#creativity

#creativity

Neuroscientist Karen Konkoly is a lucid dreamer. When she's asleep and immersed in a dream, she knows that she is, in fact, dreaming. One of her favorite things to do during these sleep sojourns is pose personal, even existential questions - probing the mysterious terrain of her own subconscious mind. Asa researcher who studies the human mind, Konkoly has read many scientific papers positing different explanations for why humans dream - and she's made it her mission to rigorously test them.

Everything we do is advertising and this recent trend of saying we do something different - content, direct mail, stories, whatever - is the most stupid thing I have ever heard.

There's a particular kind of panic that hits when you're facing a creative problem, and the well just feels... empty. Every idea seems stale. Every solution feels recycled. And the question creeps in: Have I finally used up all my good ideas? Maybe it's your third attempt at solving the same design problem, and every solution feels like a pale echo of something you've already tried. Or perhaps you've been churning out work for months, and suddenly the spark you used to rely on? Gone.

Most people think that sparking creativity is all about adding things[1]. They tend to think that the more they add to a particular venture or product or service, the better. More features-sure that will add to the creative element of the offering! More options? Yes, please! That will add choice, which will lead to better outcomes. We tend to associate more with being better. But when it comes to creativity, less is more.

Spend half an hour exploring #StrategyTwitter or #MarketingTwitter and you'll quickly discover huge swathes of talented folks arguing passionately about the correct way to market brands. On one end of the spectrum you'll find the staunch strategists quoting lines from Sharp's How Brands Grow (which is well worth a read), while on the other end you'll find people posting fairly nauseating Gary Vaynerchuk quotes in serif fonts about how the number one rule in marketing is 'love'.

In the "Arabian Nights" ( The Thousand and One Nights) story collection, a young Persian queen named Scheherazade prevents the king's plans to execute her by telling a succession of stories so enthralling that the king doesn't want to miss the endings. In "The Crow and the Pitcher," one of Aesop's fables, a thirsty crow can't reach the water in a tall jug, so it drops pebbles into the jug until the water rises to its beak.

As AI systems become more capable, more accessible, and more embedded in everyday workflows, creativity is emerging as one of the most important human skills in AI development and deployment. Not creativity as decoration or aesthetics, but creativity as problem framing, decision-making, and human judgment. In an era where many organizations are using the same models, tools, and platforms, creative thinking is what separates meaningful outcomes from generic ones.

Intuition might have you thinking that face-to-face contact is better at getting the creative juices flowing than a voice-only phone call. A 2022 study led by business professor Melanie Brucks, however, found that videoconferencing was detrimental to creative idea generation because communicators feel obligated to stare at the screen. The experiment pitted videoconference groups against in-person groups to see which could find more creative uses for different objects.

The 44-year-old original influencer, reality star, and founder of a laundry list of business ventures, said on the January 21 episode of "On Purpose with Jay Shetty" that her neurodivergent brain helps her "think outside the box." "I never wanted to be in one lane. I wanted to create my own lane. And I just have always been someone who just loves to do things and take risks and do things before anyone else," she said.

Develop a start-from-scratch mentality. Imagine walking into your kitchen each morning and seeing a completely empty pot-no leftovers, no old recipes, just a blank slate. That's what I face every day as a creator: the daunting but exhilarating task of starting fresh. This mindset is essential for innovation. We can't rest on yesterday's ingredients. We must embrace a beginner's mind, a state of utter unknowing, like a child who can see infinite possibilities and the extraordinary in the ordinary.

Remote work is amazing and so is pizza. But you shouldn't eat pizza every day and you shouldn't work from home every day either. As an introvert I hate small talk and loud spaces, so when remote work became the default during COVID, it felt like the world had finally adjusted to me. No commute, no noise and no forced conversations. I could work in silence with my cat on my lap.

When asked to rate high-performing candidates and average candidates, study participants preferred the high performers. No surprise there. But the highest-rated candidates of all were the high performers who had also just spilled coffee all over themselves before walking in the door. In other words, we want you to be able to do your job, but we don't mind if you're kind of a mess. In fact, we prefer it! You're relatable.

Balancing gut feelings with hard data isn't a soft skill. It's a strategic advantage. In an era where AI, automation, and ubiquitous dashboards flood us with metrics, it's tempting to believe that better spreadsheets alone will yield better decisions. But our most consequential choices rarely emerge from a cell in column D. They arise from an ongoing negotiation between intuition and rational analysis.

We recently participated in a weekend symposium focused on the intersections of imagination, neuroscience, art, and psychedelics at the UC San Diego Imaginarium. Viewing our couples' therapy work from this perspective was exciting and inspiring, and it reaffirmed something we have always known: The couples that stay vibrant, resilient, and deeply connected are the ones that remain curious about each other and creative and imaginative about their relationship. They don't just love one another. They are present and mindful, and they imagine and play together.

I'm going to be 79 years old. You know, my mother only lived to be 82 and suddenly, chronology has a different meaning,

When the new arrives, we generally have two choices in how we respond. The first path is resistance. This is the path of fear. We tighten up, we judge the change, we worry about the future, and we try to fight it. This path almost always creates suffering. The second path is acceptance. This doesn't mean "giving up"; it means opening up. It is the path of curiosity where we observe, learn, and adapt. This path creates peace.

In the 5th grade, I remember making a drawing of something in art class. What ended up on paper was exactly what I had seen it in my head. Something cognitive manifested into something physical, and I had felt creativity for the first time. As a young teen, I had been listening to bands like The Decendents, Face to Face, and The Gorilla Biscuits.

This, says Alexey Pajitnov, while holding a scrambled Rubik's Cube, is my favorite puzzle. But I also think it's simply one of the best things humanity has ever invented. If we could only send 10 things into space, this should be one of them. Standing beside Pajitnov who revolutionized the digital world when he created Tetris, the best-selling video game of all time is the cube's creator, Erno Rubik, smiling widely.

When we think of creativity, we don't usually think of it as a skill one can develop through hard work and intent, like learning a new language or developing our math abilities. Often, we think of artists or entrepreneurs as inherent geniuses, born with some genetic quality we could never obtain.

Some days, starting feels effortless. A clear challenge or opportunity presents itself, an idea crystallizes, and then contracts into a single coherent thought. Today, frankly? That's not happening. I'm staring at a pristine white canvas while the cursor mocks me. That uncomfortable space-the blinking cursor, the first messy draft, the false starts-isn't a nuisance. It's where creativity lives. Today, the temptation is to skip past all that.

"[My train of thought] let its line down into the stream. It swayed, minute after minute, hither and thither among the reflections and the weeds letting the water lift it and sink it until-you know the little tug-the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the end of one's line."

Everyone's heard that expression, "Life is for the living." I've always assumed living in this context was a noun referencing all people currently alive. Now I'm looking at it as a verb. Think of it as a verb, as an action, as I say that life exists not for the dying of it, but for the living of it. Well, of course, right? Living occurs right now, in the present. Life is a gift.

A group of researchers from Aarhus University in Denmark offered "...an outlook on potential ways in which what we eat, where we eat, and how we eat might positively support creative thinking, with applications in the workplace and home. [They presented] the view that, by offering a rich multisensory experience, eating nourishes not only our bodies but our mental well-being." They went on to state that, "If creativity is based on the process of discovering heretofore unknown links between different areas/sensory attributes, then consuming food that offers more sensorial experiences should give more opportunities for inspiration."