree with solid certainties. If you, dear reader, stumble upon an idea that feels irrelevant, wrong, or contrary to everything you’ve lived, maybe it isn’t for you. Skim past it, or let it sit for a while. Your experience may differ from mine because we are all different. Just like everyone else. (See Quote Investigator)
There is no intended order to these thoughts; ideas arrive unpredictably, and any kind of structure will likely dissolve after a few weeks or so of tending to this project.
Note: Most of these thoughts are written in the second person because this article is meant primarily for me, as a place to plant and prune ideas.
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Finding the DNA of Creativity
Set your antennae for examples using creative problem-solving. When you find a cool example of creative problem solving, identify the structure of the idea. This will help you devise other ideas with the same bones. (inspired by Lynley Dodd)
Method 1: Twist and exaggerate something completely normal until it becomes something completely new, but at the same time familiar (MAYA).
Method 2: We all have this DNA hidden in some unconscious competencies. Find them, bring them to the surface and work with them for a long time.
A creative person is one, who enjoys, above all, the company of his own mind. Anything done well, from baking a souffle to putting together a winning stock portfolio is creative.
The trick to creativity, if there is a single useful thing to say about it, is to identify your own peculiar talent and then settle down to work with it for a good long time.
Everyone has an aptitude for something. The trick is to recognise it, to work with it… The problem is that the things you’re good at come naturally.
And since most people are modest instead of arrogant sobs, what comes naturally you don’t see as a special skill. It’s just you. It’s what you’ve always done.
Denise G. Shekerjian – Uncommon Genius
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On Mistakes and Certainty
Prejudices emerge from the disposition of the human mind to perceive and process information in categories. Categories is a nicer, more neutral word than stereotypes, but it’s the same thing.
An acquired prejudice is hard to dislodge. As the great jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. said, “Trying to educate a bigot is like shining light into the pupil of an eye—it constricts.”
Carol Tavris, Elliot Aronson – Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me)
To fight that constriction, you need intellectual agility. Mistakes were made, sometimes by you, and admitting that requires a big ego and a small ego.
The people who are the most successful here, who we want to hire, will have a fierce position. They’ll argue like hell. They’ll be zealots about their point of view. But then you say, ‘here’s a new fact,’ and they’ll go, ‘Oh, well, that changes things; you’re right.’ You need a big ego and small ego in the same person at the same time.
Laszlo Bock in a How to Get a Job at Google article
That “small ego” is where creativity happens. If you treat a mistake not as a failure of character, but as a twist in the data, it becomes a discovery process.
Nine out of ten of my experiments fail, and that is considered a pretty good record amongst scientists.
Science, my boy, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.
Jules Verne – Journey to the Centre of the Earth
However, calibrate what you learn, lest you over-correct.
We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits on a hot stove-lid; he will never sit on a hot stove-lid again—and that is well; but also he will never sit on a cold one anymore.
Mark Twain
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Productivity Models
Don’t confuse efficiency (doing things right to minimise waste) with effectiveness (doing the right thing). The goal, naturally, is to do the right things right. Or effective efficiency. Or efficient effectiveness.
But be careful. If you chase efficiency too hard, you lose resilience, the ability to respond to changing circumstances. A system that is 100% efficient has no slack, and without slack, there is no room to absorb a shock.
This applies to how you view time itself. Sometimes, you must override the mental chatter that tells “you are wasting time”. Yes, sometimes you lose time mindlessly; sometimes you create memories. Too often, time is seen as a financial metaphor (see George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s book, Metaphors We Live By): we spend time, save time, live on borrowed time.
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The Weight of Memory
I’ll explain it to you: it’s terrible to remember, but it’s far more terrible not to remember.
I believe that in each of us, there is a small piece of history. In one half a page, in another two or three. Together, we write the book of time. We each call out our own truth. The nightmare of nuances.
From Svetlana Alexievich, a Belarusian investigative journalist and the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature winner, who recorded interviews with thousands of people, bearing witness to the overlooked tragedies and private histories that official records and grand narratives often miss (villagers and survivors living through the aftermath of Chernobyl, the long shadows haunting Soviet women who went to war, or the countless children caught in the upheaval of World War II, etc.).
Carry your history, but don’t weaponise it against others.
In my first weeks at Auschwitz I learn the rules of survival. If you can steal a piece of bread from the guards, you are a hero, but if you steal from an inmate, you are disgraced, you die; competition and domination get you nowhere, cooperation is the name of the game; to survive is to transcend your own needs and commit yourself to someone or something outside yourself.
I also want to say that there is no hierarchy of suffering. There’s nothing that makes my pain worse or better than yours, no graph on which we can plot the relative importance of one sorrow versus another. People say to me, “Things in my life are pretty hard right now, but I have no right to complain — it’s not Auschwitz.” This kind of comparison can lead us to minimise or diminish our own suffering.
Edith Eger – The Choice
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Pocketing the Good Days
Sometimes, to move forward, look to see if you can borrow somebody else’s light.
In life, you have to learn to count the good days. You have to tuck them in your pocket and carry them around with you. So I’m putting today in my pocket and I’m off to bed.
Richard Osman – The Thursday Murder Club
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
Annie Dillard
But pocketing joy triggers an ancient guilt, showing different heads like a Hydra.
How that pattern does repeat itself in legend. The human race feels eternally guilty when it is happy. We cannot even remark on our good health without touching wood or crossing our fingers or otherwise averting the gods’ anger at mortal well-being.
Josephine Tey – The Singing Sands
So when that fear appears, you can either
Look, he said to his imagination, if this is how you’re going to behave, I shan’t bring you again.
Terry Pratchett – Going Postal
or
My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened.