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…
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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…
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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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4 Secrets To Becoming Luckier, According To Research
open to more opportunities, interact with a large network of people, break routines and keep a relaxed attitude toward life. Via Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries: ...lucky people pay more attention to what’s going on around them than unlucky people. It’s more nuanced than that. Here’s where being open to meeting, interacting with, and learning from different types of people comes in. Wiseman found that lucky people tend to be open to opportunities (or insights)…
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How does Chris Rock create such brilliant comedy?
's relentlessly tested and tweaked onstage over a period of months. Via Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries: When beginning to work on a new show, Rock picks venues where he can experiment with new material in very rough fashion. In gearing up for his latest global tour, he made between forty and fifty appearances at a small comedy club, called Stress Factory, in New Brunswick, New Jersey, not far from where he lives. In front of…
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Is it better to do all your reading for the year in two weeks?
y compressing their intake into a matter of days, they give new ideas additional opportunities to network among themselves, for the simple reason that it’s easier to remember something that you read yesterday than it is to remember something you read six months ago." Via Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation: The problem with assimilating new ideas at the fringes of your daily routine is that the potential combinations are limited by the reach of your…
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Does quantity lead to quality?
can. Making mistakes can be vital to improvement. Via Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation: “The errors of the great mind exceed in number those of the less vigorous one.” This is not merely statistics. It is not that the pioneering thinkers are simply more productive than less “vigorous” ones, generating more ideas overall, both good and bad. Some historical studies of patent records have in fact shown that overall productivity correlates with radical breakthroughs…
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