Creativity and Good Ideas

Reading a book on Creativity by a prof. whose name sounds Russian and is too complex to remember. Anyway, he has a theory about "Flow" of ideas. He quotes an interesting Q/A with Linus Pauling, a Nobel Laureate, and a student about how to get good ideas.

A student: "Dr. Pauling, how does one go about having good ideas?"

Pauling: "You have a lot of ideas and throw away the bad ones."

He also says finding pleasure in the right things is the best thing we can teach the young. And, that our schools and teachers are ineffective in bringing interest to the subject being taught. Parental models and behavior also usually sets wrong examples, hindering creativity and satisfaction among the children who grow up with wrong ideas.

Interesting thoughts based on interviews with highly accomplished and creative people including authors, musicians (Ravi Shankar) and the like.

2 comments:

Harimohan said...

We had a Prof at Osmania Unive who did a Ph.D. in creativity and gave us questionnaires to fill up. There would be random questions like 'What if clouds have strings attached to them?' We, the respondents, were to give the maximum number of responses as we could. I always thought that the amount an answer deviated from the general ideas was what creativity all about until he told us that it was about the number of responses one could generate. Very interesting and on the lines of what Dr. Pauling said I think.

Rajendra said...

Yeah, I think we also have a (mis)conception of creative being crazy, which may not be necessarily correct. You can be sane and creative at the same time, perhaps.

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