Get your brain in motion

Category: creativity (Page 3 of 7)

9 Most important things to Learn

Which are the nine most important things that it is possible to learn in our life? In an interesting article mixing numerology, wittiness and common sense, Maria Popova, the founder of “Brain pickings”, tried to create her own personal list.

Here’s the result:

  1. Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind. In a world where everyone has an opinion, sometimes being incoherent and changing our minds could connect us with our hidden self.
  2. Do nothing for prestige or status or money or approval alone. The best incentive is to do what makes you happy.
  3. Be generous with your time and your resources and especially, with your words.
  4. Build pockets of stillness into your life. Finding the time for a walk or for yoga allows you to stay centered, to generate ideas and to entice your creative thinking.
  5. When people try to tell you who you are, don’t believe them. The assumptions made by those that misunderstand who you are and what you stand for reveal a great deal about them and absolutely nothing about you.
  6. Presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity for. Look for what makes life worth living.
  7. Expect anything worthwhile to take a long time. At odds with the culture of immediacy, let’s enjoy the period of blossoming “where all the real magic unfolds in the making of one’s character and destiny”.
  8. Seek out what magnifies your spirit. Who are the people, ideas, and books that magnify your spirit? Find them, hold on to them and visit them often.
  9. Don’t be afraid to be an idealist.

Read the full article

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Image source: Flickr – duncan c (CC BY-NC 2.0)

Be orderly in life, be original in your work

The contemplative life requires discipline and hard work, for sure. But it also seems to require some time indulging pleasures.

There is much fascinating variety in the daily habits of celebrity and creative humanists to be discovered browsing their biographies.

Monkish and lonely Nietsche used to eat incredible amounts of fruits at lunch, and a much loved beefsteak, before setting himself for long mountain walks in the Swiss Alps.

Prodigious Karl Marx was accustomed to working long hours at night, accompanied by ceaseless smoking.

Rather predictable and orderly Immanuel Kant tried to stick to the rule that he would smoke only one pipe, but the bowls of his pipes increased considerably in size as the years went on…

Remember Gustave Flaubert’s maxim?

“Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” Maybe, the addition of a little “bad habit” or two might help too!

Discover more here

 

Nietzsche & Overbeck

 

Image source: Flickr – Karl-Ludwig Poggemann (CC – BY 2.0)

Would you give away your home keys to some random stranger? I bet not. Curiously enough, when it comes to internet personal security, people usually lower their guard, thus giving possibility to malwares, Trojans or identity thieves to have access to private data. Justin Schuh, one of the top Google’s information security engineers, here explains in five simple tips how to sensibly reduce risk of infection while surfing on the internet.

Because, as Jodi Rell once stated: “at the end of the day, the goals are simple: safety and security”

Never lower your guard

Image source: Bykst  (CC0 1.0)

Seven Smart Habits of Great Innovators

According to Lolly Daskal (President and CEO, Lead From Within), to stay on top you need to keep innovating.

These 7 habits will help you:

1) Constantly connect the dots, in order to gain new insight and see relationships that were invisible before;

2) Commit to asking questions, by asking new questions you get new perspective;

3) Actively try new things, the real innovation is not in seeking new horizons but seeing the horizon in a new light;

4) Find points of intersection with Others, for ideas to germinate  a diverse set of perspectives, thinkers, questioners, and doers is required;

5) Have a sense of purpose, great innovators are powered by their passion and use it as a sense of purpose;

6) Cross-pollinate ideas, creativity happens when two things collide to create a whole new idea;

7) Make innovation a daily routine, if you want to become a master of anything, it takes discipline and commitment;

Innovation Adoption Curve

Image: Flickr: Jurgen Appelo  – Innovation Adoption Curve (CC BY 2.0)

Go Back to the Basics!

The innovation expert Jeff De Graff, in his article published by Huffington Post, describes the New Rules of Innovation.

Go back to the basics. That is the imperative of radical innovation. As founded by some economic studies, radical innovations consistently generate more positive performance outcomes than incremental innovations. As a consequence, sometimes a brand new radical approach may be the best winning card to break through situations. The article shows how this basic and even foregone assumption is able to cherish change. By way of summary, the challenge is having the courage to break old rules.

Read here the full article http://huff.to/1x90bwJ

Scudo, Dinamica, Innovazione, Innovativo, Carriera

Image Source: Pixabay – geralt – (CC0)

 

Hidden Creativity

Harvard professor Linda Hill, co-author of “Collective Genius,” Linda Hill, spent a decade studying leaders of innovative firms in the US, Europe, India, and Asia.

The idea was to come up with a set of tools and tactics to keep great ideas flowing — from everyone in the company, not just the designated “creatives.”

In this TED, Linda Hill talks about what’s the secret to unlocking the creativity hidden inside your daily work, and giving every great idea a chance.

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