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John Cleese has a talk on this that's one of my favorite and most actionable for me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb5oIIPO62g

I go back to it over and over to remind me how to get into a state to be creative.

This was a fantastic talk, thanks for linking! One interesting takeaway: As you play create random juxtaposition of ideas and see if anyone makes sense. It's good that some of these are crazy. He talks about the concept of "intermediate impossibles" (related post: https://medium.com/front-line-interaction-design/intermediat... shake your mind loose and arrive at the actual solution. I found this idea similar to Zen koans.

I read something a long time ago that argued that highly creative people aren't creative because they have better ideas, but they have more ideas than their peers of similar intelligence, and then they sift through those ideas to pick out the gems. (Of course it then requires a lot of work ethic and skills to generate quality inspiration and to covert those ideas into valuable creations).

Creativity correlates with openness to experience. Openness to experience means you're more likely to play with a new experience or idea in an open way - and perhaps generate new ideas from it - than to dismiss it out of hand because you find it boring and/or anxiety provoking.

https://www.opencolleges.edu.au/informed/features/the-number...

You don't need a work ethic to be creative. IME creative people have to be creative. It's not a choice.

You need a work ethic to turn creativity into value - which is a different problem, where you have to balance creative output with critical evaluation and conscious persistent development of relevant skills. (In addition to all the usual biz dev stuff.)

That sounds like DeBono PO method: http://www.debonogroup.com/podisruption.php

thanks for the link. Wasn't sure about it at first, but pretty good talk. Most of it seems somewhat obvious, but not often considered. Thanks!

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