An ongoing collection of short-form pieces created as I work out ideas and insights related to my current projects. No pics, no formatting—just thinking.
Basic generative requirements of creativity
Continuing on McGilchrist’s concept of the ‘interactive cognitive requirements’ of creativity, I want to expand on the first one: the generative requirements. So, this is kind of interesting and I think it provides immense opportunity for anyone that values being creative. Basically, the argument is that although we cannot control the creative act, nor can we invoke it whenever we please, we can create the terms upon which the creative…
The three cognitive requirements for the creative act
I’ve been working my way through Iain McGilchrist’s recent work, The Matter With Things. It’s, of course, phenomenal. But, at the same time, massive and dense. It’s so dense, in fact, that I’ve been chipping away at it since the beginning of the year when the two-volume book arrived. Chapter eight is devoted to the idea of creativity and the creative act. I’m grateful for it because McGilchrist helped me understand creativity in a new way. It’s so good, I have read it twice in order to get everything I can from it. For instance, I’ve often thought of creativity as the act of creating something, the doing or producing of a piece of creative—writing an article, producing a video.…
I don’t want to do this work
So, where to start? A couple weeks ago, or maybe more, I had this midnight epiphany. I was laying in bed, my wife sound asleep, and all of the sudden I had an insight. I got up and went straight to my office. I had to scribble down this thought or it would be lost by morning. So I wrote in big scrawly cursive for a few pages, getting the gist of my insight down. Now, I won’t go into the details of the insight but suffice it to say it was an idea for my business, and more specifically, an insight into how I could reframe my offerings in a way that might be perfect for a broader market…
Welcome to Short-Form
I decided to create a place where I could post short-form content—not blog posts so much, but rather pieces that I create while working out an idea or concept. These will be typically tied to whatever I’m researching or working on at the moment and will be more informal in nature. There will likely be other kinds of pieces sprinkled in from time to time, too. You might be wondering what this is all about. Fair enough. Whenever I’m working on a bigger piece, like an article or essay, I like to break it down into smaller pieces and then work out my thinking on those individual pieces. That’s what Short-Form is: those pieces published to my site. In the…