The secret to creativity, intelligence and scientific thinking is being able to make connections. Knowledge alone is not useful unless we can make connections between what we know. Connections are our source for creativity and as Steve Jobs has said it: nothing is original. He said 'Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something.'
In response to yesterday's post, Where Do Ideas Come From? here is a more in depth explanation of how to fuel more creativity and ideas into your thought process. If you can't think of your own ideas, it's okay, you can steal them.
Author Austin Kleon explains this perfectly. He even has a book, Steal Like An Artist, a book about using the work of others to inspire and inform your own. Honor, study fully and credit those work who you steal ideas from, transform and remix their ideas, and learn from many.
This basic idea is to think of yourself as a mashup of what you let into your life. Anyone can be creative if they surround themselves with the right influences, play nice, and work hard.
Creativity is the ideas you take from others, and it's also the connections you make with people and your life experiences. It's everything you take your life to be. Pay attention to the details in your life, and always be curious.
The secret to being able to make connections with our experiences and knowledge and being able to pour it into our craft is simple: when you connect experiences with the people you meet and the stories you share, you are connecting everything in your life to create new ideas. In order for us to truly create and contribute to the world, we have to be able to connect countless dots, to cross-pollinate ideas from a wealth of disciplines, to combine and recombine these pieces and build on them.
Our egos also affect our willingness to build on what other have done before. In yesterday's post, I discussed briefly about not letting yourself be sure of everything. Those who think they know it all and want to be confident about their so-called brilliance, they leave no room for learning.
Connect the experiences you've had and synthesize them with new things. The way to do this is to go out and experience more and think more about the experiences you have had. This is what I live by. In the movie, Stuck In Love, the father tells his children (who want to be writers) that writers are a sum of their experiences. I want to be a writer...or I guess I technically already am; but after hearing that, it made me want to go out and let me self be vulnerable, experience things I would have been afraid to do otherwise, and truly just live life. Exploring, hearing other people's stories and making memories of my own is what fuels my creativity. What will you do to fuel yours?
Photograph by Chris Ozer
In response to yesterday's post, Where Do Ideas Come From? here is a more in depth explanation of how to fuel more creativity and ideas into your thought process. If you can't think of your own ideas, it's okay, you can steal them.
Author Austin Kleon explains this perfectly. He even has a book, Steal Like An Artist, a book about using the work of others to inspire and inform your own. Honor, study fully and credit those work who you steal ideas from, transform and remix their ideas, and learn from many.
This basic idea is to think of yourself as a mashup of what you let into your life. Anyone can be creative if they surround themselves with the right influences, play nice, and work hard.
Creativity is the ideas you take from others, and it's also the connections you make with people and your life experiences. It's everything you take your life to be. Pay attention to the details in your life, and always be curious.
The secret to being able to make connections with our experiences and knowledge and being able to pour it into our craft is simple: when you connect experiences with the people you meet and the stories you share, you are connecting everything in your life to create new ideas. In order for us to truly create and contribute to the world, we have to be able to connect countless dots, to cross-pollinate ideas from a wealth of disciplines, to combine and recombine these pieces and build on them.
Our egos also affect our willingness to build on what other have done before. In yesterday's post, I discussed briefly about not letting yourself be sure of everything. Those who think they know it all and want to be confident about their so-called brilliance, they leave no room for learning.
Connect the experiences you've had and synthesize them with new things. The way to do this is to go out and experience more and think more about the experiences you have had. This is what I live by. In the movie, Stuck In Love, the father tells his children (who want to be writers) that writers are a sum of their experiences. I want to be a writer...or I guess I technically already am; but after hearing that, it made me want to go out and let me self be vulnerable, experience things I would have been afraid to do otherwise, and truly just live life. Exploring, hearing other people's stories and making memories of my own is what fuels my creativity. What will you do to fuel yours?
Photograph by Chris Ozer
