Six Words on Larry Smith's Project
<p>Six-Word Memoirs: Video Story from SMITHmag on Vimeo.</p>
Poptech talk drives home succinct memoirs
See more on Larry Smith's talk http://bit.ly/d5UGQ6 or go directly to his website http://bit.ly/aPnco2
Where's my home? No idea but this world feels like a cool place to call home.
Unfocused postings on whatever catches my attention, makes me think or demands that I point and shoot.
<p>Six-Word Memoirs: Video Story from SMITHmag on Vimeo.</p>
Great video from the Economist on their interview with Ed Catmull - President of Pixar - and a helpful post by Scott Berkun on the key content.
Very helpful advice for people managing within a highly creative environment http://bit.ly/aWwKCv
I'm liking adidas' active engagement in urban art with an iphone app currently available in Berlin and Hamburg.
Here's their site, which acts as the meeting place for all references and shows the spread beyond its initial cities http://bit.ly/2QY7SA
I was just reading about one of Salvador Dali's techniques to inspire his creativity.
He believed that most creative thoughts come at a subconscious level and this occurs in the transition point between being awake and falling asleep. His technique was very simple. He would put a cup beside his bed; lie on the bed and suspend a teaspoon over the cup with his hand and allow himself to fall asleep. As he started to fall into the subconscious sleep state, ideas would flash into his head and at the same moment, the hand would release the spoon into the cup thereby immediately awakening him. He would then write down any of the thoughts he had just experienced. Punishing exercise maybe but it illustrates the effort one has to exert to achieve new thinking, new ideas and creativity in general. How we encourage this level of effort in the context of work will be a future post once I've finished reading Daniel Pink's fascinating new book on motivation - Push.
I just read an article about two psychologists from the University of Amsterdam - Ap Dijksterhuis and Teun Meurs - who have done some great work on the role of consciousness and cognition in relation to creativity.
They want you to imagine going in to a room and asking two guys to come up with ideas for advertising a chocolate bar - one guy is very creative but extremely shy and the other is clever, not as creative but far more domineering.
The output is dominated by the louder guy resulting in the ideas being good but not that innovative.
They then ask you to imagine a second scenario where you go in and brief the same two guys but this time you distract the loud, domineering guy, allowing the quieter, more creative guy to be heard. This time you walk away with more innovative ideas.
This analogy explains how your conscious mind dominates your unconscious mind shutting out your more creative side.
Ap Dijksterhuis and Teun Meurs did a test with students where they split the students in to two groups and asked both groups to come up with new pasta names. To help the groups, the professors provided 5 names all ending in 'i' as is typical in pasta names. One group were given the assignment and then asked to respond within 3 minutes. The second group were also given the assignment but then asked to forget about it and instead play a game of following a dot for 3 minutes. After following the dot for 3 minutes, they were then asked to list names.
The results were really interesting. The first group provided names that were dominated with words ending in the letter 'i' therefore being swayed by the stimulus - the conscious mind, while the second group provided more than twice as many unusual names than the first group.
So next time you are challenged to come up with ideas, write down the challenge, go and play Sodoku and then come back to the challenge.
