I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened. Mark Twain

Creativity runs into resistance all the time. Stephen Pressfield may call it the brain’s greatest obstacle. Or that might be me saying that. Here are a few finds from this week about which  I only have time and energy to shoot out a blurb .

Writer’s Mind

Creativity Myths for Writers. Writer’s Mind is a new blog at PsychCentral that is quickly becoming a favorite of mine. Creativity Myths for Writers. The myths?

1.  MYTH:  You must adhere to a writing schedule.

2. MYTH:  Write only what you know.

3.  MYTH:  Don’t read other authors’ books when you’re writing.

4.  MYTH:  Give the market what it wants.

You have to go there for the details.

Business Strategy Motivation has a post on the need for innovative companies. It also defines methods and madness.

Innovation, by definition, requires and encourages creative thinking. It rewards the behaviors that most corporate cultures inadvertently crush or drive underground. Sanctioned brainstorming sessions, tools to capture and refine ideas and forums for open dialog create those ‘stretch goal’ opportunities for creativity and thinking outside of the box. Even people that say that they aren’t creative can be encouraged to participate and develop those mental muscles over time. That creativity flows back into their daily jobs and encourages them to question and improve the way that they work (even if it’s only at a relatively subconscious level)

Brain Leaders and Learners

This post about Inspiring Change in Those Who Would Rather Run in the Ruts

In spite of broken systems that resist progress, innovation, design and the human brain hold enormous power for profitability.

What is the potential for creativity and original thinking for our brains? While it’s a myth that we only use 10% of our brain, I wonder even with all that IS accomplished, how much potential is lost, ignored, or left behind.

Lateral Action

Creative Block # 2 from Lateral Action – The Fear of Getting it Wron

Next time you sit down to compose, write the ‘wrong’ version, full of mistakes, the kind of conversation only an idiot or a rank beginner would produce. Then produce another ‘wrong’ version, this time featuring a completely different set of mistakes. And so on, until you’ve got at least five completely unusable manuscripts. (Don’t worry, no one need ever see them.)

Give it a few days, then go back to the wrong versions. Ask yourself whether there’s anything at all, even the slightest detail, that you quite like and could use. Even if it’s still clearly wrong for this specific piece, you might find the germ of another composition in the midst of all that dross.

I’ve been writing lately about the value of failure. Risk, as I see it, will always meet you on the way to greatness. What I have discovered working with people is that they don’t balk at the fear of failure.

What scares many is the fear that they might fail – and they won’t be able to handle it.

IdeaSchema

Or, maybe the devil made us do it, give it up, refuse to try -

And in the end, it seems that — religious or otherwise — it’s not hard to see how a tiny but powerful process like the lizard brain might be easily anthropomorphized into the Devil. It seems very straightforward that, having identified such a process, we might want to say “The Devil made me do it!” and beg off all responsibility, because that thing, that Resistance, seems so much like ourselves and so must be a thinking, planning, near-human creature.

The scary part, Megan goes on to say, is that what we are afraid of, what we resist, turns out to be us.

See Mark Twain at the top of the page. Most of the crap that makes us shake in our boots fail to materialize. So, possibility of failure or not, risk, soberly calculated risk is the route forward.

People that take risks fail. The also succeed. Those that do fail, and risk in full knowledge of that possibility, handle it just fine.

What brain and creativity stories have you come across this week?

photo credit: Vilseskogen