I’ve been answering questions on the social media site Quora for about a month. My responses are getting more views and upvotes, so I thought I’d put some here, since the posts there are like posts here for readers who don’t feel like going there. I’m thinking about making a standard Saturday practice of collecting my responses here from there for the week. Since I have a month to catch[…] Keep reading →

The series of posts below covers creativity, mainly exploring counterproductive mainstream myths about it. I used to view “creativity” as vague, but a few sources dramatically and convincingly changed my perspective. One was a class at Columbia Business School called Systematic Creativity in Business, by Jacob Goldenberg. Creativity being systematic was designed to appear in the course name as a contradiction, but isn’t when you understand the material. His book[…] Keep reading →

EDIT (2019): While I value all the resources below, this page is long due for an update. Other resources have emerged as more important. I’ll do my best to update it soon. If you can’t wait, contact me and I’ll raise its priority. The best place to find more, besides contacting me, is one of my seminars or classes. If I haven’t posted about an upcoming one recently, check with[…] Keep reading →

I’ve written a lot on creativity and when I do I often mention the professor whose class on creativity I took, Jacob Goldenberg. He recently gave an online talk with Columbia Business School about his research. If you like creativity, learning some unexpected properties of it, and improving your creativity, I recommend it. It’s not as polished as a TED talk, but as informative. Here it is: video platformvideo managementvideo[…] Keep reading →

A couple people emailed me today’s long New York Times article Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue?. One pointed out that it echoed my post that English and romantic languages reflect the difficulty in deciding in the root -cide. On choosing The article reports research in choosing. This blog emphasizes not mere research but applying it to improve your life. I love reading research, but enjoying learning pales in comparison[…] Keep reading →

This post continues my About page. Where to find more The best place to find more, besides contacting me, is one of my seminars or classes. If I haven’t posted about an upcoming one recently, check with me for something coming up. Here are some sources that have been influential or inspirational to me (just names of people and books now, I’ll put in links soon). Business Marshall Goldsmith –[…] Keep reading →

I haven’t forgotten about finishing up the creativity series. I got Creativity: Beyond the Myth of Genius out from the library again and am researching about the research before Jacob‘s. In the meantime, and continuing yesterday’s topic of friends doing awesome things, check out what my friend from graduate school days, when she was a post-bac pre-med, is doing: a micro-farm in Nyack, 24 miles from Manhattan. Here’s a recent[…] Keep reading →

[This post is part of a series on creativity. If you don’t see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you’ll get more value than reading just this post.] When you have a problem to solve, the problem defines the solution. When the solution solves the problem we say the form followed the function. Such solutions can appear elegant, creative, obvious, or other[…] Keep reading →

[This post is part of a series on creativity. If you don’t see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you’ll get more value than reading just this post.] So you want to be more creative? What do you do? Just about the worst thing you can do is to believe people have a certain amount of creativity and that’s their lot in[…] Keep reading →