Charles Duhigg Quote

Creativity is just connecting things, Apple cofounder Steve Jobs said in 1996. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. People become creative brokers, in other words, when they learn to pay attention to how things make them react and feel. Most people are too narrow in how they think about creativity, Ed Catmull, the president of Disney Animation, told me. So we spend a huge amount of time pushing people to go deeper, to look further inside themselves, to find something that’s real and can be magical when it’s put into the mouth of a character on a screen. We all carry the creative process inside us; we just need to be pushed to use it sometimes.