Creativity Creep

Joshua Rothman wrote about creativity in The New Yorker, and how we confuse “the production of things with the living of a creative life.”: 

How did we come to care so much about creativity? The language surrounding it, of unleashing, unlocking, awakening, developing, flowing, and so on, makes it sound like an organic and primordial part of ourselves which we must set free—something with which it’s natural to be preoccupied. But it wasn’t always so; people didn’t always care so much about, or even think in terms of, creativity. In the ancient world, good ideas were thought to come from the gods, or, at any rate, from outside of the self. During the Enlightenment, rationality was the guiding principle, and philosophers sought out procedures for thinking, such as the scientific method, that might result in new knowledge. People back then talked about “imagination,” but their idea of it was less exalted than ours. They saw imagination as a kind of mental scratch pad: a system for calling facts and images to the mind’s eye and for comparing and making connections between them. They didn’t think of the imagination as “creative.” In fact, they saw it as a poor substitute for reality; Hobbes called it “decayed sense.”

How Digital Is Saving Vinyl Records and Pinball Machines

Harvard Business Review, The Daily Idea: 

What do Swiss watches, pinball machines, fountain pens, handmade goods and vinyl records have in common? They have all seen a resurgence in recent years after being disrupted by new and cheaper technologies. On the surface it may seem like a paradox that these products are finding new life in the face of the very thing that threatened their demise in the first place: the digital age. But it’s really not a paradox at all. The makers of these types of goods are actually finding success because of digital platforms such as Etsy, eBay, and Kickstarter, not despite them. In other words, the internet isn’t killing handmade, artisanal, or non-digital goods; it’s actually saving them.

Source: How the Internet Saved Handmade Goods by Larry Downes and Paul Nunes

Lil' Buck & Prime Tyme Freestyling

Lil' Buck and Prime Tyme freestyling a hybrid of hip hop and ballet to get the week going. 

How To Be Different

Bernadette Jiwa on differentiation: 

The reason it’s not easy to copy a truly great brand is because they have put so much of themselves into the work— that there is no substitute. There is only one Banksy, one Dyson and one Disney. They each show up uniquely as brands in the world by being more of who they are.

What Makes A Family Of Artists

Another fantastic blog post by Maria Konnikova, for The New Yorker, discussing the studies that explore whether creativity is hereditary or not: 

After a decade of research, [Baptiste] Barbot has discovered that, if we are to understand the hereditary and environmental nature of creativity, we need to think of creativity as a constellation of factors that come together in the right way, at the right moment—“maybe a bit of intelligence, some associative thinking, some divergent thinking, and then some personality traits, like the tendency to take risks, your motivation, and your specific interests.” he said. “These factors are partly genetically based, and, of course, partly environmental.”