My idea is that the entire passenger cabin would be separate from the rest of the plane, like a shotgun shell waiting to be put in the shotgun. Passengers would take their seats in the cabin “tube,” located in the airport terminal. When the airplane arrives, it lines up with the terminal and smoothly ejects its current passenger tube, along with their checked luggage, to the terminal area. The new cabin tube is lined up and smoothly inserted into the airplane shell. The entire process should take about two minutes.

Our offices should encourage casual, cafe-style interactions, but allow people to disappear into personalized, private spaces when they want to be alone. Our schools should teach children to work with others, but also to work on their own for sustained periods of time. And we must recognize that introverts like Steve Wozniak need extra quiet and privacy to do their best work.

Before Mr. Wozniak started Apple, he designed calculators at Hewlett-Packard, a job he loved partly because HP made it easy to chat with his colleagues. Every day at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., management wheeled in doughnuts and coffee, and people could socialize and swap ideas. What distinguished these interactions was how low-key they were. For Mr. Wozniak, collaboration meant the ability to share a doughnut and a brainwave with his laid-back, poorly dressed colleagues — who minded not a whit when he disappeared into his cubicle to get the real work done.

Fascinating.

Over the past hundred years, researchers have reached a surprising degree of consensus about the predictable stages of creative thinking. It was Betty Edwards who first pointed out to me that the stages move back and forth between right and left hemisphere dominance:

1. Saturation: Once the problem or creative challenge has been defined, the next stage of creativity is a left hemisphere activity that paradoxically requires absorbing one’s self in what’s already known. Any creative breakthrough inevitably rests on the shoulders of all that came before it. For a painter, that might mean studying the masters. For me, it involves reading widely and deeply, and then sorting, evaluating, organizing, outlining, and prioritizing.

2. Incubation: The second stage of creativity begins when we walk away from a problem, typically because our left hemisphere can’t seem to solve it. Incubation involves mulling over information, often unconsciously. Intense exercise can be a great way to shift into right hemisphere in order to access new ideas and solutions. After writing for 90 minutes, for example, the best thing I can do to jog my brain, is take a run.

3. Illumination: Ah-ha moments – spontaneous, intuitive, unbidden – characterize the third stage of creativity. Where are you when you get your best ideas? I’m guessing it’s not when you’re sitting at your desk, or consciously trying to think creatively. Rather it’s when you’ve given your left hemisphere a rest, and you’re doing something else, whether it’s exercising, taking a shower, driving or even sleeping.

4. Verification: In the final stage of creativity, the left hemisphere reasserts its dominance. This stage is about challenging and testing the creative breakthrough you’ve had. Scientists do this in a laboratory. Painters do it on a canvas. Writers do it by translating a vision into words.

The first key to intentionally nurturing our creativity is to understand how it works. I’ve found the stages often unfold in unpredictable sequence, and wrap back on one another. Still, keeping them in mind lets me know where I am in the creative process, and how to get to where I need to go.

The illusion of eliminating uncertainty from corporate decision-making is not merely a question of management style or personal preference. In the legal environment that has developed around publicly traded corporations, managers are strongly discouraged from shouldering any risks that they know about—or, in the opinion of some future jury, should have known about—even if they have a hunch that the gamble might pay off in the long run. There is no such thing as “long run” in industries driven by the next quarterly report. The possibility of some innovation making money is just that—a mere possibility that will not have time to materialize before the subpoenas from minority shareholder lawsuits begin to roll in.

Today’s belief in ineluctable certainty is the true innovation-killer of our age. In this environment, the best an audacious manager can do is to develop small improvements to existing systems—climbing the hill, as it were, toward a local maximum, trimming fat, eking out the occasional tiny innovation—like city planners painting bicycle lanes on the streets as a gesture toward solving our energy problems. Any strategy that involves crossing a valley—accepting short-term losses to reach a higher hill in the distance—will soon be brought to a halt by the demands of a system that celebrates short-term gains and tolerates stagnation, but condemns anything else as failure. In short, a world where big stuff can never get done.

