How Creativity is Helped by Failure

BBC News Magazine Viewpoint:

"Dare to fail" is a powerful slogan. It doesn't mean we should aim at failure - rather it hints at the paradox that creativity is a journey that involves taking wrong turns along the way. Organisations like Google, Apple, Dyson and Pixar have developed cultures that, in their different ways, create the conditions for empowering failure. They have become living ecosystems of the imagination, fired by the courage to test ideas, to see their flaws, and to be triggered into new associations and insights.

The Brain, The Faulty Walnut

The School of Life: 

Our minds are made up of some of the most impressive matter in the universe. But they are also profoundly flawed machines, whose weaknesses we should be well aware of. We like to call them 'faulty walnuts.' 

The Fracking of Attention

Martin Weigel, Head of Planning at Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam, has written a keenly observed essay on the role we play everyday in, well, fracking people's attentions: 

So attention is personal – what we attend to defines our reality.

Attention is finite – it is a scarce and thus valuable resource – not just to those who wish to monetise it, but to those to whom it belongs.

And attention is hackable – the world is overpopulated with those skilled in the art of capturing and redirecting attention for their own purposes.

Surely then, we have a responsibility – dare one say, an ethical duty – to the audience.

And to the attention we see to hack.

Rohan Gunatillake: You Are Not Your Work

From 99U:

At the heart of any creative endeavor often lies fear; fear of missing an opportunity, of burning out, of not scaling, or fear of failure. In this presentation, Mindfulness Everywhere Director Gunatillake reminds us of the humanity in an often cold business world—and how to never lose sight of the fact that there is another human being at the other end of the screen.

Scientists Can Now Predict Intelligence From Brain Activity

Chelsea Leu in Wired: 

But now that neuroscientists have used maps of people’s brains to accurately predict intelligence, reality creeps ever so much closer to fiction.

By intelligence, in this case, the scientists mean abstract reasoning ability, which they inferred by mapping and analyzing the connections within people’s brains. But the study, published today in "Nature Neuroscience", is compelling because it gets at a fundamental and very uncomfortable truth: Some brains are better than others at certain things, simply because of the way they’re wired. And now, scientists are closer to being able to determine precisely which brains those are, and how they got that way.