True say, Big Ze. True say!

Even if you’re in it only for the jokes, it’s worth 36 minutes of your life.

Seriously

A few main takeaways from John’s talk:

1. Creativity is linked to the ability to Play.

2. People can be described in terms of two modes: Open and Closed.

Creativity is _not_ possible in the closed mode.

3. We mostly operate in the “closed” mode: filled with tention, purposeful, manic and not creative.

4. “Open” mood is marked by: being playful, less serious, relaxed, curious, etc.

5. Alexander Flemming discovered penicillin in the “open” mode – he became curious why the bacterial culture did not grow in one of the Petri dishes.

6. Hitchcock often used to tell random stories to relax people around him, claiming they tried too hard.

7. We need to be in the “open” mode when pondering a problem.

8. Once we find a solution, we must switch to the “close” mode – because it’s the best for “exectution” [Potr: this reminds me of key ideas on innovation and creativity from "Innovators Dilemma" by Clayton C. - great read BTW]

9.  We too often get stuck in the “closed” mode, attaining a tunnel vision. This is particularly prevalent among politicians.

How many psychiatrist does it take to change the light bulb?

Only one…but the light bulb really needs to change.

10. The are conditions under which creativity can be released.

To attain the “open” mode you require:

a. SPACE

- You need to create space for your creativity to flourish.

b. TIME

- Pick a specific start and end time to your “creative” time. This will help you to seal yourself off from distractions.

- Play is secluded and marked by limitedness.

- Create an oasis for yourself by setting the boundaries of space and time. Become separate from everyday life just for a few moments.

- It’s easier to do trivial things which are not important, that to do important things. Therefore, clear off unimportant distractions.

- It takes some time for your mind to quiet down. 30 minutes is not enough for your creative time.

- Cleese suggest about 1 1/2 hour sessions.

- Take a break (e.g. for a week).

- Learn to tolerate the anxiety that

c. TIME

- Take your time to ponder on the most creative solution.

- When confronted with a problem, do NOT jump into the first solution. Stick with the problem for longer.

- The most creative proffesional played longer with the problem.

They were able to tollerate the slight discomfort of anxiety when we haven’t solved the problem yet.

- Don’t create an image of yourself as being “decisive” just for the sake of it. Coming with the solutions on the spot.

- Take your time to ponder the most creative solution. Then take decission. Once you take it. Stick with it!

- Give yourself MAXIMUM PONDERING TIME. This will lead you to the most creative solution.

- You don’t have to decise IMMEDIATELY.

- Give your TIME as long as possible to COME UP with something ORIGINAL.

d. CONFIDENCE

- Nothing will stop your creativity time like the fear of being wrong or the fear your failure.

- You can’t be spontaneous withing reason.”

- You have to risk saying things which are silly, illogical, wrong.

- During your creative time, there is never any idea that can be “wrong”.

e. HUMOUR/FUN

- Laughter brings relaxation.

- The difference between Serious vs. Solemn.

- What is the point of “solemnity”? Egotism? Pompousness? Laugh in the face of it! You don’t need it.

- Humour inspires and makes things cathartic.

- GIGGLE ALL YOU WANT!

Again. 5 things you need are:

SPACE

TIME

TIME

CONFIDENCE

an more Jeffery Archer!

11. Keep your mind resting against the subject. Gently bringing it back into focus. Take your time to ponder the problem.

And you’ll be rewarded

12. It’s easy to be creative if you have other people to play with.

There is a danger though…avoid playing with people who make you feel defensive.

Play with people who you like and trust.

Never, ever negate what they say.Never say “no” or “wrong” or “I don’t like that”.

Always be positive. And build on what’s been said.

Instead, say:

“Would it be even better if…?”

“I don’t quite understand that…can you just explain it again?”

“Go on!”

“What if?”

“Let pretend…”

Try to establish as free an atmosphere as possible.

13. Japanese creativity – unstructured, lack of pressure, first people to give their views are the most junior  - they can speak freely without contradicting what’s already been said by those more important.

