Upon reviewing an old piece of work I composed, but regretfully deleted, this email to my boss.

"Too often what passes for knowledge on social media or good ideas in innovation are concepts that thrive only in the shallow end of the pond, unaware of the dangers that lurk in the deeper end. Only people who have been to the deep end know what lurks there, and how to deal with what lurks there. Shallow end thinking is thinking, but it may not be the best thinking."

Are you Experienced? (via nextness)

Group discussions are a "creativity killer"

… as well as boring and a waste of time.

"If a project is truly innovative, you cannot possibly know its exact cost and exact schedule at the beginning. And if you do know the exact cost and the exact schedule, chances are that the technology is obsolete."

Joseph Gavin, in charge of developing the original lunar module of NASA’s space program, quoted in HUMANITIES Magazine

"If I have learned anything important over the past six months, it’s probably this: There isn’t any job description, anywhere, that contains everything I want. Nothing encompasses all of my interests. My main creative act (in this stage of my life) is not going to be my writing; rather, it’s going to be piecing together jobs, and projects, and ways of living, so that I can do and be everything that I want. That is how, I think, to win the game—and I definitely feel like I’m playing a weird, capitalist game. It’s so imperative to resist the overwhelming current toward mindless routines, social isolation, and self-segregation."

Read the whole thing at What the hell, summer spell.

 

"Too often, we fail to consider the ways in which our surroundings constrain our creativity. When we are always “close” to the problems of work, when we never silence our phones or stop responding to email, we get trapped into certain mental habits. We assume that there is no other way to think about things, that this is how it must always be done. It’s not until we’re napping by the pool with a pina colada in hand – when work seems a million miles away – that we suddenly find the answer we’ve needed all along."

The importance of vacation, Jonah Lehrer.