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People Don’t Actually Like Creativity

375 pointsby wikiburnerover 11 years ago

47 comments

simonsarrisover 11 years ago
John Cleese (of Monty Python fame) gave a lecture on this topic, which I think is pertinent if you want to consider some solutions to this problem:<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AU5x1Ea7NjQ" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=AU5x1Ea7NjQ</a><p>(I posted it to HN almost a year ago, but it got no upvotes then, though I think it is excellent and merits its own discussion so we don&#x27;t derail this article&#x27;s comments too much, so here&#x27;s a repost: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6862219" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=6862219</a>)<p>He gives several pointers on how work environments could foster creativity if they wanted to, but also weighs the merits of both &quot;open&quot; and &quot;closed&quot; thinking. I thought it fascinating, and a good breakdown of &quot;being creative&quot; versus &quot;getting things done&quot;, and the environment needed for each.<p>I definitely prefer written articles to videos, but I do think the video has a lot of merit for anyone interested in this topic. It has a lot more actionable advice than this Slate article.
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vezzy-fnordover 11 years ago
This is a very old observation and in fact, the suppression of creativity and individualism is one of the key goals of the compulsory schooling system.<p>From John D. Rockefeller, Sr.&#x27;s General Education Board, <i>Occasional Papers No. 1</i>, 1913:<p>&quot;In our dreams, we have limitless resources and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present education conventions fade from their minds, and unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive rural folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning, or men of science.<p>We have not to raise up from among them authors, editors, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have an ample supply…The task we set before ourselves is very simple as well as a very beautiful one, to train these people as we find them to a perfectly ideal life just where they are. So we will organize our children and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way, in the homes, in the shops and on the farm.&quot;
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crazygringoover 11 years ago
Except that, most creative ideas are bad.<p>Like the famous observation about Churchill: &quot;His chief of staff Alan Brooke complained that every day Churchill had 10 ideas, only one of which was good -- and he did not know which one.&quot;<p>And when I think of product meeting&#x27;s I&#x27;ve sat in on... generally 90% of the &quot;creative&quot; ideas would be complete disasters. And a lot of the remaining 10% <i>might</i> be good, but the work involved in figuring that out for sure would often be prohibitive, for an unclear payoff. But occasionally you get a gem that everyone gets excited about.<p>I would say that people <i>do</i> like creativity, but only when it&#x27;s clear that the particular creative solution will likely work. Which is generally not the case.<p>And if people went chasing every plausible creative idea, we wouldn&#x27;t have time for anything else, like normal productivity. That&#x27;s why it&#x27;s a very difficult balance to get right.
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jerfover 11 years ago
In general, things that we are constantly reminding each other of are things that we either do not naturally believe and thus need constant reminding of, or things we do not really believe (which can be determined by looking at our actions). The things we all already know and believe, we never even talk about. We know and agree, what would be the point?<p>For another example (and my, did I have to search for one that was politically neutral...), consider how often we&#x27;re telling ourselves here on HN that procrastination is bad. If we want to believe that, we need constant reminding of it, constant reminding to carefully consider our real priorities, or our actions will betray our true priorities, which aren&#x27;t whatever we want or think them to be.<p>By contrast, consider how often we debate whether the best way to learn programming is by doing it, (exclusive) or by studying it. We might discuss the <i>best</i> way to learn by doing, but virtually no one really believes programming is best learned by extensive study before one is even permitted a REPL. (And anyone who pops up here and claims they believe that I will assume is being contrarian for contrariness&#x27; sake. Do take note of my &quot;exclusive&quot; there; of course there&#x27;s a place for study, but even in formal studies there&#x27;s no reason not to have the student in front of a compiler&#x2F;interpreter on day one, or lab day one anyhow.)
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mathattackover 11 years ago
Two observations...<p>One is general - that other people imposing their creativity on me requires me to think. This isn&#x27;t bad, but I have a limited capacity to think, and my bias leads me to think that my new ideas are great, and yours aren&#x27;t. This is an oversimplification, but if everything changed all the time, we couldn&#x27;t cope. Some people reject all creativity as a result. Others just put up filters.<p>Second is just practical career advice. Someone at a large company once told me, &quot;People around here talk about diversity and innovation, but what they really want is people doing the same things just a little cheaper, a little faster, and a little more predictably.&quot;<p>This isn&#x27;t to say that Change is bad, only that there is lots of resistance with semi-rational reasoning behind it.
mdakinover 11 years ago
I call these anti-creative people of the world who work to hold the world of humanity fixed in one conceptual place&#x2F;time &quot;The Lords of the Status Quo.&quot; These &quot;lords&quot; are great in number, but always individually weak. This group somehow combined forces with &quot;The Lords of Hierarchy&quot;-- those who built and currently inhabit the hierarchal social structures that last throughout time (e.g. Corporations, Religions, Governments). That combined force is the most powerful abstract entity that I know of on this planet, and has somehow managed to impose its collective will over everyone on this planet. (Drone strikes, anyone?) If you want to understand the combined group you want to understand &quot;Slave Morality.&quot; They are all something like Slaves. The creatives are best understood using &quot;Hero Morality.&quot; I can&#x27;t wait until this world&#x27;s &quot;Slaves&quot; finally free themselves. I am generally an anti-Nietzsche thinker and I believe his ideas should be taken with a huge handful of salt, but I think the Hero&#x2F;Slave archetypes actually do explain a lot about this (effed up) world.
normlomanover 11 years ago