14. Creativity is like humour…In a joke, the laugh comes at  a moment when you connect two frames of reference.

15. Having a new idea is connecting to separate ideas that creates a NEW MEANING.

16. New connections are significant if they generate a new MEANING.

17. When you play, you can try randomly invent new juxtapositions. Then use your intuition to sense which are significant or meaningful.

18. Deliberately crazy connections can be called “intermediate impossibles”.

However stupid or wrong or absurd they seem, they are the stepping stones to an idea that is right.

If you really don’t know how to start or you get stuck , start generating random connections that may lead to some new ideas.

19. Finally: how to stop your subordinates from being creative.

Treat all humour as trivial or subversive.

Keeping ourselves feeling irreplaceable keeps everyone down…

Demand that people should be doing things all the time. Pondering leads to creativity.

Keep that moat closed.

So on and on

Enjoy!

I aplaude their choice of Ruby language for running the backend logic and interfacing with Flash front-end and MySQL database(s).

I was also happy to learn how they’d overcome MySQL scaling issues. HINT: they used a (now hugely) popular in-memory key-value store called Redis.

Redis is an awesome piece of technology, and in hindsight, seems like a perfect fit for a high-throughput / mega-popular Facebook game like Monster World.

Sounds interesting to you ??? The full video is here for your pleasure.

Where did we come from? I find the explanation that we were made in stars to be deep, elegant, and beautiful. This explanation says that every atom in each of our bodies was built up out of smaller particles produced in the furnaces of long-gone stars. We are the byproducts of nuclear fusion. The intense pressures and temperatures of these giant stoves thickened collapsing clouds of tiny elemental bits into heavier bits, which once fused, were blown out into space as the furnace died. The heaviest atoms in our bones may have required more than one cycle in the star furnaces to fatten up. Uncountable numbers of built-up atoms congealed into a planet, and a strange disequilibrium called life swept up a subset of those atoms into our mortal shells. We are all collected stardust. And by a most elegant and remarkable transformation, our starstuff is capable of looking into the night sky to perceive other stars shining. They seem remote and distant, but we are really very close to them no matter how many lightyears away. All that we see of each other was born in a star. How beautiful is that?

by Kevin Kelly, We Are Stardust

by the simplicity and the beauty of

Piet Mondrian’s art.

Bold bright colours emanate from his paintings,

Strange uneven rhythms  put simple rectangles and squares into hypnotic motion,

The simplest and most overused building blocks take on a life of their own.

I am drawn in and let it take me for an art-ride…

Excel Rhythms after Piet Mondrian by Piotr Zuralski

Enjoyed my attempt at Excel Art? Feel free to share it with the world.

The truly creative mind in any field is no more than . . .a cruelly delicate organism with the overpowering necessity to create, create, create – so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him.

He must create, must pour out creation.

By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.

-Pearl Buck

So, What are you creating today?

So I decided to make up my own mind.

My conclusion?

You should absolutely follow your passion!

Why?

Because the road to success, to doing and achieving meaningful and worthy goals is just so freakin’ hard.

Because you are bound to face obstacles, setbacks and a lot of pushbacks.

And in this crazy quest, you will need a lot of fuel. A LOT of it.

And this fuel is your passion. Passion for achieving your “unrealistic” dreams.

Clearly, somebody is Passionate About Flowers

When people write about passion, they almost always equate it with the SUBJECT of their endeavours.

The WHAT.

When they say you shouldn’t follow your passion, because passion alone is unlikely to lead to success, they think of the SUBJECT of the quest. And I will nod my head to that.

Let me explain…

Imagine you have an obscure passion: knitting with ginger pubic hair, painting Pop Art with donkye’s feces or perhaps collecting Bolivian stamps from the 1950s. Whatever stops you from jumping out of the window on a frosty winter morning…

Following these “passions” (the THINGS) is not likely to make you rich or successful. At least not in material terms. (mind there, young soul! you might get lucky!)

Yes, that debilitating and omnipresent “don’t follow your passion” mantra feels prefect here. Because we refer to the SUBJECT of the passion itself. The WHAT.

Now. Let’s take a counterexample.

Imagine you are a CEO of the World’s hottest global startup – the mighty Apple (AAPL).

