Is curiosity the key to creativity?
esearch evidence suggests a strong link between inquisitiveness and creative productivity." Via Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries: Research evidence suggests a strong link between inquisitiveness and creative productivity. In an extensive six-year study about the way creative executives in business think, for example, Professors Jeffrey Dyer of Brigham Young University and Hal Gregersen of INSEAD, surveyed over three thousand executives and interviewed five hundred people who had either started innovative companies or invented new products. They…
2 minutes
Can you turn stress into excitement?
ny studies have shown we easily confuse our feelings: Ariely thinks it might have something to do with "misattribution of emotions": "Sometimes we have an emotion and we don't know where it's coming from, so we kind of stick it on something that seems sensible." The rush from a Red Bull and a roller coaster can make us believe we're in love with the person next to us. We can even fall in love with someone trying to kill us…
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Does networking make you more creative?
..businesspeople with entropic networks full of weak ties were three times more innovative than people with small networks of close friends..." Via Imagine: How Creativity Works: Ruef then analyzed each of these entrepreneurs using an elaborate metric of innovation. He measured the number of patents they’d applied for and kept track of all their trademarks. He rated the originality of their products and gave them bonus points if they’d “entered an unexploited niche” or pioneered a new marketing method. He…
2 minutes
Here’s The Secret To Persistence, According To Research
en challenged, focus on "getting better" -- not doing well or looking good. Get-better goals increase motivation, make tasks more interesting and replenish energy. This effect even carries over to subsequent tasks. Via Nine Things Successful People Do Differently: Get-better goals, on the other hand, are practically bulletproof. When we think about what we are doing in terms of learning and mastering, accepting that we may make some mistakes along the way, we stay motivated despite the setbacks that might…
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Is Your Brain Disorganized? Research Says That’s A Good Thing
Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, Steven Johnson posits that "the more disorganized your brain is, the smarter you are" in reference to the results of a neuroscience experiment by Robert Thatcher. Across the board, in Johnson's book and other sources it seems pretty clear that creativity is messy. Ideas need to be sloshing around or crashing in to one another to produce breakthroughs: Johnson cites research showing that the volume of ideas bouncing about…
2 minutes
Are hobbies the key to creative breakthroughs?
erlapping different projects allows new connections to burgeon at the margins, helping to create innovative ideas. Via Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation: Legendary innovators like Franklin, Snow, and Darwin all possess some common intellectual qualities— a certain quickness of mind, unbounded curiosity— but they also share one other defining attribute. They have a lot of hobbies... ...It is tempting to call this mode of work “serial tasking,” in the sense that the projects rotate one…
1 min read
What’s more likely to land you a job: a referral or just being good-looking?
you had to choose between one or the other, forget the referral and just be hot: There is a blend of various factors on which the hiring of employee is based upon. This paper investigates and interrogates the contribution of physical attractiveness and referrals in the hiring of employee and further ponders on which matters the most from the above outlined variables when an employee is hired. The findings of the paper clearly confirm that it is the physical…
1 min read
What are the most creative places in the world?
e biggest cities. Via Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation: A city that was ten times larger than its neighbor wasn’t ten times more innovative; it was seventeen times more innovative. A metropolis fifty times bigger than a town was 130 times more innovative. Kleiber’s law proved that as life gets bigger, it slows down. But West’s model demonstrated one crucial way in which human-built cities broke from the patterns of biological life: as cities get…
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