Working the Creative Muscle

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Creativity can give people a competitive edge in any profession, from firefighting to oil trading. The challenge is knowing when we need to be creative and how to do it, says Balder Onarheim, co-founder of the Copenhagen Institute of NeuroCreativity. Creativity requires a lot of energy, and the brain is designed to conserve energy, especially in stressful situations, so “if it can reuse an old pattern, it will,” he says. “For most people, it’s actually about knowing when to help push your brain out of the normal way of dealing with things.” 

When seeking inspiration, many people look for ideas around issues similar to the one they’re stuck on. The genius of Oblique Strategies, says Onarheim, is that it introduces an element of randomness that breaks that mold. It’s the same reason people often have their best ideas in the shower or on a walk through the woods rather than sitting at a desk.

Jess Shankleman writing for Bloomberg Business

Risk Management

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When we say that someone has fallen on bad luck, we relieve that person of any responsibility for what has happened. When we say that someone has had good luck, we deny that person credit for the effort that might have led to the happy outcome. But how sure can we be? Was it fate or choice that decided the outcome?

Until we can distinguish between an event that is truly random and an event that is the result of cause and effect, we will never know whether what we see is what we’ll get, nor how we got what we got.

When we take a risk, we are betting on an outcome that will result from a decision we have made, though we do not know for certain what the outcome will be. The essence of risk management lies in maximizing the areas where we have some control over the outcome while minimizing the areas where we have absolutely no control over the outcome and the linkage between effect and cause is hidden from us.

Peter Bernstein, Against the Gods

Curiosity primes the pump

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The research tells us that curiosity matters for three primary reasons. First, inspiration is strongly correlated with an intrinsic desire to learn. Curiosity sparks inspiration. You learn more and more frequently because you are curious. Second, curiosity marks the beginning of a virtuous cycle that feeds your ability as a self-directed learner. Finally, research suggests that curiosity doesn’t diminish with age, so it can serve you at any point in your career. Although your learning methods will change over time, curiosity will keep the spark of motivation alive.   

Lisa Christensen, Jake Gittleson, and Matt Smith 

When we Grow

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Some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don’t even recognize that growth is happening. We may feel hostile or angry or weepy and hysterical, or we may feel depressed. It would never occur to us, unless we stumbled on a book or a person who explained to us, that we were in fact in the process of change, of actually becoming larger than we were before. 

Whenever we grow, we tend to feel it, as a young seed must feel the weight and inertia of the earth as it seeks to break out of its shell on its way to becoming a plant. Often the feeling is anything but pleasant. 

But what is most unpleasant is the not knowing what is happening. Those long periods when something inside ourselves seems to be waiting, holding its breath, unsure about what the next step should be ... it is in those periods that we realize that we are being prepared for the next phase of our life and that, in all probability, a new level of the personality is about to be revealed.  

Alice Walker, Living by the Word

The Reasonableness of Authority

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There is a strong tendency to suppose that there is no more reason to listen to one man than another in spiritual matters, because the subjects considered are notoriously incapable of proof. The proper conclusion to be drawn, however, is the precise opposite of this. It is because the subjects are incapable of proof that we need to avail ourselves of superior wisdom whenever we can find it. 

D. Elton Trueblood, Philosophy of Religion 

Building Self-confidence

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Formulate and stamp indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself succeeding. Hold this picture tenaciously. Never permit it to fade.

Do not be awestruck by other people and try to copy them. Nobody can be you as efficiently as YOU can. Remember also that most people, despite their confident appearance and demeanor, are often as scared as you are and as doubtful of themselves.  

Norman Vincent Peale, The Power of Positive Thinking

Predicting the future

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How much reliance can we place on regression to the mean in judging what the future will bring? What are we to make of a concept that has great power under some conditions but leads to disaster under others? Keynes admitted that “as living and moving beings, we are forced to act … (even when) our existing knowledge does not provide a sufficient basis for a calculated mathematical expectation.”

With rules of thumb, experience, instinct and conventions – in other words, gut - we manage to stumble from the present into the future … The trick is to be flexible enough to recognize that regression to the mean is only a tool; it is not a religion with immutable dogma and ceremonies. Used to make mechanical extrapolations of the past … regression to the mean is little more than mumbo-jumbo. Never depend upon it to come into play without constantly questioning the relevance of the assumptions that support the procedure. Francis Galton spoke wisely when he urged us to “revel in more comprehensive views” that the average.

Peter Bernstein, Against the Gods

The duty of encouragement 

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One of the highest of duties is the duty of encouragement ... It is easy to laugh at men's ideas; it is easy to pour cold water on their enthusiasm; it is easy to discourage others. The world is full of discouragers. We have a Christian duty to encourage one another. Many a time a word of praise or thanks or appreciation or cheer has kept a man on his feet. Blessed is the man who speaks such a word.

William Barclay