Creativity

March 1, 2011 by Joshua
in Blog, Creativity

[I replaced this post with a series on creativity. Click here to view that series, where you’ll get more value than reading just this post.]

The next few posts will be on creativity, mainly exploring counterproductive mainstream myths about it. I used to view the topic 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 is great and covers the material well, though the tone is academic.

The other is Creativity: Beyond the Myth of Genius, the other revolutionary book on creativity I’ve read.

Mainstream ideas on creativity try to make the topic seem romantic — like that Mozart was a creative genius beyond ordinary human capability and he worked in ways beyond us. Between the two books, my concept of what we call creativity is dramatically more down to earth. De-romanticized, creativity will sell fewer magazines and movie tickets, but is more accessible.

In other words, read these books and you can be more creative more easily and have more fun doing so. People will call you genius, even though the things they call you genius for are easy and you’re just having fun. I’ve read other books on creativity and, in my opinion, they’re garbage in comparison.

A few of the topics I plan to cover

… and more …

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3 responses on “Creativity

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