I will turn 45 this year. One of my principles for healthy aging is to make sure I'm learning something new and challenging every year or two.
I live in a fishing town in southeast Alaska, and I bought my first boat about three years ago. I bought a 16-foot boat with an open cabin, and it was an absolutely humbling experience. It feels like everyone here knows how to drive a boat, and sputtering through a harbor trying not to take out a row of motors was a really interesting learning experience. It forced me to be open to any and all feedback from all kinds of people. It forced me to seek out advice and assistance from people outside of my everyday circle of friends and co-workers. It made me pay attention to tides and weather in ways I hadn't needed to before. In short, it made me feel like I was looking at the world with new eyes again.
That experience made me look for experiences every few years that are new enough that I have to see the world as a kid does again. Not in the wide-eyed wonder way, but in a way where I have to learn a whole new skill set. This year it's been learning how to drive a truck with a boat trailer. I thought I knew it intellectually, and I knew what I needed to make the trailer do, but I couldn't figure out how to make the back of the truck go where I needed it to. My neighbor was cracking up as he was helping me, and I think it was bringing him back into the mindset of looking at this kind of task from a beginner's perspective as well.
I have a 6 year old son, and I love sharing these learning experiences with him. I want him to know that adults don't know everything, and that you really can spend your whole life learning new skills.
Awesome. I'm 44 and work in technology. Just started tinkering with hydroponics with my kids (kale and catnip lol). It's completely disorienting, I'm beyond clueless and I love it.
One thing I didn't foresee is that my kids never really get to see me learn something from the ground floor. We're basically peers in this and they can see (for better or worse) how I attack the unknown. It's been fun, our plants are so dead.
Oh, man, boats will humble anyone. I managed to go overboard from mine the first day I had it... had to get fished out by some nearby fisherman, who thought it was hilarious.
This is off-topic but I'm learning python and just ordered your book earlier this morning (after reading through glowing reviews on amazon). I remember reading your bio and thought that it was pretty interesting that the author was a school teacher in Alaska!
Very serendipitous reading a comment from you here just now!
What are some other new/similar skills you've dabbled in over the years (if you don't mind me asking)?
That's awesome! I grew up with boats, and have been around them my whole life (boaters ed was taught along with drivers ed in HS in my town). Keep practicing with the trailer, you'll get it. Just take your time :)
One thing with smaller boats and their trailers is that they can be harder to back up. Larger boat trailers have longer tongues so you can back up with more angle before the trailer starts to lift up. For example, on my current boat I can back the trailer up to a near 90 degrees to the truck.
Yeah, there seems to be a serious translation problem converting ideas into mechanical action but it's damn satisfying when you finally nail it. I guess the process in itself requires a kind of creativity because how else could we learn something new. So it makes sense it would strengthen the ability as well.
I'm ancient (late fifties), but even so, I'm struck by the somewhat creakingly defensive tone of several comments in this thread - stolid narratives on the virtues of middle age experience and perspective. Fourty years younger me would be shaking my head. Present day me still is, a little bit.
I try to keep up. I am not necessarily very good at it, but I try. I have sort of given up on quite a few of my contemporary friends who seem to have sort of given up on trying. But all too clearly, ideas and crazy angles just aren't coming the way they used to. I was probably at my creative peak when I was sixteen. Didn't really know shit about anything, but my writings and drawings from that time are still holding up, as fresh and inspired as anything I ever did.
Replying to you is quite arbitrary. But, at some point, I have to at least raise my point.
I'm a cardiologist. I see patients every day. Anyone below 70, to me, is young. It's important to me that they feel the same way: it's easy to get old if you feel old. There's nothing factual or evidence based here. It's just my view.
I understand that the running joke in the Valley is that you're old if you're out of your 20s. But, in my reality, 50s is extremely young.
Get off your horse. You're a kid in your late fifties. Ancient my foot. It's this kind of thinking that allows the little children in their 20's and 30's to think that they know it all.
I'm in my late fifties and will not stop learning and thinking about new things (which are often old things in a different guise), new applications for old technology and how to think about the physical underpinnings of the universe. I teach the young (in their teens, tweens and thirties) to think outside of the box when looking at the universe.
I was taught to think this way in my late twenties by a young lady in her late seventies about always staying young. One's body may get aged but one's mind and spirit shouldn't. One should gain wisdom and yet stay in youthful wonder all of one's days.
