He had magic in His words and cured even incurable maladies by His words. The book dwells on His grace and glory on His disciples. It also highlights the importance of Guru and how to cultivate self-realization.
He had such a power that nobody came empty hands from His shrine. The same experience is being felt even now and more than one hundred thousand people visit every day to seek His blessings. His ash from Dhuni ever burning fire is a gift to mankind and its mere application absolves them from all sins and illnesses.
The author is visiting His shrine over 40 years and had myriad experiences and His blessings which is also covered in the book. The mere reading of this book will stand any one in good stead in life. A must-read book! Human consciousness is like a machine. When people learn how to master their own minds and bodies as they do machines, they will have the ability to experience profound and sustained joy. To harness the intelligence of their own life force, people should tap into the wisdom of yoga and its time-tested principles.
Yoga is a reliable method people can use to get in touch with their own transcendent and divine natures. He began practicing yoga when he was 12 years old and living in Mysore, India. We read every chapter, identify the key takeaways and analyze them for your convenience. Visit our website at instaread. This quote by Sadhguruperfectly encapsulates our theme for the month of love.
We asked our readers, our contributors to not limit their love to only romantic love but to the love for life, love for self, love for food, travel, and everything around them. Nothing can bring you closer to yourself than spirituality.
How to be spiritual? What is spirituality in the true sense? We decided to learn this from the expert himself. We are extremely delighted to feature yogi, mystic, and author, Sadhguru in the February issue of the Storizen Magazine.
Check out the exclusive coverage on page 8! See Less. The book is filled with opinions of the so called mystic Sadhguru of India who runs his own Isha Foundation. Often we keep conforming to a norm even in situations of complete anonymity, where the probability of being caught transgressing is almost zero. In this case fear of sanctions cannot be a motivating force.
Yet, we have seen that the Parsonian view of internalization and socialization is inadequate, as it leads to predictions about compliance that often run counter to empirical evidence. In particular, James Coleman has argued in favor of reducing internalization to rational choice, insofar as it is in the interest of a group to get another group to internalize certain norms.
In this case internalization would still be the result of some form of socialization. Bicchieri , has presented a third, alternative view about internalization.
This view of internalization is cognitive, and is grounded on the assumption that social norms develop in small, close-knit groups where ongoing interactions are the rule. Upholding a norm that has led one to fare reasonably well in the past is a way of economizing on the effort one would have to exert to devise a strategy when facing a new situation. This does not mean, however, that external sanctions never play a role in compliance: for example, in the initial development of a norm sanctions may indeed play an important role.
Yet, once a norm is established, there are several mechanisms that may account for conformity. Finally, the view that one conforms only because of the threat of negative sanctions does not distinguish norm-abiding behavior from an obsession or an entrenched habit; nor does that view distinguish social norms from hypothetical imperatives enforced by sanctions such as the rule that prohibits naked sunbathing on public beaches.
In these cases avoidance of the sanctions associated with transgressions constitutes a decisive reason to conform, independently of what others do. In fact, in the traditional rational choice perspective, the only expectations that matter are those about the sanctions that follow compliance or non-compliance. In those frameworks, beliefs about how other people will act—as opposed to what they expect us to do—are not a relevant explanatory variable: however, this leads to predictions about norm compliance that often run counter to empirical evidence.
The traditional rational choice model of compliance depicts the individual as facing a decision problem in isolation: if there are sanctions for non-compliance, the individual will calculate the benefit of transgression against the cost of norm compliance, and eventually choose so as to maximize her expected utility. Individuals, however, seldom choose in isolation: they know the outcome of their choice will depend on the actions and beliefs of other individuals.
Game theory provides a formal framework for modeling strategic interactions. Thomas Schelling , David Lewis , Edna Ullmann-Margalit , Robert Sugden and, more recently, Peyton Young , Cristina Bicchieri , and Peter Vanderschraaf have proposed a game-theoretic account according to which a norm is broadly defined as an equilibrium of a strategic interaction.
