Thomas Frank on the creativity industry:
What our correspondent also understood, sitting there in his basement bathtub, was that the literature of creativity was a genre of surpassing banality. Every book he read seemed to boast the same shopworn anecdotes and the same canonical heroes. If the authors are presenting themselves as experts on innovation, they will tell us about Einstein, Gandhi, Picasso, Dylan, Warhol, the Beatles. If they are celebrating their own innovations, they will compare them to the oft-rejected masterpieces of Impressionism — that ultimate combination of rebellion and placid pastel bullshit that decorates the walls of hotel lobbies from Pittsburgh to Pyongyang.
Those who urge us to “think different,” in other words, almost never do so themselves. Year after year, new installments in this unchanging genre are produced and consumed. Creativity, they all tell us, is too important to be left to the creative. Our prosperity depends on it. And by dint of careful study and the hardest science — by, say, sliding a jazz pianist’s head into an MRI machine — we can crack the code of creativity and unleash its moneymaking power.
That was the ultimate lesson. That’s where the music, the theology, the physics and the ethereal water lilies were meant to direct us. Our correspondent could think of no books that tried to work the equation the other way around — holding up the invention of air conditioning or Velcro as a model for a jazz trumpeter trying to work out his solo.
Full Story: Salon: TED talks are lying to you
I’ve linked to a bunch of these sorts of “science of creativity” articles over the years, but the best advice I’ve heard came from a conversation I eavesdropped at a local coffee shop a couple weeks ago. A comic book artist was being interviewed (I don’t know who it was or what publication was interviewing him), and he said “the muse strikes when you’re working a lot, not when you’re sitting around waiting for the muse to strike.”
See Also:
Peak Intel: How So-Called Strategic Intelligence Actually Makes Us Dumber