Simple, Hard Work + Talent = Creativity - Keith Sawyer

I think Sawyer leaves are crucial component out of this discussion - practice. Nevertheless, a recommended read. I’ve often cited the research of Professor Anders Ericsson, showing that world-class expertise only emerges after you invest 10,000 hours of “deliberate practice.” Ericsson’s research is consistent with a well-known finding of creativity research: “The ten year rule,” the observation that major creative contributions generally don’t happen until a person has been working in an area for at least ten years. (If you do the math, ten years comes out to about 10,000 hours.) Ericsson studied a wide range of expertise–chess players, musicians, and others. In one of his more famous studies, he analyzed how many total hours violin students at a top music conservatory had rehearsed over their lifetimes. The number of hours rehearsed correlated highly with ratings by conservatory faculty.

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Brand New Leadership Programme from the Growth Faculty

In a unique opportunity for Australian businesses, actor George Clooney and entrepreneur Martha Stewart will lead a line-up of six internationally acclaimed business leaders who will present at the inaugural Global Leadership Forum being run by The Growth Faculty at the Sydney Convention Centre on December 12. The powerful one day seminar is an opportunity for businesses and their employees to be inspired by leaders who have revolutionised the way we communicate, invest, shop, use technology, act and live in global business. The full line-up of speakers includes:

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Watch as a young Steve Jobs brainstorms with the NeXT team in 1985....

What is quite extraoridnary about these videos is that Jobs saw the Apple computer as a way of revolutionising higher education. The sad reflection as you will see here is that Apple the company revolutionised the computer, music and telecommunications but failed to move the most important contemporary civilising industry - education!!

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Is There A Hidden Bias Against Creativity? - Association for Psychological Science

CEOs, teachers, and leaders claim they want creative ideas to solve problems. But creative ideas are rejected all the time. A new study, which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that people have a hidden bias against creativity. We claim to like creativity, but when we’re feeling uncertain and anxious—just the way you might feel when you’re trying to come up with a creative solution to a problem—we cannot recognize the creative ideas we so desire.

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The Physicality of our Cognitions - The Situationist

Embodied cognition, the idea that the mind is not only connected to the body but that the body influences the mind, is one of the more counter-intuitive ideas in cognitive science. In sharp contrast is dualism, a theory of mind famously put forth by Rene Descartes in the 17th century when he claimed that “there is a great difference between mind and body, inasmuch as body is by nature always divisible, and the mind is entirely indivisible… the mind or soul of man is entirely different from the body.” In the proceeding centuries, the notion of the disembodied mind flourished. From it, western thought developed two basic ideas: reason is disembodied because the mind is disembodied and reason is transcendent and universal.

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