Characterizing social norms as equilibria has the advantage of emphasizing the role that expectations play in upholding norms. On the other hand, this interpretation of social norms does not prima facie explain why people prefer to conform if they expect others to conform. Take for example conventions such as putting the fork to the left of the plate, adopting a dress code, or using a particular sign language. In all these cases, my choice to follow a certain rule is conditional upon expecting most other people to follow it.
Once my expectation is met, I have every reason to adopt the rule in question. In fact, if I do not use the sign language everybody else uses, I will not be able to communicate.
It is in my immediate interest to follow the convention, since my main goal is to coordinate with other people. This is the reason why David Lewis models conventions as equilibria of coordination games. Such games have multiple equilibria, but once one of them has been established, players will have every incentive to keep playing it as any deviation will be costly. Take instead a norm of cooperation. In this case, the expectation that almost everyone abides by it may not be sufficient to induce compliance.
If everyone is expected to cooperate one may be tempted, if unmonitored, to behave in the opposite way. The point is that conforming to social norms , as opposed to conventions, is almost never in the immediate interest of the individual. In such games the unique Nash equilibrium represents a suboptimal outcome. It should be stressed that—whereas a convention is one among several equilibria of a coordination game—a social norm can never be an equilibrium of a mixed-motive game.
However, Bicchieri has argued that when a norm exists it transforms the original mixed-motive game into a coordination one. Clearly the only Nash equilibrium is to defect D , in which case both players get T,T , a suboptimal outcome. Suppose, however, that society has developed a norm of cooperation; that is, whenever a social dilemma occurs, it is commonly understood that the parties should privilege a cooperative attitude.
Thus there are two equilibria: if both players follow the cooperative norm they will play an optimal equilibrium and get B,B , whereas if they both choose to defect they will get the suboptimal outcome S,S. More specifically, if a player knows that a cooperative norm exists and has the right kind of expectations, then she will have a preference to conform to the norm in a situation in which she can choose to cooperate or to defect.
To understand why, let us look more closely to the preferences and expectations that underlie the conditional choice to conform to a social norm. Note that universal compliance is not usually needed for a norm to exist. However, how much deviance is socially tolerable will depend on the norm in question. Group norms and well-entrenched social norms will typically be followed by almost all members of a group or population, whereas greater deviance is usually accepted when norms are new or they are not deemed to be socially important.
What matters to conformity is that an individual believes that her threshold has been reached or surpassed. For a critical assessment of the above definition of norm-driven preferences, see Hausman Brennan et al. Norms are clusters of normative attitudes in a group, combined with the knowledge that such a cluster of attitudes exists. Condition i is meant to reflect genuine first personal normative commitments, attitudes or beliefs. Condition ii is meant to capture those cases where individuals know that a large part of their group also shares in those attitudes.
Putting conditions i and ii together offers a picture that the authors argue allows for explanatory work to be done on a social-level normative concept while remaining grounded in individual-level attitudes. Consider again the new coordination game of Figure 1 : for players to obey the norm, and thus choose C, it must be the case that each expects the other to follow it. When a norm exists, however, players also believe that others believe they should obey the norm, and may even punish them if they do not.
We prefer to comply with the norm as we have certain expectations. Suppose the player knows a norm of cooperation exists and is generally followed, but she is uncertain as to whether the opponent is a norm-follower. In this case the player is facing the following situation Figure 2. According to Bicchieri, conditional preferences imply that having a reason to be fair, reciprocate or cooperate in a given situation does not entail having any general motive or disposition to be fair, reciprocate or cooperate as such.
Having conditional preferences means that one may follow a norm in the presence of the relevant expectations, but disregard it in its absence. Whether a norm is followed at a given time depends on the actual proportion of followers, on the expectations of conditional followers about such proportion, and on the combination of individual thresholds.
As an example, consider a community that abides by strict norms of honesty. A person who, upon entering the community, systematically violates these norms will certainly be met with hostility, if not utterly excluded from the group.
