By David Robson — 2021
Many professions require you to think flexibly and improvise all day long—but constant pressure to be inventive could be holding you back.
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CLEAR ALL
What happens when a journalist turns her lens on a mystery happening in her own life? Maureen Seaberg did just that and lived for a year exploring her synesthesia.
People who are good at creating ideas are good at seeing connections.
Learning any new skill involves relatively brief spurts of progress, each of which is followed by a slight decline to a plateau somewhat higher in most cases than that which preceded it . . . the upward spurts vary; the plateaus have their own dips and rises along the way. . . .
Ultimately, nothing in this life is ‘commonplace,’ nothing is ‘in between.’ The threads that join your every act, your every thought, are infinite. All paths of mastery eventually merge. [Each person has a] vantage point that offers a truth of its own.
This is how great intellectual breakthroughs usually happen in practice. It is rarely the isolated genius having a eureka moment alone in the lab. Nor is it merely a question of building on precedent, of standing on the shoulders of giants, in Newton’s famous phrase.
To be creative, we have to unlearn millions of years of evolution. Creativity asks us to do that which is hardest: to question our assumptions, to doubt what we believe to be true. That is the only way to see differently.
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