Slowing the work treadmill; To aid creativity and achieve more, try doing less, HBS professor says

Slowing the work treadmill

To aid creativity and achieve more, try doing less, HBS professor says

August 27, 2013 | Editor’s Pick Popular

By Chuck Leddy, Harvard Correspondent

Teresa Amabile compares much of work life to running on a treadmill. People constantly try to keep up with the demands of meetings, email, interruptions, deadlines, and the never-ending need to be more productive and creative. Yet on many days they seem to make no progress at all, especially in creative endeavors. “Many companies are running much too lean right now in terms of the number of employees,” said Amabile, the Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration and a director of research at Harvard Business School. So the treadmill speeds up, compelling time-strapped employees to do ever more with less. Read more of this post

Michael Lewis on Writing, Money, and the Necessary Self-Delusion of Creativity; Lewis remained disinterested in money as a motive – in fact, he recognized the trap of the hedonic treadmill and got out before it was too late

Michael Lewis on Writing, Money, and the Necessary Self-Delusion of Creativity

“When you’re trying to create a career as a writer, a little delusional thinking goes a long way.”

The question of why writers write holds especial mesmerism, both as a piece of psychological voyeurism and as a beacon of self-conscious hope that if we got a glimpse of the innermost drivers of greats, maybe, just maybe, we might be able to replicate the workings of genius in our own work. So why do great writers write? George Orwell itemized four universal motives. Joan Didion saw it as access to her own mind. For David Foster Wallace, it was about fun. Joy Williams found in it a gateway from the darkness to the light. For Charles Bukowski, it sprang from the soul like a rocket. Italo Calvino found in writing the comfort of belonging to a collective enterprise.

In Why We Write: 20 Acclaimed Authors on How and Why They Do What They Do (public library) – which also gave us invaluable wisdom from Susan Orlean, Mary Karr and Isabel Allende, and which was among the 10 best books on writing from my recent collaboration with the New York Public Library – Michael Lewis, one of today’s finest nonfiction masters, shares his singular lore. Read more of this post

The Art of Thought: Graham Wallas on the Four Stages of Creativity, 1926; How to master the beautiful osmosis of conscious and unconscious, voluntary and involuntary, deliberate and serendipitous

The Art of Thought: Graham Wallas on the Four Stages of Creativity, 1926

How to master the beautiful osmosis of conscious and unconscious, voluntary and involuntary, deliberate and serendipitous.

In 1926, thirteen years before James Webb Young’s Technique for Producing Ideas and more than three decades before Arthur Koestler’s seminal “bisociation” theory of how creativity works, English social psychologist and London School of Economics co-founder Graham Wallas, sixty-eight at the time, penned The Art of Thought – an insightful theory outlining the four stages of the creative process, based both on his own empirical observations and on the accounts of famous inventors and polymaths. Though, sadly, the book is long out of print, with surviving copies sold for a fortune and available in a few public libraries, the gist of Wallas’s model has been preserved in a chapter of the 1976 treasure The Creativity Question (public library) – an invaluable selection of meditations on and approaches to creativity by some of history’s greatest minds, compiled by psychiatrist Albert Rothenberg and philosopher Carl R. Hausman, reminiscent of the 1942 gem An Anatomy of Inspiration. Wallas outlines four stages of the creative process – preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification – dancing in a delicate osmosis of conscious and unconscious work. These phases, which literary legend Michael Cowley would come to parallel in his 1958 model of the four stages of writing, go as follows: Read more of this post