But suppose that a large group of thieves makes its way into this community. In due time, people would cease to expect honesty on the part of others, and would find no reason to be honest themselves in a world overtaken by crime. Such a reconstruction is meant to capture some essential features of norm-driven behavior; also, this analysis helps us distinguish social norms from other constructs such as conventions or personal norms. A limit of this account, however, is that it does not indicate how such equilibria are attained or, in other terms, how expectations become self-fulfilling.
While neoclassical economics and game theory traditionally conceived of institutions as exogenous constraints, research in political economy has generated new insights into the study of endogenous institutions.
Some alternative accounts have helped reconcile insights about norm-driven behavior with instrumental rationality Elster b. In turn, experimental findings have inspired the formulation of a wide range of models aiming to rationalize the behavior observed in the lab Camerer ; Dhami These frameworks can explain a good wealth of evidence on preferences for equitable income distributions; they cannot however account for conditional preferences like those reflecting principles of reciprocity e.
As noted above, the approach to social norms taken by philosophically-inclined scholars has emphasized the importance of conditional preferences in supporting social norms. These theories presuppose that players are hardwired with a notion of fair or kind behavior, as exogenously defined by the theorist. Since they implicitly assume that all players have internalized a unique—exogenous—normative standpoint as reflected in some notion of fairness or kindness , these theories do not explicitly model normative expectations.
That said, we stress that social preferences should not be conflated with social norms. Social preferences capture stable dispositions toward an exogenously defined principle of conduct Binmore By contrast, social norms are better studied as group-specific solutions to strategic problems Sugden ; Bicchieri ; Young b. Accounting for endogenous expectations is therefore key to a full understanding of social norms.
Relatedly, Guala offers a game-theoretic account of institutions, arguing that institutions are sets of rules in equilibrium. From the first account, he captures the idea that institutions create rules that help to guide our behaviors and reduce uncertainty. With rules in place, we more or less know what to do, even in new situations. From the second, he captures the idea that institutions are solutions to coordination problems that arise from our normal interactions.
The institutions give us reasons to follow them. The function of the rules, then, is to point to actions that promote coordination and cooperation. Because of the equilibrium nature of the rules, each individual has an incentive to choose those actions, provided others do too.
Guala relies on a correlated equilibrium concept to unite the rules and equilibria accounts. On this picture, an institution is simply a correlated equilibrium in a game, where other correlated equilibria would have been possible. In what follows we focus on lab experiments that identify social norms by explicitly measuring both empirical and normative expectations.
Xiao and Bicchieri designed an experiment to investigate the impact on trust games of two potentially applicable—but conflicting—principles of conduct, namely, equality and reciprocity.
Note that the former can be broadly defined as a rule that recommends minimizing payoff differences, whereas the latter recommends taking a similar action as others regardless of payoff considerations. The experimental design involved two trust game variants: in the first one, players started with equal endowments; in the second one, the investor was endowed with twice the money that the trustee was given. In both cases, the investor could choose to transfer a preset amount of money to the trustee or keep it all.
However, in the asymmetry treatment empirical beliefs and normative expectations conflicted: this highlights that, when there is ambiguity as to which principle of conduct is in place, each subject will support the rule of behavior that favors her most. Reuben and Riedl examine the enforcement of norms of contribution to public goods in homogeneous and heterogeneous groups, such as groups whose members vary in their endowment, contribution capacity, or marginal benefits.
By contrast, with punishment, contributions were consistent with the prescriptions of the efficiency rule in a significant subset of groups irrespective of the type of group heterogeneity ; in other groups, contributions were consistent with relative contribution rules. These results suggest that even in heterogeneous groups individuals can successfully enforce a contribution norm. Most notably, survey data involving third parties confirmed well-defined yet conflicting normative views about the aforementioned contribution rules; in other words, both efficiency and relative contribution rules are normatively appealing, and are indeed potential candidates for emerging contribution norms in different groups.
