DO YOU WANT TO BECOME CREATIVE? Valuable hints from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (and me)

Do you think of yourself as a creative person? Do you aspire to creativity? What does it mean? Why would you want to spend your time on creative activity? How should you go about it?

We’ve all heard of Leonardo da Vinci, but have you heard of Leonardo of Pisa, and do you know why he deserves to be famous?

‘The virtuous are virtuous for no other reasons than to join forces with others who are virtuous, to mutual benefit.

It strikes me as whimsically appropriate that I should be sitting in Australia in the middle of summer, watching the persistent rain outside, snugly – and perhaps smugly – reading about the English and the glories and humiliation of their – my – history.

The poet Philip Larkin famously observed that sex was invented in 1963. Or rather less dramatically: So life was never better than/In nineteen sixty-three/(Though just too late for me)/Between the end of the ‘Chatterley’ ban/And the Beatles’ first L.P.

John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World to That Which is to Come was published in 1678 and is considered one of the greatest works of English literature

Most of us throw our embryo-hood away. As we get older, we become set in our ways, fixed in our nature.

Chimpanzees greatly outperform our well-educated elites in their knowledge of important world trends

And now for something completely different.

We have to look at the origins of individualism...

Here is my cycling survival guide

WHAT IS DIFFERENT FROM 2006?

Western civilization has created something no previous civilization has managed – an immensely rich society and culture

Capitalism has delivered “the Miracle”

The question came into my mind just now when reading some words written in 1944 from a Nazi prison by Dietrich Bonhoeffer

To pursue intelligent difference, we need to find a competitive advantage.

Five Practical Ways to Lazy Intelligence

This may seem a touch eccentric and macabre, but as a philosophy of life it has some great virtues

A concept is by its nature an oversimplification.

It seems clear that inspiration comes from outside, and that we cannot control it.

Philip K Dick’s great book The Man in the High Castle...

f you want to succeed, don’t innovate. Imitate.

One of the best science fiction books ever

Here are my Ten Commandments...