Creativity Top 5: September 4, 2012
/Love the Warhol Campbell's Soup cans.
Scott Adams: Creativity and Memory
/The way I perceive the act of creativity while it happens in me is as a process of forgetting, not a process of creating. The mind is not capable of having zero thoughts, so when you flush whatever is in your head at the moment it creates a sort of vacuum that sucks in a new thought. In my case, that process of forgetting and then sucking in a new thought happens continuously. My memory isn't "sticky," so what comes in slides right back out in a nanosecond. Sometimes a new thought is worth writing down, which I either do right away or lose it forever. Usually the new idea is random garbage and it passes quickly, making room for the next idea. My mind feels like a slot machine that I can't stop pulling. Sometimes the diamonds line up, but not often.
Scott Adams talks about his terrible memory and how he believes it is the key to his creativity.
Creativity Top 5: August 27, 2012
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Watching the James Franco directed spot for Samsung Galaxy Note I can't help but think about the recent verdict on the patent case and the Steve Jobs quote "If you see a stylus, they blew it."
Trust your hunches, and write them down.
/The problem with hunches is that it's incredibly easy to forget them, precisely because they're not fully-baked ideas. You're reading an article, and a little spark of an idea pops into your head, but by the time you've finished the article, you're checking your email, or responding to some urgent request from your colleague, and the next thing you know, you've forgotten the hunch for good. And even the ones that you do manage to retain often don't turn out to be useful to you for months or years, which gives you countless opportunities to lose track of them.This is why for the past eight years or so I've been maintaining a single document where I keep all my hunches: ideas for articles, speeches, software features, startups, ways of framing a chapter I know I'm going to write, even whole books. I now keep it as a Google document so I can update it from wherever I happen to be. There's no organizing principle to it, no taxonomy--just a chronological list of semi-random ideas that I've managed to capture before I forgot them. I call it the spark file.
Steven Johnson, writer of the must-read Where Ideas Come From, explores writing and idea generation in the newly launched in beta Medium.