Bicchieri and Chavez designed an experiment to investigate norm compliance in ultimatum games. Further, the experimenters had subjects play three instances of the above ultimatum game under different information conditions. Moreover, the frequency of Coin choices was highest in the public information condition, where such option was common knowledge and its outcome transparent: this shows that there proposers followed the rule of behavior that favored them most, and that such a rule was effectively a social norm.
In a subsequent study, Chavez and Bicchieri measured empirical and normative expectations as well as behavior of third parties who were given the opportunity to add to or deduct from the payoffs of subjects who had participated in an ultimatum game.
Third parties tended to reward subjects involved in equal allocations and to compensate victims of unfair allocations rather than punish unfair behavior ; on the other hand, third parties were willing to punish when compensation was not an available option.
The experimental results further show that third parties shared a notion of fairness as indicated by their normative expectations , and that such notion was sensitive to contextual differences. Krupka and Weber introduced an interesting procedure for identifying social norms by means of pre-play coordination games.
In brief, using alternative between-subjects variants of the dictator game, Krupka and Weber had participants assess the extent to which different actions were collectively perceived as socially appropriate: subjects providing these ratings effectively faced a coordination game, as they were incentivized to match the modal response given by others in the same situation such a pre-play coordination game was intended to verify the presence of shared normative expectations.
In short, Schram and Charness had participants in dictator games receive advice from a group of third parties. Bicchieri and Xiao designed an experiment to investigate what happens when empirical and normative expectations conflict.
To that end, participants in a dictator game were exposed to different pieces of information. Other groups were given both descriptive and normative information. This suggests that if people recognize that others are breaching the norm, then they will no longer feel compelled to follow the relevant rule of behavior themselves. To conclude, the studies surveyed here provide evidence of the role played by expectations in affecting behavior in a variety of social dilemmas.
In this regard, we note that in contrast to the vast literature on empirical beliefs, the number of lab studies that directly measure normative expectations is relatively limited: more research is clearly needed to investigate the interplay of empirical and normative information about applicable rules of behavior.
Thus far we have examined accounts of social norms that take for granted that a particular norm exists in a population. However, for a full account of social norms, we must answer two questions related to the dynamics of norms.
First, we must ask how a norm can emerge. Norms require a set of corresponding beliefs and expectations to support them, and so there must be an account of how these arise. Second, we must investigate the conditions under which a norm is stable under some competitive pressure from other norms. Sometimes, multiple candidate norms vie for dominance in a population. Let us now turn to the question of norm emergence. Here we can see three classes of models: first, a purely biological approach, second, a more cognitive approach, and third, a structured interactions approach.
The most famous of the biological approaches to norms seek to explain cooperative behavior. The simplest models are kin selection models Hamilton These models seek to explain altruistic tendencies in animals by claiming that, as selection acts on genes, those genes have an incentive to promote the reproductive success of other identical sets of genes found in other animals. We think visually. I worked for a long time with the Royal Ballet in Britain and came to see that dance is a powerful way to express ideas and that dancers use multiple forms of intelligence—kin- esthetic, rhythmic, musical, and mathematical—to accomplish this.
Nor would abstract painting, hip-hop, design, architecture, or self-ser- vice checkouts at supermarkets. The diversity of intelligence is one of the funda- mental underpinnings of the Element. An individual who represents this wonderful di- versity is R. Buckminster Fuller, best known for his design of the geodesic dome and his coining of the term Spaceship Earth. Certainly his greatest accom- plishments come in the field of engineering which of course requires the use of mathematical, visual, and interpersonal intelligence , but he was also a clever and unusual writer, a philosopher who challenged the beliefs of a generation, an ardent environmental- ist years before the emergence of a true environ- mental movement, and a challenging and nurturing university professor.
He did all of this by eschewing formal education he was the first in four genera- tions in his family not to graduate from Harvard and setting out to experience the world to use the fullest range of his intelligence.
