Creativity needs a bit of untidiness. Make everything too neat and there is no room for experiment.
Interpretation
Creativity thrives in chaos and experimentation rather than strict order.
The quote emphasizes that in order to foster creativity, one must embrace a certain level of disorder and unpredictability. If everything is overly organized and controlled, it stifles the ability to experiment, innovate, and think outside the box, preventing the emergence of fresh and original ideas.
In practice
In a creative workshop, one might use this quote to encourage participants to experiment freely without fear of making a mess.
The companies that survive longest are the one's that work out what they uniquely can give to the world not just growth or money but their excellence, their respect for others, or their ability to make people happy. Some call those things a soul.
The first step is to measure whatever can easily be measured. This is OK as far as it goes. The second step is to disregard that which can't be easily measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading. The third step is to presume that what can't be measured easily really isn't important. This is blindness. The fourth step is to say that what can't be easily measured really doesn't exist. This is suicide.
Why don't we teach our children in school what they are? We should say to them, 'You are unique... you have the capacity for anything. You are a marvel'.
To learn anything other than the stuff you find in books, you need to be able to experiment, to make mistakes, to accept feedback, and to try again. It doesn't matter whether you are learning to ride a bike or starting a new career, the cycle of experiment, feedback, and new experiment is always there.
We cannot wait for great visions from great people, for they are in short supply. It is up to us to light our own small fires in the darkness.
I believe that a lot of our striving after the symbols and levers of success is due to a basic insecurity, a need to prove ourselves. That done, grown up at last, we are free to stop pretending.
I do much of my creative thinking while golfing. If people know you're working at home they think nothing of walking in for a cup of coffee, but wouldn't dream of interrupting on the golf course.
Ideas are cheap. Always be passionate about ideas and communicating those ideas and discoveries to others in the things you make.
Discovering a new explanation is inherently an act of creativity.
Reading, conversation, environment, culture, heroes, mentors, nature β all are lottery tickets for creativity. Scratch away at them and youβll find out how big a prize youβve won.
I've known several cases of writers who decide to write about something and they research the hell out of it and when they're ready to write, they can't move because they are so burdened. I start writing. Whatever I need somehow comes to hand.
If we're free from the burden of trying to be completely original, we can stop trying to make something out of nothing, and we can embrace influence instead of running from it.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.