Creativity takes time, risk, love and hard work

Q. What advice can you give us nongeniuses to help us be more creative?

A. Take risks, and expect to make lots of mistakes, because creativity is a numbers game. Work hard, and take frequent breaks, but stay with it over time. Do what you love, because creative breakthroughs take years of hard work. Develop a network of colleagues, and schedule time for freewheeling, unstructured discussions.

Most of all, forget those romantic myths that creativity is all about being artsy and gifted and not about hard work. They discourage us because we're waiting for that one full-blown moment of inspiration. And while we're waiting, we may never start working on what we might someday create.

Washington University psychologist R. Keith Sawyer - from article The Hidden Secrets of the Creative Mind, Time mag. Jan. 8, 2006

He is author of Explaining Creativity: The Science of Human Innovation

> image: Ed Harris as Jackson Pollock in the film Pollock

> Comment by Douglas Eby [site author]:

Many films such as this one about Pollock with Ed Harris, and the more recent "Capote" starring the also very gifted Philip Seymour Hoffman, are stimulating explorations of the richly complex lives of artists - but they can also help perpetuate ideas of the artist as a loner, a troubled or downright crazy outsider, rather than one of us, and someone with talents we might also have and could nurture.
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