Fuller seemingly saw no limits on his ability to use every form of intelligence avail- able to him. The second feature of intelligence is that it is tre- mendously dynamic. The human brain is intensely interactive. You use multiple parts of it in every task you perform. It is in fact in the dynamic use of the brain—finding new connections between things—that true breakthroughs occur. Albert Einstein, for instance, took great advantage of the dynamics of intelligence.
However, Einstein was a student of all forms of expression, be- lieving that he could put anything that challenged the mind to use in a variety of ways.
For instance, he interviewed poets to learn more about the role of in- tuition and imagination. And later, as a theorist, his success came not from the brute strength of his mental processing power but from his imagination and creativity. He could construct complex equations, but more im- portant, he knew that math is the language nature uses to describe her wonders.
Growth comes through analogy, through seeing how things connect rather than only seeing how they might be different. Certainly, the epiphany stories in this book indicate that many of the moments when things sud- denly come clear happen from seeing new connec- tions between events, ideas, and circumstances.
The third feature of intelligence is that it is entirely distinctive. There might be seven, ten, or a hun- dred different forms of intelligence, but each of us uses these forms in different ways.
My profile of abil- ities involves a different combination of dominant and dormant intelligences than yours does. The per- son down the street has another profile entirely. This brings us back to the question I asked earlier: How are you intelligent? Knowing that intelligence is diverse, dynamic, and distinctive allows you to ad- dress that question in new ways.
This is one of the core components of the Element. For when you ex- plode your preconceived ideas about intelligence, you can begin to see your own intelligence in new ways.
No person is a single intellectual score on a lin- ear scale. And no two people with the same scores will do the same things, share all of the same pas- sions, or accomplish the same amount with their lives.
Discovering the Element is all about allowing yourself access to all of the ways in which you experi- ence the world, and discovering where your own true strengths lie. She has exhibited in major museums all over the world, and her work is in the permanent collections of the Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art.
In addition, she is an award-winning writer, having received the Caldecott Honor for her first book, Tar Beach. She has also composed and recorded songs. Interestingly, though, she found herself on this path when illness kept her out of school.
She got asthma when she was two, and because of this, had a late start to formal education. Because when you have a lot of people in one space, you have to move them around in a certain way to make it work. I just did not ever get hooked into the regimentation. I missed all of kindergarten and the first grade.
By the second grade, I was going. And I absolutely did not mind missing those classes. Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Billy Eck- stine—all these old singers and bandleaders and all those people who were so wonderful. And so these people were the ones who I thought of as being highly creative. It was so obvious that they were making this art out of their own bodies.
We all lived in the same neighborhood. You just ran into them—here they are, you know? I was deeply in- spired by their art and by their willingness to give of themselves to the public and to their audience. I did not dress like them. I did not look like them.
And in my family, it was not expected that I should be like that. So, it came quite natural to me to do something that was considered a bit odd. My mother was a fash- ion designer. She was an artist herself, although she would never have said she was an artist.
She helped me a lot, but she was very keen on the fact that she did not know whether art would be a good lifetime endeavor. An excellent experience. I dis- tinctly recall my teachers getting excited about some of the things that I had done and me kind of wonder- ing, Why do they think this is so good? In junior high school, the teacher did a project with us in which she wanted us to try to see it without looking.
We were supposed to paint these flowers in that way. Look at this. It was free and it was the same kind of thing that I like when I see chil- dren do art. It is expressive; it is wonderful. This is the kind of magic that children have. Children do not see anything so strange and different about art.
They accept it; they understand it; they love it. They walk into a museum and they are looking all around, they do not feel threatened. Whereas adults do. They think there are some messages there they do not get, that they are supposed to have something to say or do in relation to these works of art.
The children can just accept it because somehow or other they are born that way. And they stay that way until they be- gin to start picking themselves apart. Now, maybe it is because we start picking them apart. I try not to do that, but the world is going to pick them apart and, you know, judge them this way and that—this does not look like a tree, or this does not look like a man.