I am 51. The last few years I studied Pali Suttas, Stoic writings and Christian Church Fathers. That leads all the way up to Frege, Wittgenstein and NAND Gates. The overlaps were astounding. It filled in just tons of historical explanatory blanks in my view of the world.
> I'm ancient (late fifties), but even so, I'm struck by the somewhat creakingly defensive tone of several comments in this thread
Nobody likes the idea that they are growing older and slowly breaking down mentally/physically. So we lie to ourselves ( 50 is the new 20 and 60 is the new 30 ) and naturally get defensive when people hold up a mirror to us.
> But all too clearly, ideas and crazy angles just aren't coming the way they used to.
Not only that, as we age, we get more conservative and risk averse. Especially as we hit retirement age and you have to live on fixed income.
And as you grow older, you become more cynical with life because you see how the world really is. All the naive idealism and optimism and vigor of youth just fades away.
You can notice this on social media. As the demographics gets older, the creativity and "edginess" and coolness fades and things get more plain, dull and boring. People clamor for more censorship and more moderation and the more mundane. And all the new/hip/creative things are happening on younger platforms with younger people.
I'm not satisfied to define creativity as simply having "unusual ideas" as the article says in the opening paragraphs. The study focuses on cognitive flexibility, what I understand to be out-of-the-box thinking.
Other research that composes creativity as a mixture of empathy, pattern-matching, and seeing the big picture suggests that creative ability can be refined with age.
Yeah, I also think "outside the box thinking" as defined by the article is particularly bogus. Their opening example of a 4 year old suggesting the grandfather stop eating all vegetables because eating vegetables defines an adult is cute, but I wouldn't say it leads anywhere productive or meaningful. In fact that kind of outside the box thinking is likely to kill the grandfather sooner.
I suppose this doesn't matter so much if we're talking about purely artistic creativity, which is typically thinking outside the box solely for the sake of thinking outside the box. Sure, maybe that decreases with age, but I'd say objective-based creativity, where the goal is to solve a specific problem, should actually increase with age and accrued knowledge if a person can remain open to new solutions.
Thinking outside the box is easy. Most adults simply don't do it because they're focused on productivity and goals. A kid might think that a great way to feed a family is to build their house out of pizza, so they can just eat the walls and never go hungry. Good luck with that...
This. In fact, I think creativity is something that needs cultivating. Artists can have their "best" phase about anywhere in life. I don't think there is any bias towards artists having their "best years" when they're young. While art is certainly the most cultivated form of creativity - at least to me.
Yes. Subjectively speaking it is finding the correct idea, not an unusual one. It's akin to remembering something. You either remember somebody's name or you don't; you don't make up a new one.
I like a definition of creativity described in https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/02/18/a-dent-in-the-universe... , where it's contrasted with imagination. Briefly, creativity is domain specific, like in music or software, while imagination is a domain-independent survival skill for higher rungs on Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
I agree, but I would call that loose thinking, not out-of-the-box thinking. If you don't know where the the box walls are, it's a crap shoot finding the other side.
I too am in my 40s and I think that my creativity is still active. The main difference is now I have the experience to know when an idea is worth acting on and when it is just an "wow, wouldn't that be great."
Even if something would be great, that does not mean that an idea that you have is one that ignites your passion. If you are not passionate about an idea it is not an idea that you should pursue, at least not as a founder, inventor, etc.
I think creativity is simply the way you think. For me, when I see something that I like I always ask myself several questions such as :
1. I wonder why ......
2. What would be the outcome of ....
3. What if.....
4. Wouldn't it be/function/look/inspire if
5. How can I make this.....
These are not the only questions I ask, but if the answers keep me excited about something, I continue asking myself questions to see if the resulting answers create something worthy of further pursuit. If so, then I approach a couple of trusted people and ask them 'what if this did this or if you had this available to you' would you use it? Would you use it often? Would you tell others about it? What would make it better' etc. If you are lucky an idea or two or five are worth putting all of your energy behind. I have felt that way about a couple of ideas in my life but they did not always come at times that my life allowed me to pursue the idea with all my time and attention, until now. I liken it to finding your significant other, they have to challenge you, ignite your passion and the timing has to be right.
But overall, I believe that Creativity is not about age as much as it is developing your own way of seeing things and then arriving at something new. Not everybody questions most things they see, hear, touch, etc but for those of us that do, well age is just a number.
