What We Can Learn From The Eiffel Tower
We take great works for granted. We forget, but the fate of even our most famous ideas and creations…
Category: Creative Thinking
Creativity Is Not An Accident
Many of our popular stories of discovery are portrayed as accidents or matters of luck. We love these stories as…
The many mothers of invention
[This is an excerpt from chapter 3 of the bestseller, The Myths of Innovation] All the clichés about beginnings…
My Creative Burnout
I’m ten days into the worst burnout of my life. I’ve discovered, in times like these, it’s a challenge…
How Do You Know When You’re Done?
The more creative the project, the more subjective the answer is for when it’s finished. If the project was…
The Myth of Epiphany
One of the most provocative chapters of The Myths of Innovation (book summary) is The Myth of Epiphany. This myth,…
Why Small Ideas Can Matter More Than Big Ideas
Americans are preoccupied by the size of things: big houses, big sandwiches, and big salaries. At leadership retreats, and…
Saving Your Creative Soul (video)
We share a mass confusion about creativity – why are ideas are so fun in our minds but so…
Don’t Be Precious (with your ideas)
Three magic words for people who create things are: don’t be precious. Being precious means you’re behaving as if…
Saving Your Creative Soul
I spoke at TEDXDepaul last month, on the invitation of Daniel Gurevich. He gave me free reign to decide what…
What I learned From Improv Class
A decade ago, on a dare, I took a class in improvisation. I was surprised how much the class…
The amazing invention of Braille
While studying to write the Myths of Innovation I read hundreds of accounts of how world changing inventions came…
Do you want a bar in your workplace?
Taking the question of how much does your workplace affect creativity in a new direction, the folks at Janelia…
Idea beginnings and endings
The beginning of a very bad idea often feels very good. And the beginning of a very good idea…
John Cleese on Creativity
I recently re-watched this excellent talk by John Cleese (of Monty Python) on creativity. The best parts are after the…
The hypocrisy of bosses asking for ideas
I discovered the CBC Comedy The Newsroom a decade ago, while watching PBS late one night. I didn’t know…
How To Find Your Voice
You have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself – Miles Davis There is a…
Bob Ross, Picasso and Creativity
Growing up in NYC in the 1970s, with a mere 4 TV stations, any show in regular rotation on…
Does Your Workplace Affect Creativity? Mostly No
There’s a misguided trend in looking to architecture to explain why some groups of people are creative and others…
Fermat and ideas are made of other ideas
A nice email from Ro about how the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem is an example of ‘ideas are…