When children are little, they are not paying atten- tion to that. They are just—they are just unfolding right before your eyes. And I do too. Because they are completely unrepressed where these things are concerned.
Their little voices are like little bells that they are ringing. I went to a school where I did a forty- minute session with each of the grades, starting with the prekindergarten, going all the way up to the sixth grade. I did this art session with them in which they would read from a book and then I would teach them.
By the fifth grade, you are running into trouble. Their little voices are no longer like bells; they are feeling ashamed of themselves, you know, and some of them who can still sing will not.
She loved exploring her creativity from an early age, and she managed to keep that spark alive into adulthood. My dream was to be an artist, one who makes pictures for a lifetime, as a way of life. Every day of your life you can create something wonderful, so every day is going to be the same kind of wonderful day that every other day is—a day in which you dis- cover something new because as you are painting or creating whatever it is you are creating, you are find- ing new ways in doing it.
I usually ask these same people how they rate their creativity. As with intelli- gence, I use a 1 to 10 scale, with 10 at the top. And, as with intelligence, most people rate themselves some- where in the middle. Out of perhaps a thousand people, fewer than twenty give themselves 10 for cre- ativity.
A few more will put their hands up for 9 and 8. On the other end, a handful always puts them- selves at 2 or 1. I think that people are mostly wrong in these assessments, just as they are about their intelligence. Typic- ally, between two-thirds and three-quarters of the audience raise their hands at this point. Why is this? I think it is because most people believe that intelli- gence and creativity are entirely different things—that we can be very intelligent and not very creative or very creative and not very intelligent.
For me, this identifies a fundamental problem. A lot of my work with organizations is about showing that intelligence and creativity are blood relatives. Similarly, the highest form of intel- ligence is thinking creatively. In seeking the Ele- ment, it is essential to understand the real nature of creativity and to have a clear understanding of how it relates to intelligence.
In my experience, most people have a narrow view of intelligence, tending to think of it mainly in terms of academic ability. There are myths surrounding cre- ativity as well. This is not true. Everyone is born with tremendous capacities for creativity. The trick is to develop these capacities.
Creativity is very much like literacy. We take it for granted that nearly everybody can learn to read and write. The same is true of creativity. Another myth is that creativity is about special activities. These often do involve a high level of creativity. But so can science, math, engin- eering, running a business, being an athlete, or get- ting in or out of a relationship.
The fact is you can be creative at anything at all—anything that involves your intelligence. This is one of the surest paths to finding the Element, and it involves stepping back to examine a fundamental feature of all human intelli- gence—our unique powers of imagination.
We do the same with our imaginations. In fact, while we largely take our senses for granted, we tend to take our imaginations for granted com- pletely.
Imagination underpins every uniquely human achievement. Imagination led us from caves to cities, from bone clubs to golf clubs, from carrion to cuisine, and from superstition to science. And this relation- ship serves a very significant role in the search for the Element. We know too that we can routinely step outside of our immediate sensory environment and conjure mental images of other places and other times.
If I ask you to think of your best friends at school, your favorite food, or your most annoying acquaintance, you can do that without having any of those things directly in front of you.
This is unfortunate because imagina- tion is vitally important to our lives. Through ima- gination, we can visit the past, contemplate the present, and anticipate the future. We can also do something else of profound and unique significance.
We can create. Through imagination, we not only bring to mind things that we have experienced but things that we have never experienced. We can conjecture, we can hypothesize, we can speculate, and we can suppose. In a word, we can be imaginative.
As soon as we have the power to release our minds from the imme- diate here and now, in a sense we are free. We are free to revisit the past, free to reframe the present, and free to anticipate a whole range of possible fu- tures. Imagination is the foundation of everything that is uniquely and distinctively human. It is the basis of language, the arts, the sciences, systems of philosophy, and the all the vast intricacies of human culture.
