How to Live a Creative Life

You are going to have to ask yourself, at every turn: is this project making me smarter, or making me stupider. Is this job stoking my fire, or burning me out? How do I top this? How can I learn from this? How do I produce my best work in this kind of environment? Should my next set of projects build up from what I’ve already done? Or do I need to branch out, go sideways, and push myself to try something new, that I’m less comfortable with.

Think carefully about how you spend your time, because your work isn’t like other people’s work. There isn’t a hard line between uptime and downtime. Your brain is always working, and what you experience in your downtime influences the quality of what you do when you’re on task. Be mindful of what you’re getting out of the time that you spend. Does your downtime refresh and recharge you? Or does it narcotize you? Does it spark new ideas? Or do you find yourself thinking, “well, there’s three hours of my life I’m never getting back.”

Ringling College Commencement Speech, 2011. Thanks to Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing.

Stop daydreaming and get to work

It's like your teachers said. Fantasy makes your dreams less likely to come true.

Positive fantasies "'make energy seem unnecessary' say Heather Kappes and Gabriele Oettingen. 'By allowing people to consummate a desired future,' the researchers explain, 'positive fantasies trigger the relaxation that would normally accompany actual achievement, rather than marshaling the energy needed to obtain it.'"

But only positive fantasies. If your daydreams feature worrying that you'll never achieve your goals, that's supposed to energize you. According to this research, pessimists should be more successful than optimists, no?

The Collective Conscious, or, Mind-Blowing Massive Math

In January, Timothy Gowers, a professor of mathematics at Cambridge and a holder of the Fields Medal, math's highest honor, decided to see if the comment section of his blog could prove a theorem he could not.

In two blog posts he proposed an attack on a stubborn math problem called the Density Hales-Jewett Theorem. He encouraged the thousands of readers of his blog to jump in and start proving. Mathematics is a process of generating vast quantities of ideas and rejecting the majority that don't work; maybe, Gowers reasoned, the participation of so many people would speed the sifting.

Six weeks later, the theorem was proved.

By now we're used to the idea that gigantic aggregates of human brains — especially when allowed to communicate nearly instantaneously via the Internet — can carry out fantastically difficult cognitive tasks, like writing an encyclopedia or mapping a social network. But some problems we still jealously guard as the province of individual beautiful minds: writing a novel, choosing a spouse, creating a new mathematical theorem. The Polymath experiment suggests this prejudice may need to be rethought. In the near future, we might talk not only about the wisdom of crowds but also of their genius.

From the NY Times Year in Ideas.

But bear in mind that this crowd consisted of at least one other Fields medalist in addition to Gowers. I'm not sure I ever had the prejudice that mathematical theorems were as privately arrived at as spousal choices, but this sounds amazing, anyway, the connection of (eventually) all our minds.