{"id":10184,"date":"2016-01-26T14:31:16","date_gmt":"2016-01-26T06:31:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/blog\/?p=9440"},"modified":"2016-01-26T14:31:16","modified_gmt":"2016-01-26T06:31:16","slug":"creativity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/2016\/01\/26\/creativity\/","title":{"rendered":"Creativity is just connecting (and remixing) things"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=coGpmA4saEk\">Everything Is A Remix (Full Video)<\/a>\u00a0[30 mins+]<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/austinkleon.com\/2011\/03\/30\/how-to-steal-like-an-artist-and-9-other-things-nobody-told-me\/\">How To Steal Like An Artist<\/a>, by Austin Kleon (Google him for Twitter).<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/news.ycombinator.com\/item?id=8915939\">Post on HN, about Steve Jobs, Chris Rock<\/a><\/li>\n<li>Reframe your thinking [<a href=\"http:\/\/www.fastcodesign.com\/1672354\/how-reframing-a-problem-unlocks-innovation\">1<\/a>]<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Steve Jobs:<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn&#8217;t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That&#8217;s because they were able to connect experiences they&#8217;ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they&#8217;ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.<\/p>\n<p>Unfortunately, that&#8217;s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven&#8217;t had very diverse experiences. So they don&#8217;t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one&#8217;s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/archive.wired.com\/wired\/archive\/4.02\/jobs_pr.html\" rel=\"nofollow\">http:\/\/archive.wired.com\/wired\/archive\/4.02\/jobs_pr.html<\/a><\/p>\n<p>====<\/p>\n<p>Creativity is just connecting things. Imagine the world as a giant set of data points. Creativity is seeing a unique set of connections between a given set of data points, or a choosing an unusual subset unusual data points to tell a unique, different story. It&#8217;s about ordering things differently, selecting things differently. People applaud creativity when it shows us more interesting ways of seeing things. The familiar becomes unfamiliar. The unfamiliar becomes familiar. There&#8217;s a shorter, faster, more efficient way of doing something. Etc<\/p>\n<p>How do emotional states (sadness, boredom, etc) affect creativity? They act as filters. When you&#8217;re sad, you focus on some things and not others. When you&#8217;re happy, you focus on some things and not others. When you&#8217;re bored&#8230; you get the drill.<\/p>\n<p>It isn&#8217;t the state that makes you more creative. It&#8217;s CHANGING your state that makes you creative. It&#8217;s about seeing the world with new eyes. Going for a run makes you more creative. Being sleep-deprived makes you more creative, and getting a good night&#8217;s sleep makes you more creative\u2013 depending on what you&#8217;re working on.<\/p>\n<p>And of course, the more you work, the more data points you have, the more different variations you attempt, the more you switch things around, the more creative you&#8217;ll be. It&#8217;s a skill you can practice, like improv comedy.<\/p>\n<p>\u2014<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/news.ycombinator.com\/item?id=6914138\">HN thread<\/a>: There&#8217;s totally a parallel between this and the video game music of Mario, Zelda and Final Fantasy- they could only play 2-3 notes at once, so they had to work with those constraints. The music couldn&#8217;t be too complex, so every note had to go really, really far. The result? Extremely memorable tunes with catchy melodies. It was a matter of necessity.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s a lot to be said about creativity coming from being forced to deal with constraints. It&#8217;s counterintuitive, but we get most juiced about solving problems when they&#8217;re tough. It&#8217;s hardest to start writing when it&#8217;s blank piece of paper. Here&#8217;s one story on it: http:\/\/plumecopy.com\/bach-picasso-on-the-creative-process\/<\/p>\n<p>\u2014<\/p>\n<p>===<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.com\/news\/uk-england-38506378\">Creative commuters<\/a><\/li>\n<li><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp; Everything Is A Remix (Full Video)\u00a0[30 mins+] How To Steal Like An Artist, by Austin Kleon (Google him for Twitter). Post on HN, about Steve Jobs, Chris Rock Reframe your thinking [1] &nbsp; Steve Jobs: &#8220;Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something,&hellip; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[836],"tags":[588,589,590],"class_list":["post-10184","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-wip","tag-creativity","tag-making-things","tag-remix"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5gxNz-2Eg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10184","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10184"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10184\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}