{"id":5618,"date":"2012-06-18T23:44:05","date_gmt":"2012-06-19T04:44:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meganstrange.com\/?p=5618"},"modified":"2012-06-18T23:44:05","modified_gmt":"2012-06-19T04:44:05","slug":"book-review-imagine-how-creativity-works","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meganstrange.com\/?p=5618","title":{"rendered":"Book Review: Imagine: How Creativity Works"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/meganstrange.com\/?attachment_id=5619\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-5619\" target=\"_blank\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-5619\" title=\"book-articleInline\" src=\"https:\/\/meganstrange.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/06\/book-articleInline.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"190\" height=\"323\" srcset=\"https:\/\/meganstrange.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/06\/book-articleInline.jpg 190w, https:\/\/meganstrange.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/06\/book-articleInline-176x300.jpg 176w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 190px) 100vw, 190px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>&#8220;What kind of culture have we created? Is it a world full of ideas that can be connected? Are we willing to invest in risk takers? Do our schools produce students ready to create? Can the son of a glover grow up to write plays for the queen? We have to make it easy to become a genius.&#8221; Jonah Lehrer, <em>Imagine: How Creativity Works<\/em><\/p>\n<p>I have always wanted to be creative.\u00a0 I keep thinking that I will wake up one morning and be filled with <a href=\"https:\/\/pinterest.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Pinterest<\/a> ideas that I will spend the whole day creating.\u00a0 Then, as I create cool things, I&#8217;ll take <a href=\"http:\/\/instagram.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Instagrammish<\/a> pictures and then scrapbook them all together into the coolest <a href=\"http:\/\/standardtheme.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Standard Theme WordPress<\/a> blog on the block.\u00a0 But&#8230;for the time being, I continue to not be creative.<\/p>\n<p>I was sitting at the pool two weeks ago with a new friend talking about books and she mentioned that she wanted to read <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/dp\/B005MZN1HC\/ref=r_soa_w_d\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Imagine: How Creativity Works<\/em><\/a> by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jonahlehrer.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Jonah Lehrer<\/a>.\u00a0 I should mention that she is my fun new friend that is awesome at scrapbooking and ALL things creative.\u00a0 I love to read her blog and imagine that it is just 1% of all the awesome creative ideas she has. So&#8230;I thought that this book would be my ticket to&#8230;basically, being cool too!<\/p>\n<p>This book was really interesting on a number of different angles.\u00a0 Since I have pretty much resigned myself to being a person of order that can follow specific non-creative instructions pretty well, I decided to see what I could take away from the perspective of a high school and middle school principal charged with cultivating the hearts and challenging the minds of our students at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ncchristian.org\" target=\"_blank\">North Cobb Christian School<\/a> so that they can impact culture for Christ.\u00a0 This book is an outstanding read that really percolated some thoughts for me as it relates to how we teach and how our students learn.\u00a0 My hope is to take these thoughts and use them to evaluate what we are doing to make sure we are giving our students the room to be creative and the motivation to run hard after their dreams.\u00a0 God created us to be artists and artisans.<\/p>\n<p>Here are several thoughts that I highlighted while reading&#8230;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Every creative journey begins with a problem. It starts with a feeling of frustration, the dull ache of not being able to find the answer. We have worked hard, but we\u2019ve hit the wall. We have no idea what to do next.<\/li>\n<li>\u201cAn insight is like finding a needle in a haystack,\u201d Beeman says. \u201cThere are a trillion possible connections in the brain, and we have to find the exact right one. Just think of the odds!\u201d<\/li>\n<li>The constant need for insights has shaped the creative process.<\/li>\n<li>Creativity is the residue of time wasted. \u2014Albert Einstein<\/li>\n<li>Instead of insisting on constant concentration\u2014requiring every employee to focus on his or her work for eight hours a day\u20143M encourages people to make time for activities that at first glance might seem unproductive.<\/li>\n<li>One important consequence of this approach was the invention of the 15 percent rule, a concept that allows every researcher to spend 15 percent of his or her workday pursuing speculative new ideas.<\/li>\n<li>Why is a relaxed state of mind so important for creative insights? When our minds are at ease\u2014when those alpha waves are rippling through the brain\u2014we\u2019re more likely to direct the spotlight of attention inward, toward that stream of remote associations emanating from the right hemisphere. In contrast, when we are diligently focused, our attention tends to be directed outward, toward the details of the problems we\u2019re trying to solve.<\/li>\n<li>Another ideal moment for insights, according to Beeman and John Kounios, is the early morning, shortly after waking up. The drowsy brain is unwound and disorganized, open to all sorts of unconventional ideas.<\/li>\n<li>We do some of our best thinking when we\u2019re half asleep.<\/li>\n<li>Occasionally, focus can backfire and make us fixated on the wrong answers. It\u2019s not until you let yourself relax and indulge in distractions that you discover the answer; the insight arrives only after you stop looking for it.<\/li>\n<li>The benefit of such horizontal interactions\u2014people sharing knowledge across fields\u2014is that it encourages conceptual blending, which is an extremely important part of the insight process.