Before we get into the nitty gritty, did anyone else notice how dumb this article was?
It presupposed some things without evidence: "we lose creativity"
and then creates a convoluted study to support this notion. then creates a second convoluted study that undermines the presented presupposition and didn't discuss that at all.
just right back to the conclusion that writer already had.
The thing that I've found as an artist is that, as one's skill grows, the management of that corresponding complexity can overtake one's creative capacity. At higher levels, the methods and structure required for competent execution are a cognitive load that crowds out other impulses. I think this is why you see a lot of older artists create works that are proficient, but repetitive, the habitual overtaking the innovative.
But I don't think this is an unavoidable trajectory. Instead, one has to cultivate "creative thinking" in the same way that they do other skills. The thing that I've found most useful are arbitrary constraints derived from things like word association games. They encourage all kinds of divergent thinking.
I've wondered a lot about the relationship between creative output and age in terms of musicians. Across all genres, it seems that many talented musicians lose their ability to compose or take part in creative works as they get older. Sting talked about this (1); at some point in his mid-40s after writing and releasing new albums every few years the creative well seemed to dry up (he got it back later, and recently helped write and score a play). Other musicians shift to performance mode or give up creating new works altogether.
However, with many well-known authors it seems to be more mixed. At one end of the spectrum you have people like Walter M. Miller Jr. and Harper Lee who write a great work and then seem to stop publishing by the time they reach their early 40s, and then at the other, there are people like Ursula K. LeGuin and Stephen King who are machines for more than 50 years.
I think there are actually very few masters in any age- most of the people whose works we celebrate and enjoy just aren't that brilliant. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with enjoying whatever we enjoy, or that it's trivial or worthwhile to try to spot the timeless master among the many skilled and successful artists. Just that I think you need a different lens.
And yet, classical composers (Bach!) have often produced their best work in their later years.
I think the key is always having somewhere to (creatively) dig. For example, artists who vary genres and instruments seem to do better than those who pick a style and then stick with it for decades. Always head towards unexplored ground; always be reinventing yourself.
>I've wondered a lot about the relationship between creative output and age in terms of musicians. Across all genres, it seems that many talented musicians lose their ability to compose or take part in creative works as they get older
There are too many counter-examples in classical, blues and whatever for this to be true.
Sting was never in it for the pure love of music in the way someone like Miles Davis, or BB King, or Tom Waits and Elvis Costello for that matter, he got distracted by the jet set lifestyle (Bob Gedolf is an ever worse example of that).
We need artists who started older, to compare. Alternative hypothesis- many artists come to prominence with one great contribution, but they can't do it repeatedly. Not because they are getting older but because they had one grand idea and failed to deliver another.
See, one-hit wonders if all ages. See, The Beatles and Eric Clapton, both famous for continuous reinvention.
Sharp observation. See my comment above. This general takeaway makes fine sense when you calculate the scope of the lifestyle differences.
Here's my loose take:
Music is a unique beast; especially these days. It remains the most scientifically fleeting artforms. The reasons why are sensory/media based for the most part, and usually entail a long-winded conversation because of the sheer abstraction of where the power lies in the medium. The conversations a musician has with it's audience actually seems to correlate more with what we consider childishness. In short, it's highly intuitive. Having this type of conversation briefly with rooms full of fans does not quite exercise the 'theory' end. Older musicians whose flame is still burning will usually have a deep and nuanced relationship with their art and practice that only those close to them can begin to understand. Maintaining that is rare.
And then there's "Weird Al" Yankovic, who started out able to hold his own with many of the pop stars he parodied and put out more consistently brilliant work as he got older.
Just dropping by to say I really appreciate the HN community. I have learned a ton through this concentration of (mostly) smart, well-rounded and diverse bunch of people. Thank you. <3
In my twenties I had a very large drive, but of shallow conceptual level. Since my brain slowed a lot, but I can grasp much larger problems and still progress.
It's a smoother exploration process rather than youth random rush through unknown space.
It seems to me that we would naturally become less "creative" as we age because we are emmasing knowledge and experience. As we do so we have a much larger bank of solutions to new problems we face. When we are young we have to come up with creative solutions because we can't draw on past experience and accumulated knowledge.
This is probably why we seem more creative when we try something new and novel. We now again have to come up with creative solutions because we have no other reference to go by.
What the article doesn't touch is how to stay creative.
