Takers have a knack for generating creative ideas and championing them in the face of opposition. Because they have supreme confidence in their own opinions, they feel free of the shackles of social a...
Simonton finds that on average, creative geniuses weren’t qualitatively better in their fields than their peers. They simply produced a greater volume of work, which gave them more variation and a hig...
People who started businesses and contributed to patent applications were more likely than their peers to have leisure time hobbies that involved drawing, painting, architecture, sculpture, and litera...
One of the keys to cultivating grit is making the task at hand more interesting and motivating.
No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader, he was fond of saying.
Never put off till tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow. Mark Twain
I’d rather be defined by perseverance than by whether or not I passed an exam.
In every field, even the most eminent creators typically produce a large quantity of work that’s technically sound but considered unremarkable by experts and audiences. When the London Philharmonic Or...
In a recent study comparing every Nobel Prize–winning scientist from 1901 to 2005 with typical scientists of the same era, both groups attained deep expertise in their respective fields of study. But...
Having a sense of security in one realm gives us the freedom to be original in another.
Givers tend to use more powerless speech, talking with tentative markers like these: • Hesitations: well, um, uh, you know • Hedges: kinda, sorta, maybe, probably, I think • Disclaimers: this may be a...
For the next two hours, the executives worked in groups, pretending to be one of Merck’s top competitors. Energy soared as they developed ideas for drugs that would crush theirs and key markets they h...
Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.1 Scott Adams
Conceptual innovators tend to generate original ideas early but risk copying themselves. The experimental approach takes longer, but proves more renewable: instead of reproducing our past ideas, exper...
By giving away credit, Meyer compromised his visibility. For a long time, George’s towering contribution to what some see as the most important TV show of the period was not as well known as it should...
At its core, comedy is an act of rebellion. Evidence shows that compared to the norms in the population, comedians tend to be more original and rebellious—and the higher they score on these dimensions...
As economist Joseph Schumpeter famously observed, originality is an act of creative destruction. Advocating for new systems often requires demolishing the old way of doing things, and we hold back for...
As Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman and decision expert Gary Klein explain, intuitions are only trustworthy when people build up experience making judgments in a predictable environmen...
Anthony and Stanton viewed Stone’s support of voting rights for black men as a betrayal of the women’s cause. They reneged on their commitment to a joint organization and announced the formation of th...
All it took was having them spend their initial six minutes a little differently: instead of adopting a managerial mindset for evaluating ideas, they got into a creative mindset by generating ideas th...