In a recent appearance on Tavis Smiley, legendary songwriter Diane Warren discussed her work method. She arrives at her office at 8:30 every morning, sits down at the piano and begins to write. If things start to flow, she stays put at the piano. Likewise, If she’s blocked, she stays put at the piano. In […]
In this brief documentary, renowned jazz guitarist and composer Joshua Breakstone discusses the importance of play in the creative process. Breakstone also notes how play itself may actually subvert the predominant values of our consumer culture.
The story goes like this: The great Henri Matisse was teaching painting to a group of students in Paris. He asked the class: “who here wants to become a great painter”? All of the students raised their hands enthusiastically. “Then what are you doing here?,” the Master responded. “Go home and paint.” The point here is […]
In this thought-provoking talk recently presented at TED, media critic Johanna Blakely discusses how the lack of copyright protection in the fashion industry leads to an unprecedented amount of creativity. She even shows that industries with little or no copyright protection actually enjoy far greater revenues than those with such protections. Which begs the question […]
Appearing Last week on Charlie Rose, Nathan Myhrvold, former Chief Technology Officer at Microsoft and current CEO of Intellectual Ventures, discussed, among other topics, the process of creativity and invention. “You have to be comfortable being confused and not knowing what you’re doing,” Myhrvold explained. He helped illustrate the point by bringing up the great […]
Creativity is often about recognizing the value of accidents. Silly Putty, for example, was the accidental result of the search for a synthetic rubber during World War II. Saccharin came about in 1879 as chemist Constantin Fahlberg was trying to come up with a new use for coal-tar. I recently experienced the value of unintended consequences […]
