Tag: Creativity
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ONCE UPON A time, artists had jobs. And not “advising the Library of Congress on its newest Verdi acquisition” jobs, but job jobs, the kind you hear about in stump speeches. Think of T.S. Eliot, conjuring “The Waste Land” (1922) by night and overseeing foreign accounts at Lloyds Bank during the day, or Wallace Stevens, scribbling lines…
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Just over 30 years ago, Julia Cameron’s agent gave her the immortally bad advice that no one was going to be interested in a book about creativity. “What on earth are you doing?” the agent demanded. Instead of shelving her manuscript, Cameron photocopied it and started selling it by hand. She got a new agent,…
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“Come to my state and read poems from the book over which you spent five years laboring. It’ll cost $400 in travel, $200 in lodging, and $20 in food and drinks. We can’t pay you but it’ll be a reeeeally big crowd and you can sell your book.” Article by Foster Rudy, published on Medium…
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Perfectionism is a widespread modus operandi among artists. In an essay inspired by the film Solo, our author reflects why this can lead to fear of failure rather than better work – and how one can overcome this faulty logic of self-judgment. This film is screened at this year’s online edition of the Norient Film…
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Ancient philosophy and creative work are rarely thought analogous. Maybe they should. Creative work of any kind—a book, a screenplay, a painting, an album, a business—really comes down to having something to say and a way to say it so people listen. As Ryan Holiday writes in Perennial Seller, “Anyone doing any kind of creative…
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In his influential paper of 1943, A Theory of Human Motivation, the American psychologist Abraham Maslow proposed that healthy human beings have a certain number of needs, and that these needs are arranged in a hierarchy, with some needs (such as physiological and safety needs) being more primitive or basic than others (such as social…
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Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s investigations of “optimal experience” have revealed that what makes an experience genuinely satisfying is a state of consciousness called flow. During flow, people typically experience deep enjoyment, creativity, and a total involvement with life. His studies led him to conclude that happiness is an internal state of being, not an external one. His popular…
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We often don’t realize that we’re suffering from burnout until it’s too late. When we push our creativity and productivity to its limits, we can easily find ourselves teetering on brink of burnout. And there’s a fine line between being in the zone and falling down the slippery slope of mental, emotional and physical exhaustion.…
Mental Support for Creative Minds 