One of computer scientific ways is to be epsilon-greedy, meaning everytime you have an action to take, you do (1-epsilon) (so 90% if epsilon = .1) times what you think is best and epsilon times something completely random.
Of course, that is a heuristic that doesn't really make sense without a context because you wouldn't want to do it in your job interview or your marriage proposal.
The other extreme is following the following quote which I find quite inspiring:
If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough (attributed to Alan Key but who knows)
While that's quite a high bar I personally do something quite different:
When I see something strange happening, e.g. a bird landing right in front of you and looking at you, or you have a deja-vu or you see somewhere some strange reference that looks like a message that only you can understand because it's something that happened in your past, then I'm going to take the other choice.
It happens a few times in a year and mostly biases explorative actions towards when I have a congnitive surplus anyway cause otherwise I wouldn't perceive the strange event in the first place.
I've always found it interesting that "creative activity" as relates to age is apparently quite different depending on the discipline. It's well-known that mathematicians (usually) get their most life-altering ideas quite early in life, while artists often create their most unique impacts much later in life.
Fantasy author Brandon Sanderson (Mistborn, Wheel of Time, Stormlight Archive) teaches a writing class where one of his lectures focuses on the notion that writing is more about skill/craftsmanship rather than ideas/inspiration:
I want to disabuse you of a few notions. Writing is not about inspiration. Writing is not about ideas. Writing, or more specifically, getting published, is not about luck. What is writing about, then? Writing is about skill. And today I want to try and prove this to you.
When someone sits down to play piano for you, how quickly can you tell if they're a good pianist or not? Basically everybody in this room can judge a pianist's level of skill within a minute or two of play. Not exactly, but you can know if this is someone who's good at piano, or if this is someone who's still an amateur at the piano. You can probably tell if this is a master versus someone who's just pretty good.
Editors, published writers, people who know what they're doing, can do the same thing with one page of your writing in the exact same way. That is why it's not about inspiration, ideas or luck, because in one page I can judge how good a writer you are. People wonder why can editors reject manuscripts or, in this new age, where we're sometimes bypassing editors, how come the readers just put something down after one page when they haven't given it a real shot.
You guys can judge this too. You've read enough, you know enough, you can judge if something is going to work for you pretty quickly. Perhaps not as quickly as most editors can, but you'll know. You'll read a chapter and you'll know if that person is a master, if they're in that medium grade where they've got some good things going on (it's still readable, but they're obviously not a master), or if this is someone's first novel they wrote when they were 12. You can tell all these things. So how do you develop this skill? Practice.
He goes on to note that ideas/inspiration are important, but not the most central part of what makes writing effective.
Many "creative" disciplines like writing, sculpting, and film are more about practiced and skilled craftsmanship than inspiration and ideas, whereas in some other fields, like maths and scientific discovery, breakthroughs really are about inspiration and ideas.
I've always sort of thought about it as you get older and learn more about things you're interested in you lose the ability to misunderstand something and possibly come across something novel. Creativity becomes less of a coping mechanism as you begin to refine your mastery of your interests and have fewer chances of a misinterpretation taking you down a road of creative explosion.
Which is why I find it important to try and learn new things and find new interests when you can. But even then, "creativity" so often results in a dead end since the chance of discovering something new, effective and possibly better is slim in the first place. But hopefully experience helps in sussing out obvious bad ideas - like not eating vegetables to grow young again.
I'd say this idea itself is already quite controversial and far from settled. Old people are not necessarily worse off in their abilities to think or their "creativity" or whatnot. Children might come up with a load of ideas because their knowledge has not been trained/structured in the same way as the adults have yet. But that doesn't mean their ideas would be particularly useful in solving real problems, since they tend to be far less reality-based.
Also there are psycholinguistic researches at my university that suggest old people don't actually learn more slowly, they have just pruned some nonsensical connections and consolidated knowledge based on real world experience, and are thus worse at learning invented examples that might not make much sense.
If you are concerned about your creativity, I highly recommend looking into improvisation.
Although I am on the young side, I have devoted an evening a week to take improv classes. One of my previous professors did his Phd on how improvisational techniques can help with product design [1].
The first example of the article is completely flawed though. It's not a matter of creativity, it's that the adult knows that aren't vegetables making you an adult, so he might be thinking a better, more efficient approach (doing something that forces you to learn). Sure there are creative things kids can do, but the first one is an example of ignorance, not creativity.
