Creativity — it starts when you cut one zero from your budget. If you cut two zeros, it’s much better.
Jaime Lerner, former mayor of Curitiba, Brazil
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From the category archives:
Quotes
“It takes a while before you can step over inert bodies and go ahead with what you were trying to do.”
– Jenny Holzer, from a piece in the Warhol museum in Pittsburgh
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Writing is about hypnotizing yourself into believing in yourself, getting some work done, then unhypnotizing yourself and going over the material coldly. There will be many mistakes, many things to take out and others that need to be added. You just aren’t always going to make the right decision. My friend Terry says that when you need to make a decision, in your work or otherwise, and you don’t know what to do, just do one thing or the other, because the worst that can happen is that you will have made a terrible mistake.
Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird
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What might ‘creative silliness’ have to do with the dismal science?
Paul Krugman won the Nobel prize for economics a few weeks ago, and in the midst of all the coverage, I stumbled across an essay on his old MIT site titled How I Work. It’s not clear how long ago he wrote this, and many of the technical details about economics are over my head, but there are some generalized ideas that are worth extracting, particularly his four rules for research:
1. Listen to the Gentiles
“But always remember that you may have gotten the metaphor wrong, and that someone else with a different metaphor may be seeing something that you are missing.”
2. Question the question
“In general, if people in a field have bogged down on questions that seem very hard, it is a good idea to ask whether they are really working on the right questions. Often some other question is not only easier to answer but actually more interesting! (One drawback of this trick is that it often gets people angry. An academic who has spent years on a hard problem is rarely grateful when you suggest that his field can be revived by bypassing it).”
3. Dare to be silly
“What I believe is that the age of creative silliness is not past. Virtue, as an economic theorist, does not consist in squeezing the last drop of blood out of assumptions that have come to seem natural because they have been used in a few hundred earlier papers. If a new set of assumptions seems to yield a valuable set of insights, then never mind if they seem strange.”
4. Simplify, simplify
“Fortunately, there is a strategy that does double duty: it both helps you keep control of your own insights, and makes those insights accessible to others. The strategy is: always try to express your ideas in the simplest possible model. The act of stripping down to this minimalist model will force you to get to the essence of what you are trying to say (and will also make obvious to you those situations in which you actually have nothing to say).”
(I pulled these excerpts from his extended explanations of each rule.)
You can read the full essay here.
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“I always write the beginning at the end. It’s the last thing I write because then I know what the book is about.”
– Michael Ondaatje, in Susan Bell’s book “The Artful Edit”
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Adventurous men enjoy shipwrecks, mutinies, earthquakes, conflagrations, and all kinds of unpleasant experiences, provided they do not go so far as to impair health. They say to themselves in an earthquake, for example: “So that is what an earthquake is like,” and it gives them pleasure to have their knowledge of the world increased by this new item.
Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness
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“Deep as the snow is,
Let me go as far as I can
Till I stumble and fall,
viewing the white landscape.”
– Basho, from “The Narrow Road to the Deep North
and other Travel Sketches”
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“That was another impact. I was doing nightclub comedy down in the Village. I was down there in ’63, ’64, and my friend told me about Arthur Koestler’s book about the act of creation and it had a section on humor.
He was talking about the creative process. There was an illustration on the panel that showed a triptych. On the left panel, there were these names of artistic pursuits. There were poets, painter, composer. And one of them was jester. I was only interested in the jester. What he said about each of these, he said these individuals on the left hand side can transcend the panels of the triptych by creative growth.
The jester makes jokes, he’s funny, he makes fun, he ridicules. But if his ridicules are based on sound ideas and thinking, then he can proceed to the second panel, which is the thinker—he called it the philosopher. The jester becomes the philosopher, and if he does these things with dazzling language that we marvel at, then he becomes a poet too. Then the jester can be a thinking jester who thinks poetically.”
– George Carlin, from his last interview,
published by Psychology Today
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“Focus on the simple things of life — rain, wind, new flowers, green grass, simple food, family visits, a stroll in the garden. There are no sudden things that will change your life for the better. It is the accumulation of beautiful small things.”
– Hursh Chetan, quoted in a Businessweek article on work-life balance
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“Rationality is what we do to organize the world, to make it possible to predict. Art is the rehearsal for the inapplicability and failure of that process.”
– Brian Eno, “A Year with Swollen Appendices”
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