“Feel all the things. Feel the hard things. The inexplicable things, the things that make you disavow humanity’s capacity for redemption… Feel afraid. Feel powerless. Feel frozen. And t…

Source: A Responsibility to Light: An Illustrated Manifesto for Creative Resilience and the Artist’s Duty in Dark Times – Brain Pickings

“A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven.”

Source: James Baldwin on the Creative Process and the Artist’s Responsibility to Society – Brain Pickings

40 great books to unlock your creative potential – Holy Kaw!.

No matter what you’re field, if you seek to make a splash, the ability to think outside the box is essential.

Canva’s Andrew Tate found forty inspiring reads to put you in a state of mind to get ahead through creative thinking, whether your field is business or the arts.

01. Thinking Fast and Slow – Daniel Kahneman

Lazy thinking is the bane of creativity. In Thinking Fast and Slow, Nobel Prize winning economist Daniel Kahneman talks about how there are really two different thinking systems within the brain. System 1 lets us make fast decisions based on intuition, while system 2 is more deliberative and slower. Sometimes quick, emotional decisions are great for creativity but often we need to take a set back and reassess, bringing the second system into play. Kahneman explores different exercises you can do to make sure that for any creative decision you make, or any creative thinking you do, you are accessing the correct part of your brain.

02. Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision & Reality – Scott Belsky

Throughout this series on creativity, we have always said that tenacity and determination are just as important to creativity as that initial bright spark. In Making Ideas Happen, Scott Belsky takes this a step further and gives you concrete strategies for realizing your idea and developing the skills to make them happen time and time again.

03. Things I have learned in my life so far – Stefan Sagmeister

Stefan Sagmeister is one of the world’s foremost graphic designers. One of his many beautiful books, Things I Have Learned in My Life So Far incorporates material from his exhibitions alongside his maxims for great design and true creativity.

04. How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World – Steven Johnson

If you learn one thing from How We Got to Now, it would be that we have no idea where we are going, but genius, fate, and serendipity drive us there. Steven Johnson tells wonderful tales of creative genius and the curious connections between one breakthrough and another.

Full story at Canva.

Kickstart your creativity.

Graphics credit: Canva

Posted by Kate Rinsema

The Best Books on Writing and Creativity of 2013 | Brain Pickings.

by

Timeless wisdom and practical advice on the pleasures and perils of the written word and the creative life.

After the year’s best books in photography, psychology and philosophy, art and design, history and biography, science and technology, “children’s” (though we all know what that means), and pets and animals, the season’s subjective selection of best-of reading lists concludes with the year’s best reads on writing and creativity.

(…)

Why Emotional Excess is Essential to Writing and Creativity | Brain Pickings.

“Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.”

The third volume of Anaïs Nin’s diaries has been on heavy rotation in recent weeks, yielding Nin’s thoughtful and timeless meditations on life, mass movements, Paris vs. New York, what makes a great city, and the joy of handcraft.

The subsequent installment, The Diary of Anais Nin, Vol. 4: 1944-1947 (public library) is an equally rich treasure trove of wisdom on everything from life to love to the art of writing. In fact, Nin’s gift shines most powerfully when she addresses all of these subjects and more in just a few ripe sentences. Such is the case with the following exquisite letter of advice she sent to a seventeen-year-old aspiring author by the name of Leonard W., whom she had taken under her wing as creative mentor.

‚I like to live always at the beginnings of life, not at their end. We all lose some of our faith under the oppression of mad leaders, insane history, pathologic cruelties of daily life. I am by nature always beginning and believing and so I find your company more fruitful than that of, say, Edmund Wilson, who asserts his opinions, beliefs, and knowledge as the ultimate verity. Older people fall into rigid patterns. Curiosity, risk, exploration are forgotten by them. You have not yet discovered that you have a lot to give, and that the more you give the more riches you will find in yourself. It amazed me that you felt that each time you write a story you gave away one of your dreams and you felt the poorer for it. But then you have not thought that this dream is planted in others, others begin to live it too, it is shared, it is the beginning of friendship and love.

[…]

You must not fear, hold back, count or be a miser with your thoughts and feelings. It is also true that creation comes from an overflow, so you have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing. Permit yourself to flow and overflow, allow for the rise in temperature, all the expansions and intensifications. Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them. If it seems to you that I move in a world of certitudes, you, par contre, must benefit from the great privilege of youth, which is that you move in a world of mysteries. But both must be ruled by faith.‘

The Diary of Anais Nin, Vol. 4: 1944-1947 is brimming with such poetic yet practical sagacity on the creative life and is a beautiful addition to other famous advice on writing like Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 rules for a great story, David Ogilvy’s 10 no-bullshit tips, Henry Miller’s 11 commandments, Jack Kerouac’s 30 beliefs and techniques, John Steinbeck’s 6 pointers, and Susan Sontag’s synthesized learnings.

Sir Ken Robinson: Do Schools Kill Creativity?.

TED and The Huffington Post are excited to bring you TEDWeekends, a curated weekend program that introduces a powerful „idea worth spreading“ every Friday, anchored in an exceptional TEDTalk. This week’s TEDTalk is accompanied by an original blog post from the featured speaker, along with new op-eds, thoughts and responses from the HuffPost community. Watch the talk above, read the blog post and tell us your thoughts below. Become part of the conversation!

I’ve spoken twice at TED. The first time was in 2006. TED was a very different event then. It was a private conference for about 1,200 people. After the event, the talks were packaged in a box set of DVDs and sent just to the attendees. I gave a talk called „Do Schools Kill Creativity?“ A few months later, Chris Anderson, the curator of TED, called to say they were planning to put a few talks on their website as an experiment and asked if they could include mine. The timing was perfect. Social media was beginning to take shape and the insatiable appetite for YouTube and short videos was about to emerge. The experiment was an instant success and has turned TED into a global cultural phenomenon. There are now several hundred talks on the website and the number of downloads has passed one billion.