Bad Habits that Crush Your Creativity and Stifle Your Success | Hacker News Reader

Bad Habits that Crush Your Creativity and Stifle Your Success

randykepple.com

166 pointsallenp20 comments

The first one "1. Creating and evaluating at the same time" is huge, see what happens in a brainstorming session when someone starts picking apart ideas. The whole session dies.

There is plenty of time later to shoot down the bad stuff.

Yeah I agree, I think it kind of relates to this: http://www.lostgarden.com/2010/08/visualizing-creative-proce...

Where basically if you don't experiment and then cull, you'll end up too constrained and never find "the good stuff."

I just finished reading a classic book about this called "Applied Imagination." It was written in 1952 and established many commonly accepted ideas about creativity and brainstorming.

I pulled relevant excerpts and posted them here: http://www.youthandyoungmanhood.com/applied-imagination

Applies to writing code, documentation, novels too. Create first, edit later.

I clicked through and wound up disappointed. There's merit to the suggestions, no doubt, but I was hoping for something more like this:

   1. Consuming stupid entertainment
   2. Staying up too late
   3. Eating crappy food
   4. Not ever getting fresh air
   5. Starving your muse

   . . .

The self-confidence and intellectual exploration stuff I already know. If I didn't, I wouldn't be creative in the first place.

Yes,

It has a few decent suggestions but I'm annoyed at generic advice that has little to do with habits in particular. IE, How is "lack of confidence" a habit??

This one stood out to me:

> 5. Starving your muse

Care to elaborate? Looks like something worth thinking about.

I first heard the expression in an article about resolving writer's block [1]. While that particular article is specific to role-playing games, the idea has more general application and I've heard other writers refer to it.

The basic idea is that you can't always be creating. You're never as original as you think you are; your output depends on your input. If you are a storywriter, you need to remember to read for pleasure. Seek new experiences, consume the things that are innovative or interesting or just plain cool in your field of choice. If you keep your muse well-fed on interesting ideas, she'll be ready to provide you with new ideas when you need them.

It applies even in a technical context. Even if you are forced to work in Java or Ada or on a horrific enterprise application, you should be playing in Haskell during your free time, reading papers on interesting algorithms, doing recreational mathematics, that sort of thing. The ideas that will come to you when facing your work are much improved by play.

My own creativity-killing bad habit is to starve my muse. Either to drown myself so completely in the act of creation that I run out of ideas, or to intellectually consume crap rather than good stuff.

[1] http://www.geocities.com/blackhatmatt/tickling_the_muse.htm

9. Fatigue

Self-help guru Tony Robbins starts every one of his programs covering diet and exercise because he has figured out that if you don't feel well, you probably won't do well.

Of course, I think football coach Vince Lombardi said it best, "Fatigue makes cowards of us all."

Perhaps related: Illness (with effects similar to fatigue, or worse). Particularly frustrating when it's chronic and without a ready remediation.

I don't mean it as a cop-out. But rather, that if one is experiencing such a problem, it needs addressing. Overcoming it through sheer willpower makes for a good TV movie but can be counter-productive when taken on as an objective, personal measure -- especially when others are echoing Nike's "just do it" in lieu of actually helping fix the problem.

Lose the slogan, and put getting healthy at the top of the list. If your medical provider has nothing to offer, keep looking.

Math nitpick: an IQ of 120 is not "just a little above average". It's about the 90th percentile of IQ scores. (Assuming a normal distribution with a mean of 100 and standard deviation of 15.)

Site appears to be overloaded, Google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

3, 6 and 5 are all pretty much the same: lack of self-confidence.

4 is very closely related as well.

Interestingly, most of these tips could apply to dating, as well.

Good list. I think it'd be hard to overstate the importance of #4. The mind relentless tries to make sense and rationalize everything around it, whether in creative work or anywhere else. Unfortunately the world exists in a state of ambiguity, confusion, and even paradox. Being comfortable moving in that kind of state will increase your effectiveness in just about every way.

"I once had a client who sold a product by direct mail. His order form broke every rule in the book. But it worked better than any other order form he had ever tried."

Seems like he A/B tested to perfection :) (takeaway: try some oddball ideas, you might be surprised!)

10. Working somewhere that values looking more then doing. I have never felt less creative then when wearing a business shirt.

i think i might be 8 for 8.

What do you mean?

I'm so guilty of #1 haha.

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