Getting the Big Picture

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Without some grasp of the meaning of their relationship to the whole, it is not easy for individuals to retain a vivid sense of their own capacity to act as individuals, a sure sense of their own dignity and an awareness of their roles and responsibilities. They tend to accept the spectator role and to sink into passivity.

John Gardner, Self-Renewal

Inconvenient Conclusions

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Conspiracy theories may be deployed as a rhetorical tool to escape inconvenient conclusions. People selectively appeal to a conspiracy among scientists to explain away a scientific consensus when their political ideology compels them to do so—but not when the scientific consensus is of no relevance to their politics.

Stephan Lewandowsky & John Cook, The Conspiracy Theory Handbook

The creative spirit

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Children are naturally creative, playful, and experimental. If you ask me, we were the most human when we were young kids. We "worked" on our art. Sometimes for hours at a time without a break, because it was in us, though we did intellectualize it. As we got older, fears crept in, and doubts, and self-censoring, and over-thinking. The creative spirit is in us now, it’s who we are. We just need to look at the kids around us to be reminded of that. And whether you are 28 or 88 today, it’s never too late, because the child is still in you. 

Garr Reynolds, Presentation Zen

Guilt v Shame Culture

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In a guilt culture you know you are good or bad by what your conscience feels. In a shame culture you know you are good or bad by what your community says about you, by whether it honors or excludes you. In a guilt culture people sometimes feel they do bad things; in a shame culture social exclusion makes people feel they are bad. 

David Brooks writing in the New York Times

Mummies in the audience

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“Keep on growing,” the commencement speakers say. “Don’t go to seed. Let this be a beginning, not an ending.” It is a good theme. Yet a high proportion of the young people who hear the speeches pay no heed, and by the time they are middle-aged they are absolutely mummified. Even some of the people who make the speeches are mummified. Why?

The thing that is really blocking self-development – the individual’s own intricately designed, self-constructed prison, or to put it another way, the individual’s incapacity for self-renewal.

John Gardner, Self-Renewal

going to places where you don’t normally go

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An old joke says that if you torture the data long enough, it will confess. With enough work, you can distort data to make it say what you want it to say.

We all hold some beliefs, and that’s fine. It’s all part of being human. What’s not OK, though, is when we let those beliefs inadvertently come into the way we form our hypotheses.

We can see this tendency in our everyday lives. We often interpret new information in such a way that it becomes compatible with our own beliefs. We read the news on the site that conforms most closely to our beliefs. We talk to people who are like us and hold similar views. We don’t want to get disconcerting evidence because that might lead us to change our worldview, which we might be afraid to do.

One way to fight this bias is to critically examine all your beliefs and try to find disconcerting evidence about each of your theories. By that, I mean actively seeking out evidence by going to places where you don’t normally go, talking to people you don’t normally talk to, and generally keeping an open mind.

Rahul Agarwal writing in Built in

The qualities of creative people

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Some observers have been led to comment on a certain “childlike” or “primitive” quality in creative individuals. They are childlike and primitive in the sense that they have not been trapped by the learned rigidities that immobilize the rest of us. In their chosen field they do not have the brittle knowingness and sophistication of people who think they know all the answers. The advantage of this fluidity is that it permits all kinds of combinations and recombinations of experience with a minimum of rigidity.

One could list a number of other traits that have been ascribed to the creative individual by research workers. Almost all observer have noted a remarkable zeal or dive in creative individuals. They are wholly absorbed in their work.

Anne Roe, in her study of gifted scientists, found that one of their most striking traits was a willingness to work hard and for long hours. The energy they bring to their work is not only intense but sustained. Most of the great creative performances grow out of years of arduous application.

Other observers have commented on the confidence, self-assertiveness or, as one investigator put it, the “sense of destiny” in creative persons. They have faith in their capacity to do the things they want and need to do in the area of their chosen work.

John Gardner, Self-Renewal