I can illustrate this power with an example of cosmic proportions. This is another good question. The British philosopher Bertrand Russell presented this question simply and brilliantly. Or is he what he appears to Hamlet? Is he perhaps both at once? Most of us now get the point that the universe is gigantic. We also get the point that Earth is relatively small. But how small? I was delighted to come across a great set of im- ages that helped me get a sense of the relative size of the Earth.
Someone had the bright idea of taking dis- tance out of the equation altogether by plucking the Earth and some other planets out of the cosmos and laying them side by side on the floor like a team pho- tograph. Pluto, by the way, is no longer a planet and we can see why in this picture. What we were we thinking of in the first place? Suddenly, the scenario seems a bit less encouraging. Pluto at this point has become a cosmic embarrassment.
For instance, we know that Earth is small when compared with the Sun. But as big as it is, the Sun is far from the cosmic giant it seems here. If we pull back a little more, the picture changes dramatically, even for sun worshippers. Keep your eye on Arcturus as we pull back just once more to take in Betelgeuse and Antares. Antares, by the way, is the fifteenth-brightest star in the sky. It is more than a thousand light-years away.
Astronomers would say it is only a thousand light-years away. Com- pare it with this final image, which is from the Hubble telescope. Scientists estimate the Magellanic Cloud to be about , light-years across.
And yet. We can take away some encouraging things from this. One is a bit of perspective. I mean, really, whatever you woke up worrying about this morning, get over it. How important in the greater scheme of things can it possibly be? Make your peace and move on. The second is this. We certainly do seem to be clinging to the face of an extraordinarily small and unimportant planet. We may well be small and insignificant. However, uniquely among all known species on Earth—or anywhere else, to our knowledge—we are able to do something remarkable.
We can conceive of our insignificance. Using the power of imagination, someone made the images I just showed you. But certainly none comes close to showing the complex abilities that flow from the human imagination.
What accounts for these yawning differences in how humans and other species on our small planet think and behave? My general answer is imagina- tion. The dynamics of human intelligence account for the phenomenal cre- ativity of the human mind. And our capacity for cre- ativity allows us to rethink our lives and our circum- stances—and to find our way to the Element.
The Power of Creativity Imagination is not the same as creativity. Creativity takes the process of imagination to another level. You could be imaginative all day long without anyone noticing. But you would never say that someone was creative if that person never did anything. To be creative you actually have to do something. It involves putting your imagination to work to make something new, to come up with new solutions to problems, even to think of new problems or questions.
You can think of creativity as applied imagination. You can be creative at anything at all—anything that involves using your intelligence. It is because human intelligence is so wonderfully diverse that people are creative in so many extraordinary ways.
Let me give you two very different examples. In , former Beatle George Harrison had a solo album coming out. As Harrison came up with the bones of the song he wanted to record, he realized that Lynne was already working with Orbison. Not only was the song much too good to serve as a lowly B-side, but the collaboration gener- ated a sound at once easygoing and brilliant that begged for a grander platform. Harrison found the idea intriguing and took it back to his friends.
Some logistical items needed addressing. Dylan was going out on a long tour in two weeks, and get- ting everyone in one place after that was going to be a problem. Instead, they relied on something much more innate—the creative spark generated by five distinct- ive musical voices joining together. They all collaborated on songs. Each donated vocal harmonies, guitar lines, and arrangements.
The result was a re- cording that was both casual—the songs seem inven- ted on the spot—and unmistakably classic. In fitting with the relaxed nature of the project, the five de- cided to downplay their stardom and to call their makeshift band the Traveling Wilburys. In the early s, an unknown student at Cornell University threw a plate into the air in the university restaurant. The student may have caught the plate with a smile, or it may have shattered on the floor.
Either way, this would not have been an extraordinary event but for the fact that someone extraordinary happened to be watch- ing it. He was famous for his groundbreaking work in several fields including quantum electrodynamics and nanotechnology.