+1

I’ll be getting one of these.

No [person] who values originality will ever be original. But try to tell the truth as you see it, try to do any bit of work as well as it can be done for the work’s sake, and what [people] call originality will come unsought.

The current research examines the link between narcissism and creativity at the individual, relational, and group levels of analysis. It finds that narcissists are not necessarily more creative than others, but they think they are, and they are adept at persuading others to agree with them. In the first study, narcissism was positively associated with self-rated creativity, despite the fact that blind coders saw no difference between the creative products offered by those low and high on narcissism. In a second study, more narcissistic individuals asked to pitch creative ideas to a target person were judged by the targets as being more creative than were less narcissistic individuals, in part because narcissists were more enthusiastic. Finally, a study of group creativity finds evidence of a curvilinear effect: Having more narcissists is better for generating creative outcomes (but having too many provides diminishing returns).

SCAMPER is based on the notion that everything new is a modification of something that already exists. Each letter in the acronym represents a different way you can play with the characteristics of what is challenging you to trigger new ideas:

• S = Substitute
• C = Combine
• A = Adapt
• M = Magnify
• P = Put to Other Uses
• E = Eliminate (or Minify)
• R = Rearrange (or Reverse)

To use the SCAMPER technique, first state the problem you’d like to solve or the idea you’d like to develop. It can be anything: a challenge in your personal life or business; or maybe a product, service or process you want to improve. After pinpointing the challenge, it’s then a matter of asking questions about it using the SCAMPER checklist to guide you.

Consider, for instance, the problem “How can I increase sales in my business?”

Following the SCAMPER recipe, here are a few questions you could ask:

• S (Substitute): “What can I substitute in my selling process?”
• C (Combine): “How can I combine selling with other activities?”
• A (Adapt): “What can I adapt or copy from someone else’s selling process?”
• M (Magnify): “What can I magnify or put more emphasis on when selling?”
• P (Put to Other Uses): “How can I put my selling to other uses?”
• E (Eliminate): “What can I eliminate or simplify in my selling process?”
• R (Rearrange): “How can I change, reorder or reverse the way I sell?”

These questions force you to think differently about your problem and eventually come up with innovative solutions.

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. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.

Creativity is like sex. You fumble your way through, you get lost in it, you fall in love. Both are passionate, rhythmic, pleasurable, and flowing. Both can bear fruit. And both can rack your soul with vulnerability, bliss, fear and awkwardness.

See the full post for a long list of things to spark creativity. I generally find such lists to be trite, but it doesn’t mean they’re not useful. I particularly like this one because it includes some input from Merlin Mann.

I just attended this month’s Bay Area OWASP meeting here. Utterly and completely brilliant. This is a major part of why I moved home to the Bay Area.

Tufte has criticized the way Microsoft PowerPoint is typically used. In his essay “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint”, Tufte criticizes many properties and uses of the software:

• It is used to guide and to reassure a presenter, rather than to enlighten the audience;
• It has unhelpfully simplistic tables and charts, resulting from the low resolution of early computer displays;
• The outliner causes ideas to be arranged in an unnecessarily deep hierarchy, itself subverted by the need to restate the hierarchy on each slide;
• Enforcement of the audience’s linear progression through that hierarchy (whereas with handouts, readers could browse and relate items at their leisure);
• Poor typography and chart layout, from presenters who are poor designers and who use poorly designed templates and default settings (in particular, difficulty in using scientific notation);
• Simplistic thinking, from ideas being squashed into bulleted lists, and stories with beginning, middle, and end being turned into a collection of disparate, loosely disguised points. This may present an image of objectivity and neutrality that people associate with science, technology, and “bullet points”.

Tufte’s criticism of PowerPoint has extended to its use by NASA engineers in the events leading to the Columbia disaster. Tufte’s analysis of a representative NASA PowerPoint slide is included in a full-page sidebar entitled “Engineering by Viewgraphs” ^[8] in Volume 1 (page 191) of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board’s report.

