Writing can be taken up at any point. But you need to remember that the arts are fundamentally unfair. Hard work and diligence won't necessarily take you all the way. Talent, nepotism, influence, and pure luck play a huge part.
David BrinRead
It's how creativity works. Especially in humans. For every good idea, ten thousand idiotic ones must first be posed, sifted, tried out, and discarded. A mind that's afraid to toy with the ridiculous will never come up with the brilliantly original.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Creativity involves trial and error, requiring many failed ideas before achieving brilliance.
David Brin highlights the nature of creativity, emphasizing that the process often involves generating numerous poor ideas before arriving at something exceptional. He suggests that a willingness to explore even the silliest concepts is crucial for original thought, as fear of failure can stifle innovation.
Themes
CreativityIdeasInnovationFailureOriginality
In practice
Example use cases
During a brainstorming session to encourage team members to propose wild ideas without fear of judgment.
More from David Brin
All quotes βThere's no doubt that scientific training helps many authors to write better science fiction. And yet, several of the very best were English majors who could not parse a differential equation to save their lives.
David BrinRead
Competition, by itself, always leads to cheating by the powerful, who try to establish pyramids of power, like feudalism. Yet, competition is the great creative force! So how do we save it from its own contradictions? By cooperation! By cooperating with each other, via politics, to make rules and prevent cheating, so that competition can thrive!
David BrinRead
Change is the principal feature of our age and literature should explore how people deal with it. The best science fiction does that, head-on.
David BrinRead
When it comes to privacy and accountability, people always demand the former for themselves and the latter for everyone else.
David BrinRead
Human beings are inherently misled into subjective fantasies, but there's a saving grace. We all have different delusions. Other people don't necessarily share yours, and hence they will help you penetrate yours through the miracle of criticism!
David BrinRead
Similar quotes
Do you think of yourself as a creative personality? If you do, you are both fortunate and correct, in fact the beautiful truth is that everyone is creative and we all have the ability to develop our creative potential. It is wise to remember that the person who follows the crowd will get no further than the crowd. The person who walks the creative path is likely to find they are in places no one has ever been before.
Bob ProctorRead
That combination of thought and action defines creative confidence: the ability to come up with new ideas and the courage to try them out.
Tom KelleyRead
This is the extraordinary thing about creativity: If just you keep your mind resting against the subject in a friendly but persistent way, sooner or later you will get a reward from your unconscious.
John CleeseRead
You can only generate ideas when you put pencil to paper, brush to canvas... when you actually do something physical.
Twyla TharpRead
Highly creative people have a gift for connecting supposedly unrelated elements and ideas. They cross borders without regard for customs posts or No Trespassing signs. They throw suspension bridges across great distances. These elegant and unexpected combinations flow together beautifully in the twilight zone, where metaphor and resemblance rules in place of logic and classification.
Robert MossRead
Before we start anything creatively, we have a firm understanding of our objective and our frame of mind for the campaign. Who's our audience, and what's their day-to-day behavior? How can we complement those behaviors? How is our message more than an interruption? Why would people care about what we're saying?
David DrogaRead