Here is a brief excerpt from a recent blog post by Maria Popova, founder of Brain Pickings as well as an “interestingness hunter-gatherer” and curious mind at large. She also writes for Wired UK and The Atlantic, among others, and is an MIT Futures of Entertainment Fellow. To read the complete article, sign up for a free subscription to a weekly newsletter, and check out a wealth of valuable resources, please click here.

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“Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating.”

Much has been said about how creativity works, its secrets, its origins, and what we can do to optimize ourselves for it. In this excerpt from his fantastic 1991 lecture, John Cleese offers a recipe for creativity, delivered with his signature blend of cultural insight and comedic genius. Specifically, Cleese outlines “the 5 factors that you can arrange to make your lives more creative”:

o Space (“You can’t become playful, and therefore creative, if you’re under your usual pressures.”)

o Time (“It’s not enough to create space; you have to create your space for a specific period of time.”)

o Time (“Giving your mind as long as possible to come up with something original,” and learning to tolerate the discomfort of pondering time and indecision.)

o  Confidence (“Nothing will stop you being creative so effectively as the fear of making a mistake.”)

o Humor (“The main evolutionary significance of humor is that it gets us from the closed mode to the open mode quicker than anything else.”)

The lecture is worth a watch in its entirety, below, if only to get a full grasp of Cleese’s model for creativity as the interplay of two modes of operating — open, where we take a wide-angle, abstract view of the problem and allow the mind to ponder possible solutions, and closed, where we zoom in on implementing a specific solution with narrow precision. Along the way, Cleese explores the traps and travails of the two modes and of letting their osmosis get out of balance.

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To read the complete article and watch one or both of two films (excerpt and complete program), please click here.

According to Maria Popova, “Brain Pickings is a human-powered discovery engine for interestingness, culling and curating cross-disciplinary curiosity-quenchers, and separating the signal from the noise to bring you things you didn’t know you were interested in until you are.”