Tufte argues that the most effective way of presenting information in a technical setting, such as an academic seminar or a meeting of industry experts, is by distributing a brief written report that can be read by all participants in the first 5 to 10 minutes of the meeting. Tufte believes that this is the most efficient method of transferring knowledge from the presenter to the audience. The rest of the meeting is then devoted to discussion and debate.

This is something worth thinking about. Very interesting.

Now people are saying the same things about Arc that they said at first about Viaweb and Y Combinator and most of my essays. Why the pattern? The answer, I realized, is that my m.o. for all four has been the same.

Here it is: I like to find (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked problems (c) that actually need to be solved, and (d) deliver them as informally as possible, (e) starting with a very crude version 1, then (f) iterating rapidly.

Excellent stuff.

So I asked, then, what do Jobs and Jefferson and da Vinci have in common?

And then one of my favorite quotes hits me.

“Real artists ship.” – Steve Jobs

Could it be that the difference between a generalist and a dabbler is just saying “this is as done as it’s going to be” and shipping the work?

I think maybe yes. If you look at a Jefferson, da Vinci, Jobs – they shipped. A lot. I think the dabbler moves on when he’s 95% complete, so he never gets the completion, satisfaction, and feedback from completing a work.

Also, by completing a work in a field, you gain some renown and prestige, which makes it easier to get in touch with other successful people, which speeds your learning curve.

The dabbler moves on when things get tough. The generalist keeps going until he puts enough work out that he feels complete in a particular field, and then and only then is he on to the next thing.

I so fucking love this post.

I have another way of putting this: you aren’t wasting time unless you fail to produce something from your time. Creation. Output. This is the key. ::

Ideas are a lot like viruses. Neither a virus nor an idea is alive, technically, but both reproduce though contact with other people.  And both are hard to eradicate. For example, 20% of the American population believes Obama is a Muslim. That’s actually an increase since he was inaugurated.

Most idea viruses are the bad type. But I see no reason we couldn’t engineer good idea viruses. Such a virus would have three traits:

1.       It must be catchy, so you never forget it.
2.       It must be something you are inclined to share.
3.       It must cause a positive change in the world.

The catchy-sharing part happens all the time. You see that in the form of famous quotes.  One harmless idea virus is John Lennon’s “Give peace a chance.” It’s catchy, and it has a positive message, but it probably doesn’t cause people to act differently. It’s too general.

I’ve been tinkering with an idea virus that links education with peace. It would be a takeoff from the famous observation (and idea virus) that no two countries that both have a McDonalds ever went to war. I’m not sure that assertion is technically true. And it’s hard to act upon, short of conquering a country and forcing it to become a free market.

Here’s my engineered idea virus:  Education is the antidote to war.

The engineering that went into that idea is that you want it to be true because it suggests an alternative to war. That’s what lets it slip past your rational defenses.

So excellent.

1 + 1 = Infinity

To take on the myth of the lone genius, we need not only to draw on the best science and history, we also need to focus on the fundamental social unit: the pair. As Tony Kushner writes in his notes to Angels in America, “the smallest indivisible unit is two people, not one; one is a fiction.” Buckminster Fuller got at the same idea when he wrote that “[u]nity is plural and, at minimum, is two.”

In the sphere of romantic love, most of us already accept the primacy of pairs. And much of the new relationship science is focused on romantic and personal intimacy. But love, at its essence, is private and inscrutable. Long-bickering couples often outlast their placid neighbors, and this oddity layers on top of another problem: What’s our unit of measure for “good” relationships? Is it fiery passion? Is it duration? Is it the number of kids who go to the Ivy Leagues?

With creativity, by contrast, we start with a public text that can be subjected to reasonable (if not perfect) tests. Whether or not you like the Beatles’ music, it’s perfectly straightforward that most people accept their work as novel, useful, and beautiful.