He was also one of the most colorful and admired scientists of his generation, a juggler, a painter, a prankster, and an exuberant jazz musician with a particular passion for playing the bongos. In , he won the Nobel Prize in Physics. He says this was partly because of the flying plate. I was just playing, no importance at all, but I played around with the equations of motion of rotat- ing things, and I found out that if the wobble is small the blue thing goes around twice as fast as the wobble goes round.
I kept continuing now to play with it in the relaxed fashion I had originally done and it was just like taking the cork out of a bottle—everything just poured out, and in very short order I worked the things out for which I later won the Nobel Prize.
As it happens, quite a lot. Creative Dynamics Creativity is the strongest example of the dynamic nature of intelligence, and it can call on all areas of our minds and being. Let me begin with a rough distinction. This is true in two different ways. These techniques can help in generating new ideas, in sorting out the useful ones from the less useful ones, and in removing blocks to new thinking, especially in groups. What I want to discuss in this chapter is personal creativity, which in some ways is very different.
Faith Ringgold, the Traveling Wilburys, Richard Feynman, and many of the other people in this book are all highly creative people in their own unique ways.
They work in different domains, and individu- al passions and aptitudes drive them. They have found the work they love to do, and discovered a spe- cial talent for doing it. They are in their Element, and this drives their personal creativity. Having some un- derstanding of how creativity works in general can be instructive here.
Creativity is a step beyond imagination because it requires that you actually do something rather than lie around thinking about it. Regardless, some com- mon features pertain. The first is that it is a process. New ideas do some- times come to people fully formed and without the need for much further work. This is a journey that can have many different phases and unexpected turns; it can draw on different sorts of skills and knowledge and end up somewhere entirely unpredicted at the outset.
Creativity involves several different processes that wind through each other. The first is generating new ideas, imagining different possibilities, considering alternative options. This might involve playing with some notes on an instrument, making some quick sketches, jotting down some thoughts, or moving ob- jects or yourself around in a space.
The creative pro- cess also involves developing these ideas by judging which work best or feel right. Instead, they interact with each other. For example, a creative effort might involve a great deal of idea generation while holding back on the evalu- ation at the start.
But overall, creative work is a del- icate balance between generating ideas and sifting and refining them. The medium can be anything at all. The Wil- burys used voices and guitars. Richard Feynman used mathematics. Creative work also often involves tapping into various talents at your disposal to make something original.
His films have a look distinct from other film direct- ors. The source of this look is his training as an artist. My first film, The Duellists, was criticized for being too beautiful. I think what he was taken by was how I look at the French landscape. Probably the best photographers of the Napoleonic period would be painters. So I looked at the Russian painters of Napoleon going to the front on that disastrous journey to Russia.
A lot of great nineteenth-century views on that are frankly just photographic. I would take everything from those and apply that to the film. Musicians love the sounds they make, natural writers love words, dancers love movement, math- ematicians love numbers, entrepreneurs love making deals, great teachers love teaching. They do it because they want to and because when they do, they are in their Element. In all creative work, there may be frustrations, problems, and dead ends along the way.
I know some wonderfully creative people who find parts of the process difficult and deeply exasperat- ing. For some of them, it was love at first sight. Different media help us to think in different ways. He decided to create some paintings about them, and he worked on them nearly full-time for several weeks. They are both powerful images with an al- most primal energy. One of them is primarily black, with the words scrawled and scratched into the paint on half of the canvas like graffiti.
The other one is largely white, with the words written in a childlike way in dripping black paint across the background. At first glance, the paintings seem rushed and chaotic. But a careful examination of the canvases reveals layers upon layers of other images beneath, carefully built up and partly painted over. This gives the paintings real depth. He also laced each with in- tricate textures of colors and brushstrokes that be- come more vibrant as you look at them.
All of the complexity in the paintings generates their sense of simplicity and urgent energy. Nick is a designer and a visual artist. He has a natural aptitude and passion for visual work—sensitivity to line, color, shapes, and textures and to how they can be formed into new, creative ideas.
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