Replay: Steven Johnson shares Five Things He's Learned About Where Creativity Comes From
Check out the first five minutes of his recent class.
‘Don’t waste time over-organizing your ideas into buckets and categories. The key thing is to capture hunches as quickly as possible—whatever is the simplest way of capturing them, in whatever equipment you use.”
“Truly transformative ideas almost always come into the world as slow hunches—a hint of something not fully realized, a suggestion of a possibility worth exploring.”
“Slow hunches stay in that state for long periods of time, sometimes years, until they develop into something more substantial by connecting with and combining with some other idea.”
“One thing a person cannot do, no matter how rigorous his analysis or heroic his imagination, is draw up a list of things that would never occur to him.”
“The world is filled with things that would never have occurred to you but are actually really valuable to what you’re working on. So the creative workflow becomes: how do you trick your mind into thinking of something that would never have occurred to you?”
– Steven Johnson, Five Things I've Learned About Where Creativity Comes From
Steven Johnson is the bestselling author of thirteen books and an expert on the history of ideas and inventions. The Wall Street Journal called him “one of the most persuasive advocates for the role of collaboration in innovation.” Here’s the first five minutes of our recent two-hour class in which Steven shares the Five Things He’s Learned about the critical tools innovative thinkers use to nurture their creative practice – and the five key questions consistently innovative people ask themselves most often.
Five Things I've Learned about Where Creativity Comes From one of our most popular classes to date, asks and answers five essential questions for everyone interested in making the most of their imagination and ideas:
How do you capture your own hunches?
How do you capture ideas from other people?
How do your ideas evolve over time?
How Do You Surprise Yourself?
Do you have the right tools and routines to support a creative mindset?
It's an all-too-rare-a-chance to learn from the expert on how innovative thinkers – writers, artists, scientists, and many others– nurture their creative practice to make the most of their efforts. No one we know has thought more about these things, and Steven’s class is filled with inspiring ideas and discoveries you can apply right away.
If you want to discover new ways to nurture your creative practice and make the most of your ideas, this class is for you.
Steven’s books include The Ghost Map, Where Good Ideas Come From, and most recently Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer, which was also a PBS/BBC television series. Steven is also the host of the podcast American Innovations and the host and co-creator of the Emmy-winning TV series, How We Got To Now. He lives in Brooklyn, NY and Marin County, CA with his wife and three sons.
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