<\/li>\n<li>As Nietzsche observed in his 1878 book Human, All Too Human:\u00a0\u00a0 Artists have a vested interest in our believing in the flash of revelation, the so-called inspiration . . . shining down from heavens as a ray of grace. In reality, the imagination of the good artist or thinker produces continuously good, mediocre, or bad things, but his judgment, trained and sharpened to a fine point, rejects, selects, connects . . . All great artists and thinkers are great workers, indefatigable not only in inventing, but also in rejecting, sifting, transforming, ordering.<\/li>\n<li>T. S. Eliot understood this: \u201cThe bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious.\u201d<\/li>\n<li>The struggle of maturity is to recover the seriousness of a child at play. \u2014Friedrich Nietzsche<\/li>\n<li>Picasso once summarized the paradox this way: \u201cEvery child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.\u201d<\/li>\n<li>Despite a lack of natural ability, I did have the one element necessary to all early creativity: na\u00efvet\u00e9, that fabulous quality that keeps you from knowing just how unsuited you are for what you are about to do. \u2014Steve Martin, Born Standing Up<\/li>\n<li>It\u2019s not until the challenge is shared with motivated outsiders that the solution can be found.<\/li>\n<li>We need to be willing to risk embarrassment, ask silly questions, surround ourselves with people who don\u2019t know what we\u2019re talking about. We need to leave behind the safety of our expertise.<\/li>\n<li>When you escape from the place you spend most of your time, the mind is suddenly made aware of all those errant ideas previously suppressed.<\/li>\n<li>Knowledge can be a subtle curse. When we learn about the world, we also learn all the reasons why the world cannot be changed. We get used to our failures and imperfections. We become numb to the possibilities of something new.<\/li>\n<li>Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere. \u2014Anton Ego, in Pixar\u2019s Ratatouille<\/li>\n<li>A mediocre team will screw up a good idea. But if you give a mediocre idea to a great team and let them work together, they\u2019ll find a way to succeed.\u201d<\/li>\n<li>The Latin crest of Pixar University says it all: Alienus Non Diutius, which means \u201calone no longer.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>\u201cThis was a lesson I took away from the Toyota manufacturing process,\u201d Catmull says. \u201cIn their car factories, everybody had a duty to find errors. Even the lowly guys on the assembly line could pull the red cord and stop the line if they saw a problem. It wasn\u2019t just the job of the guys in charge. It was a group process.<\/li>\n<li>The absence of criticism has kept us all in the same place.<\/li>\n<li>\u201cMeltdowns are always painful, but they\u2019re a sign that we\u2019re still trying to do something difficult, that we\u2019re still taking risks and willing to correct our mistakes. We have to be willing to throw our scripts in the trash.\u201d<\/li>\n<li>\u201cYou need to hire the best folks and then get out of the way.\u201d<\/li>\n<li>\u201cWhat I\u2019ve learned to look for is the individual voice,\u201d he says. \u201cIt might be an aesthetic, or a sentence style, or a way of holding the camera. But having that unique voice is the one thing I can\u2019t teach. I can teach someone to write copy. I can show someone how to crop a photo. But I can\u2019t teach you how to have a voice. You either have something to say or you don\u2019t.\u201d<\/li>\n<li>\u201cWhat typically happens is a friend tells me about his friend, who has this interesting idea,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd so then I talk to some other people, who also think the idea is interesting. And maybe they talk to some other people, and before you know it we\u2019ve got a funding plan. That\u2019s how the process always works.\u201d<\/li>\n<li>Dewey said it best: \u2018Understanding derives from activity.\u2019 Kids don\u2019t learn when they\u2019re consuming information, when someone is talking down to them. They learn when they\u2019re producing stuff. That\u2019s how you get them to work hard without realizing they\u2019re working.\u201d<\/li>\n<li>Creativity is a skill that never goes out of style. When children are allowed to create, they\u2019re able to develop the sophisticated talents that are required for success in the real world. Instead of learning how to pass a standardized test, they learn how to cope with complexity and connect ideas, how to bridge disciplines and improve their first drafts. These mental talents can\u2019t be taught in an afternoon\u2014there is no textbook for ingenuity, no lesson plan for divergent thinking. Rather, they must be discovered: the child has to learn by doing.<\/li>\n<li>What kind of culture have we created? Is it a world full of ideas that can be connected? Are we willing to invest in risk takers? Do our schools produce students ready to create? Can the son of a glover grow up to write plays for the queen? We have to make it easy to become a genius.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;What kind of culture have we created? Is it a world full of ideas that can be connected? Are we willing to invest in risk takers? Do our schools produce students ready to create? Can the son of a glover grow up to write plays for the queen? We have to make it easy to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,23,28,17,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5618","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review","category-generosity","category-integrity","category-leadership","category-north-cobb-christian"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meganstrange.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5618","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meganstrange.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meganstrange.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meganstrange.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meganstrange.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5618"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/meganstrange.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5618\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meganstrange.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5618"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meganstrange.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5618"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meganstrange.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5618"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}