What you produce is personal

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Smash the narratives... there's more to you than you realise.

The secret to mindful creativity

How to know more and think better

Time to read a little deeper, darling

Why how you start your day matters

Have we forgotten how to play, or is it that we don't know how

Connect to create

"Much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on..."

Those are Steve Jobs's words, delivered during a 2005 commencement speech to the graduating class at Stanford University.

Jobs was explaining what had become for him a long-honed working theory on the mechanisms of creativity. For Jobs, creativity was all about ‘connecting dots’ as he called it; finding new ways to combine established ideas. The cognitive equivalent of remixing, if you like.

Although Jobs has been possibly the most notable proponent of this idea, it didn’t originate with him.

As far back as the 1940s writers and creatives like James Webb Young were espousing the doctrine of what has since come to be known as bissociative thinking.

He said the ability to generate new ideas basically comes down to:

"the capacity to bring old elements into new combinations... the ability to see relationships."

Fast forward to the 21st century. We’ve got esteemed neuroscientists and psychologists like Nancy Andreasen boiling the creative temperament down to pretty much the same thing - ‘recognising relationships’.

In other words, there’s little to no debate on how creativity works at this point. Discovering and recognising relationships between things is key. But how exactly does someone get good at doing that? How do we build that particular mental muscle?

Turns out there are a few ways... But to understand them, we need to return to Jobs’ original quote.

He said:

"Creativity is just connecting things...”

What makes someone creative is the ability “to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things.”

Do more. Think more.

Explore new things, and develop a mindful habit toward the experience of doing so.

This is about intentionality.

Your life feeds and flows into your work, and vice versa. What you produce is personal.

The more we experience, the more dots we have available to connect. The more thoroughly we think on what we’ve experienced, the more likely we are to see how to connect them.

Those with a creative temperament recognise this reality and use it to their advantage.

But what does this look like in practice? Where and how do we start building this more explorative lifestyle?

That’s what this edition of the Academy is all about.

What you produce is personal

What Next?