Creativity is a spark. It can be excruciating when we’re rubbing two rocks together and getting nothing. And it can be intensely satisfying when the flame catches and a new idea sweeps around the world.
Every creative story is different. And every creative story is the same. There was nothing. Now there is something. It’s almost like magic.
Design is the conscious imposition of meaningful order.
The best way to solve a problem? Try explaining it to somebody outside your field.
Like a work of art, we exceed our materials. Science needs art to frame the mystery, but art needs science so that not everything is a mystery. Neither truth alone is our solution, for our reality exists in plural.
It’s a hard thing to describe. It’s just this sense that you got something to say.
I want to give people theories, I want to expose them to scientific stories that force them to re-evaluate the way they use these three pounds of meat inside their head.
If you’re trying to be more creative, one of the most important things you can do is increase the volume and diversity of the information to which you are exposed.
Use your conscious mind to acquire all the information you need for making a decision. But don’t try to analyze the information with your conscious mind. Instead, go on holiday while your unconscious mind digests it. Whatever your intuition then tells you is almost certainly going to be the best choice.
If our DNA has a literary equivalent, it’s Finnegan’s Wake.
Unless you experience the unpleasant symptoms of being wrong, your brain will never revise its models. Before your neurons can succeed, they must repeatedly fail. There are no shortcuts for this painstaking process.
The world is more random than we can imagine. That’s what our emotions can’t understand.
Love is just another name for what never gets old.
In particular, Vaillant says, it is the experience of loving and being loved that most closely predicts how we react to the hardships of life; human attachments are the ultimate source of resilience. “The seventy-five years and twenty million dollars expended on the Grant Study points, at least to me, to a straightforward five-word conclusion,” Vaillant writes. “’Happiness equals love. Full stop.
Emerson looked like a Puritan minister, with abrupt cheekbones and a long, bony nose. A man of solitude, he was prone to bouts of selfless self-absorption. “I like the silent church before the service begins,” he confessed in “Self-Reliance.” He wrote in his journal that he liked man, but not men. When he wanted to think, he would take long walks by himself in the woods.
When the mind is denied the emotional sting of losing, it never figures out how to win.
Trusting one’s emotions requires constant vigilance; intelligent intuition is the result of deliberate practice.
Expertise is simply the wisdom that emerges from cellular error. Mistakes aren’t things to be discouraged. On the contrary, they should be cultivated and carefully investigated.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on my dopamine neurons.
Money chases good ideas.
When you overthink at the wrong moment, you cut yourself off from the wisdom of your emotions, which are much better at assessing actual preferences. You lose the ability to know what you really want. And then you choose the worst strawberry jam.