Creativity Needs Space, Both Internal and External

Your loves and passions are what inspire you to produce great things. Your passion is what keeps you going when you encounter resistance or difficult people, or experience setbacks or rejections. Valuing your heart’s longings will give you the courage to try out new directions and bravely explore...

Our best creative work is most likely to be intrinsically motivated, rather than motivated by extrinsic rewards like money.

When we’re intrinsically motivated, we do an activity because it’s inherently satisfying, not fo...

Nurturing environments (and people) inspire the creative. Natural and beautiful environments “feed” the brain and support the production of new neurons, while ugly, unstimulating environments stop the brain’s generative process.

If you’re procrastinating, unmotivated, or generally “blah,” a...

Our minds often get anxious when diving into new and unknown things, but research suggests that this is precisely when creativity has a chance to flourish.

For example, in several different stu...

Your deep creativity is subversive. It doesn’t care what your mother thinks, what your friends believe, or the institutional norms of your career. Creative terrain lies OUTSIDE of the institution that you work for, the social system that you grew up in, or what’s currently trending on social medi...

Our culture has long viewed creativity in ways that don’t serve us. On one hand, we view it as frilly and unnecessary—something we do for fun in our free time. And on the other hand, we think of it as a tool to help us build careers, make more money, and establish a name ...

Creative intelligence—the ability to come up with new ideas—is one of three main types of intelligence, alongside the ability to get along in differe...