What you gain in knowing "'not eating vegetables' is a fucking stupid idea" you lose in the youthful ability to easily digest any crap you like to eat, and still be healthy and fit eating it.
[+] [-] japhyr|8 years ago|reply
I live in a fishing town in southeast Alaska, and I bought my first boat about three years ago. I bought a 16-foot boat with an open cabin, and it was an absolutely humbling experience. It feels like everyone here knows how to drive a boat, and sputtering through a harbor trying not to take out a row of motors was a really interesting learning experience. It forced me to be open to any and all feedback from all kinds of people. It forced me to seek out advice and assistance from people outside of my everyday circle of friends and co-workers. It made me pay attention to tides and weather in ways I hadn't needed to before. In short, it made me feel like I was looking at the world with new eyes again.
That experience made me look for experiences every few years that are new enough that I have to see the world as a kid does again. Not in the wide-eyed wonder way, but in a way where I have to learn a whole new skill set. This year it's been learning how to drive a truck with a boat trailer. I thought I knew it intellectually, and I knew what I needed to make the trailer do, but I couldn't figure out how to make the back of the truck go where I needed it to. My neighbor was cracking up as he was helping me, and I think it was bringing him back into the mindset of looking at this kind of task from a beginner's perspective as well.
I have a 6 year old son, and I love sharing these learning experiences with him. I want him to know that adults don't know everything, and that you really can spend your whole life learning new skills.
[+] [-] jcims|8 years ago|reply
One thing I didn't foresee is that my kids never really get to see me learn something from the ground floor. We're basically peers in this and they can see (for better or worse) how I attack the unknown. It's been fun, our plants are so dead.
[+] [-] rothbardrand|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sgpl|8 years ago|reply
Very serendipitous reading a comment from you here just now!
What are some other new/similar skills you've dabbled in over the years (if you don't mind me asking)?
[+] [-] matwood|8 years ago|reply
One thing with smaller boats and their trailers is that they can be harder to back up. Larger boat trailers have longer tongues so you can back up with more angle before the trailer starts to lift up. For example, on my current boat I can back the trailer up to a near 90 degrees to the truck.
[+] [-] sliverstorm|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] WhoBeI|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IAmGraydon|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] interfixus|8 years ago|reply
I try to keep up. I am not necessarily very good at it, but I try. I have sort of given up on quite a few of my contemporary friends who seem to have sort of given up on trying. But all too clearly, ideas and crazy angles just aren't coming the way they used to. I was probably at my creative peak when I was sixteen. Didn't really know shit about anything, but my writings and drawings from that time are still holding up, as fresh and inspired as anything I ever did.
[+] [-] carbocation|8 years ago|reply
I'm a cardiologist. I see patients every day. Anyone below 70, to me, is young. It's important to me that they feel the same way: it's easy to get old if you feel old. There's nothing factual or evidence based here. It's just my view.
I understand that the running joke in the Valley is that you're old if you're out of your 20s. But, in my reality, 50s is extremely young.
[+] [-] oldandtired|8 years ago|reply
I'm in my late fifties and will not stop learning and thinking about new things (which are often old things in a different guise), new applications for old technology and how to think about the physical underpinnings of the universe. I teach the young (in their teens, tweens and thirties) to think outside of the box when looking at the universe.
I was taught to think this way in my late twenties by a young lady in her late seventies about always staying young. One's body may get aged but one's mind and spirit shouldn't. One should gain wisdom and yet stay in youthful wonder all of one's days.
[+] [-] Chiba-City|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eighthnate|8 years ago|reply
Nobody likes the idea that they are growing older and slowly breaking down mentally/physically. So we lie to ourselves ( 50 is the new 20 and 60 is the new 30 ) and naturally get defensive when people hold up a mirror to us.
> But all too clearly, ideas and crazy angles just aren't coming the way they used to.
Not only that, as we age, we get more conservative and risk averse. Especially as we hit retirement age and you have to live on fixed income.
And as you grow older, you become more cynical with life because you see how the world really is. All the naive idealism and optimism and vigor of youth just fades away.
You can notice this on social media. As the demographics gets older, the creativity and "edginess" and coolness fades and things get more plain, dull and boring. People clamor for more censorship and more moderation and the more mundane. And all the new/hip/creative things are happening on younger platforms with younger people.