And you are very, very, very passionate about making the best products for people.

This uncontainable passion for changing the world, for “pushing things forward and succeeding fuels your life’s work. It pushes your legs to walk faster, your eyes to stay wide open during those long and lonely nights. It fuels your gut to achieve the absolute best and, at odd times to scream at people, when their work does not live up to your expectations…

Now, let’s play a little game: spot the “passion” in this picture then!

Hmm…well…it’s NOT in being a successful CEO per se – in getting THINGS – like money, career ladder hops or job retention. Oh, no! Not at all.

It’s in building those freakin’ products. Those tiny shiny devices which addict like crack and make earthlings click, swipe and tap their little lives away.

If you don’t have passion for it, you just won’t be able to make the cut and work hard enough to succeed at this game.

Passion is the WHY behind the WHAT

Some people work in industries about which it seems hard to feel passionate.

Recycling, working at an oil rig, cleaning sewage systems, programming Oracle databases. I don’t know. Think of any “dirty” or plain hard job.

Do you think that those workers are passionate about cleaning or recycling or Oracle’s Primary Keys? I doubt it. But they are passionate about  their families having food on their plates. About making people’s lives better, about providing customers with a great service, about making sure that systems and processes run smooth and folks are flipping happy.

They understand that:

It’s not about the WHAT. It’s about the WHY.

Of course it’s about the WHY.

Because you SUFFER when you are NOT doing what you WANT to be doing.

And in doing what you WANT to be doing, when you SUFFER, you need PASSION to persevere.

P.S.

According to Wikipedia, the root of the word “passion” is…wait for it… “to suffer”

Passion (from the Ancient Greek verb (paskho) meaning to suffer) is a term applied to a very strong feeling about a person or thing. Passion is an intense emotion compelling feeling, enthusiasm, or desire for something.

P.S.2.

You can see exactly where my ideas come from…from the great late Steve Jobs’s mouth:

Ryan caught my attention as he explained Christopher Alexander’s (father of Design Patterns) approach to designing and judging successful designs.

In the work I do (BA, Writing, some Design and Programming), I am often asked to think in terms of REQUIREMENTS. ”These are the requirements for a report, spreadsheet, product, software, business process, design, etc.”

Ryan urges us to consider FORCES instead of REQUIREMENTS.
“If we want to judge a design, we can’t actually make requirements.”

–

I’ve posted the video of the talk below. Scroll to 37min to hear Ryan talk about this topic:

Ryan Singer, “Designing with Forces: How to Apply Christopher Alexander in Everyday Work ” from MFA Interaction Design on Vimeo.

Below is a crude transcription of the relevant fragment of this talk (37 minutes onward):

if we just have some requirements for our form that we’re designing, if we have a checklist that says: “Your app has to have this feature, this feature, that feature, this feature and it has to be red, pink and blue”, then when we check those boxes then we think we did a good job and we’re done.

But the criteria was all internal. It doesn’t tell us anything if we’re actually making something useful for the world or not.

 

Christopher Alexander says: if we want to judge a design, we can’t actually make requirements.

 

If we say what our design should be then our list can be miles and miles long.

 

The only way that we can have a useful way of deciding if something is good or not, is not by seeing if it meets requirements, but actually by looking to see if it collides with reality and produces some kind of misfit or conflict.

 

So Alexander’s saying, we define all these forces that are out there in the world, like the fact that we’re going into Highrise but we don’t like the data entry or the fact that we wish to keep track of conversation.

If Highrise had a really painful data entry process, then I would go into Highrise, want to add a note and say to myself “I hate this. I don’t wanna use this”. And stop using it.

And that moment of discontent, of brokenness, of “this isn’t right”. That moment is actually what we look for in order to judge a design, according to Alexander.

Design is an error correcting process. And the only way to know if design is good if it has an absence of misfits, absence of friction points.

 

[At 37signals] We’re looking at how many pain-points are here, what’s bothering me about it and when we can remove those different points, we feel like we’re in a situation that’s comfortable , that is without friction, that is effortless, that is natural.

 

What do you think? Leave a comment below.