The Emotions That Make Us More Creative

"Creativity is just connecting things. 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." Steve Jobs

Connecting experiences, both positive and negative, and not losing the enthusiasm in the process is key to creativity.

Ambivalence is right, you need to be bored, happy, and sad to be creative: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8916132

It seems to make common-sense from life experience that fear of imminent death and positive, unburdened, playful states of mind are both highly motivating in different ways. And to some degree, I think struggling with limited resources is often a contributing motivator that is often extinguished with over-resourced situations. This is of course partially orthogonal to individual personality, work style and other motivations. For me, getting away from most stimuli and not having a particular goal or timeframe leads to the most productive idea generation state; that is, when one lets their mind wander and play with ideas. Other people go to places like bric-à-brac stores, flip through catalogues, surf the web or seek more stimuli for inspiration.

Ugh. Another dumb article that views human beings as a machine which can be manipulated by changing the inputs.

Hundereds of years of psychology/philosophy have given humanity nothing except dumb shit like this. Man is still violent, lonely, desperate, scared. Mankind is still an enigma that it was thousands of years ago.

Time to defund this garbage.