[+] [-] mzzter|8 years ago|reply
Other research that composes creativity as a mixture of empathy, pattern-matching, and seeing the big picture suggests that creative ability can be refined with age.
[+] [-] scottLobster|8 years ago|reply
I suppose this doesn't matter so much if we're talking about purely artistic creativity, which is typically thinking outside the box solely for the sake of thinking outside the box. Sure, maybe that decreases with age, but I'd say objective-based creativity, where the goal is to solve a specific problem, should actually increase with age and accrued knowledge if a person can remain open to new solutions.
Thinking outside the box is easy. Most adults simply don't do it because they're focused on productivity and goals. A kid might think that a great way to feed a family is to build their house out of pizza, so they can just eat the walls and never go hungry. Good luck with that...
[+] [-] fnl|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kristopolous|8 years ago|reply
I try to posit "what would 16 year old me do here?" to open myself to new ideas and not constrain myself by patterns of the past.
[+] [-] roceasta|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abecode|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gt_|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] Powerofmene|8 years ago|reply
Even if something would be great, that does not mean that an idea that you have is one that ignites your passion. If you are not passionate about an idea it is not an idea that you should pursue, at least not as a founder, inventor, etc.
I think creativity is simply the way you think. For me, when I see something that I like I always ask myself several questions such as :
1. I wonder why ...... 2. What would be the outcome of .... 3. What if..... 4. Wouldn't it be/function/look/inspire if 5. How can I make this.....
These are not the only questions I ask, but if the answers keep me excited about something, I continue asking myself questions to see if the resulting answers create something worthy of further pursuit. If so, then I approach a couple of trusted people and ask them 'what if this did this or if you had this available to you' would you use it? Would you use it often? Would you tell others about it? What would make it better' etc. If you are lucky an idea or two or five are worth putting all of your energy behind. I have felt that way about a couple of ideas in my life but they did not always come at times that my life allowed me to pursue the idea with all my time and attention, until now. I liken it to finding your significant other, they have to challenge you, ignite your passion and the timing has to be right.
But overall, I believe that Creativity is not about age as much as it is developing your own way of seeing things and then arriving at something new. Not everybody questions most things they see, hear, touch, etc but for those of us that do, well age is just a number.
[+] [-] ringaroundthetx|8 years ago|reply
It presupposed some things without evidence: "we lose creativity"
and then creates a convoluted study to support this notion. then creates a second convoluted study that undermines the presented presupposition and didn't discuss that at all.
just right back to the conclusion that writer already had.
[+] [-] avip|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alphonsegaston|8 years ago|reply
But I don't think this is an unavoidable trajectory. Instead, one has to cultivate "creative thinking" in the same way that they do other skills. The thing that I've found most useful are arbitrary constraints derived from things like word association games. They encourage all kinds of divergent thinking.
[+] [-] ilamont|8 years ago|reply
However, with many well-known authors it seems to be more mixed. At one end of the spectrum you have people like Walter M. Miller Jr. and Harper Lee who write a great work and then seem to stop publishing by the time they reach their early 40s, and then at the other, there are people like Ursula K. LeGuin and Stephen King who are machines for more than 50 years.
1. http://www.npr.org/2014/10/03/351545257/how-do-you-get-over-...
[+] [-] q845712|8 years ago|reply
I think there are actually very few masters in any age- most of the people whose works we celebrate and enjoy just aren't that brilliant. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with enjoying whatever we enjoy, or that it's trivial or worthwhile to try to spot the timeless master among the many skilled and successful artists. Just that I think you need a different lens.
[+] [-] archagon|8 years ago|reply
I think the key is always having somewhere to (creatively) dig. For example, artists who vary genres and instruments seem to do better than those who pick a style and then stick with it for decades. Always head towards unexplored ground; always be reinventing yourself.
[+] [-] coldtea|8 years ago|reply
There are too many counter-examples in classical, blues and whatever for this to be true.
Sting was never in it for the pure love of music in the way someone like Miles Davis, or BB King, or Tom Waits and Elvis Costello for that matter, he got distracted by the jet set lifestyle (Bob Gedolf is an ever worse example of that).
[+] [-] sliverstorm|8 years ago|reply
See, one-hit wonders if all ages. See, The Beatles and Eric Clapton, both famous for continuous reinvention.
[+] [-] gt_|8 years ago|reply
Here's my loose take: Music is a unique beast; especially these days. It remains the most scientifically fleeting artforms. The reasons why are sensory/media based for the most part, and usually entail a long-winded conversation because of the sheer abstraction of where the power lies in the medium. The conversations a musician has with it's audience actually seems to correlate more with what we consider childishness. In short, it's highly intuitive. Having this type of conversation briefly with rooms full of fans does not quite exercise the 'theory' end. Older musicians whose flame is still burning will usually have a deep and nuanced relationship with their art and practice that only those close to them can begin to understand. Maintaining that is rare.
[+] [-] bitwize|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crehn|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] agumonkey|8 years ago|reply
It's a smoother exploration process rather than youth random rush through unknown space.
[+] [-] QAPereo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gehwartzen|8 years ago|reply
This is probably why we seem more creative when we try something new and novel. We now again have to come up with creative solutions because we have no other reference to go by.
[+] [-] dmichulke|8 years ago|reply
One of computer scientific ways is to be epsilon-greedy, meaning everytime you have an action to take, you do (1-epsilon) (so 90% if epsilon = .1) times what you think is best and epsilon times something completely random.
Of course, that is a heuristic that doesn't really make sense without a context because you wouldn't want to do it in your job interview or your marriage proposal.
The other extreme is following the following quote which I find quite inspiring:
If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough (attributed to Alan Key but who knows)
While that's quite a high bar I personally do something quite different:
When I see something strange happening, e.g. a bird landing right in front of you and looking at you, or you have a deja-vu or you see somewhere some strange reference that looks like a message that only you can understand because it's something that happened in your past, then I'm going to take the other choice.
It happens a few times in a year and mostly biases explorative actions towards when I have a congnitive surplus anyway cause otherwise I wouldn't perceive the strange event in the first place.
[+] [-] hellofunk|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Kuiper|8 years ago|reply
I want to disabuse you of a few notions. Writing is not about inspiration. Writing is not about ideas. Writing, or more specifically, getting published, is not about luck. What is writing about, then? Writing is about skill. And today I want to try and prove this to you.
When someone sits down to play piano for you, how quickly can you tell if they're a good pianist or not? Basically everybody in this room can judge a pianist's level of skill within a minute or two of play. Not exactly, but you can know if this is someone who's good at piano, or if this is someone who's still an amateur at the piano. You can probably tell if this is a master versus someone who's just pretty good.
Editors, published writers, people who know what they're doing, can do the same thing with one page of your writing in the exact same way. That is why it's not about inspiration, ideas or luck, because in one page I can judge how good a writer you are. People wonder why can editors reject manuscripts or, in this new age, where we're sometimes bypassing editors, how come the readers just put something down after one page when they haven't given it a real shot.
You guys can judge this too. You've read enough, you know enough, you can judge if something is going to work for you pretty quickly. Perhaps not as quickly as most editors can, but you'll know. You'll read a chapter and you'll know if that person is a master, if they're in that medium grade where they've got some good things going on (it's still readable, but they're obviously not a master), or if this is someone's first novel they wrote when they were 12. You can tell all these things. So how do you develop this skill? Practice.
He goes on to note that ideas/inspiration are important, but not the most central part of what makes writing effective.
Many "creative" disciplines like writing, sculpting, and film are more about practiced and skilled craftsmanship than inspiration and ideas, whereas in some other fields, like maths and scientific discovery, breakthroughs really are about inspiration and ideas.
[+] [-] nemo44x|8 years ago|reply
Which is why I find it important to try and learn new things and find new interests when you can. But even then, "creativity" so often results in a dead end since the chance of discovering something new, effective and possibly better is slim in the first place. But hopefully experience helps in sussing out obvious bad ideas - like not eating vegetables to grow young again.
[+] [-] SZJX|8 years ago|reply
Also there are psycholinguistic researches at my university that suggest old people don't actually learn more slowly, they have just pruned some nonsensical connections and consolidated knowledge based on real world experience, and are thus worse at learning invented examples that might not make much sense.
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] technobabble|8 years ago|reply
Although I am on the young side, I have devoted an evening a week to take improv classes. One of my previous professors did his Phd on how improvisational techniques can help with product design [1].
P.S. Spaghetti !?! Maybe tomorrow...
[1]https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/61610
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] Fire-Dragon-DoL|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rdiddly|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coldtea|8 years ago|reply