Copywriter here.<p>Sometimes clients ask me to create slogans for their company. I screw around for a bit, generate a list of maybe 25 slogans, then present them with the 5 best.<p>I always have a favorite out of the bunch. A slogan that&#x27;s so memorable, because it&#x27;s so out of the ordinary. One that gets to the point, and really delivers the benefit of the client&#x27;s product. And that slogan never gets picked. Business owners are afraid to stick out. So they pick the most tame slogan from the bunch.<p>Example: A web design company wanted to target a display ad to small businesses without websites. I wrote the ad with the headline: &quot;If you&#x27;re not online, you don&#x27;t exist.&quot; Client changed this to &quot;If you don&#x27;t have a good website, we can help.&quot;<p>Most people don&#x27;t know what they like, or they are afraid to admit it. So instead, they pick the same thing everyone else is doing. It simplifies making decisions. No feelings, no uncertainty. Just a quick Google of your competitors to see what they do.
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calinet6over 11 years ago
People love creativity, as evidenced by our love of the results of creativity.<p>Our <i>systems</i> however, are not set up to reward creativity.<p>Our systems at work, at school, and in life in general are set up to maintain a status quo, to result in the least amount of risk possible (especially as those systems become larger), and in general to reward predictability, consistency, and obedience. All of which describe the opposite of creativity.<p>The reasons the systems are this way is due to our style of management, primarily in the US. Carrot-and-stick styles, with emphasis on short-term goals and comparison of employees to each other (bonuses for the top 5% etc) result in short-term thinking styles and discourage creativity in the workplace. Bonuses and employee evaluations also tend to focus on measurable goals, and creativity is difficult to measure and difficult to quantify, therefore it&#x27;s optimized away. Just one of the many negative unintended consequences of our default individual-focused reward-and-punish management style.<p>Deming-style management process would likely fix this and encourage wider thinking and creativity, with less of an individual focus. Read more and spread the word: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;W._Edwards_Deming</a>
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Pxtlover 11 years ago
People like <i>results</i>. If you demonstrated good results in a creative fashion? Then they like creativity. If you did it conventionally? They like that too.<p>The problem with the &quot;creative&quot; way is you have to go through the process of eliminating all the bad ideas again, which the conventional approach has already done. But the ideas are the <i>fun</i> part.<p>Being creative means producing lots of bad ideas that nobody wants to deal with. Dragging unwilling participants through your creative process of throwing out all the bad ideas? That&#x27;s your dirty work. That&#x27;s housekeeping and laundry. The few good new ideas? Prove them, then bring in others. Unless somebody is paid to put up with your crap.<p>They laughed at Einstein, but the also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
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colmvpover 11 years ago
&quot;In the documentary The September Issue, Anna Wintour systematically rejects the ideas of her creative director Grace Coddington, seemingly with no reason aside from asserting her power.&quot;<p>Having watched it, t&#x27;s entirely possible that they cut the explanatory bits to frame Wintour as even more cold as she is in public persona. I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised.<p>But in any case, she&#x27;s the Editor-in-Chief, which makes her the final filter. She&#x27;s goes a lot by her hunch which is based on taste, a palette that revitalized Vogue and kept it relevant in the fashion industry. Taste is hard to justify.<p>In such cases, I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s so much about people not digging creativity so much as the idea isn&#x27;t there. That&#x27;s just part of being creative. Sometimes you think you&#x27;re doing interesting work and it&#x27;s actually not as good as you think it is.
simonsquiffover 11 years ago
Reminds me of Shanks law: &quot;Because people understand by finding in their memories the closest possible match to what they are hearing and use that match as the basis of comprehension, any new idea will be treated as a variant of something the listener has already thought of or heard. Agreement with a new idea means a listener has already had a similar thought and well appreciates that the speaker has recognized his idea. Disagreement means the opposite. Really new ideas are incomprehensible. The good news is that for some people, failure to comprehend is the beginning of understanding. For most, of course, it is the beginning of dismissal.&quot;
JamesArgoover 11 years ago
Let&#x27;s suppose everyone is behaving relativity rationally. How could we explain this? One obvious suggestion: the average value of a &quot;creative&quot; idea is less than that of a inside-the-box idea. Though the peek value of a &quot;creative&quot; idea can be tremendous, most &quot;creative&quot; ideas are of negative utility, similar to how most mutations decrease fitness, even though most increases in fitness are caused by mutations. Though all earth-shattering ideas are creative, perhaps all creative ideas aren’t earth-shattering and, on average, one is better off thinking inside the box.
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seijiover 11 years ago
A wise man once said:<p><i>when you have a flabby culture of consensus that rejects those who offend the few, that’s exactly what you’re going to get: risk-minimizers, not excellence-maximizers. It’s generally agreed upon that some people are too creative, too interesting, to succeed in typical human organizations because of that specific effect.</i>
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njharmanover 11 years ago
I don&#x27;t know how most people define creativity. The author seems to be equating creativity with independent, non-conformist risk takers. Which is not how I&#x27;d define creativity, but maybe that is what makes people &quot;creative&quot;.
Millenniumover 11 years ago
People generally want to be convinced of an idea&#x27;s value before implementing it, and this is reasonable. For tested and tried ideas, this value is generally a known quantity, or at least one that can be estimated reasonably well. As long as that value is high, convincing people to do it is relatively easy: it&#x27;s mostly a matter of presenting that value in ways they&#x27;ll accept.<p>For untried (i.e. &quot;creative&quot;) ideas, this is much harder. Further complicating the process is that the creators of ideas inevitably place a very high intrinsic value on them. There are many reasons for this, but a lot of them are tied into the ego, either directly (&quot;I had this idea, so it&#x27;s good&quot;) or indirectly (&quot;This idea reinforces beliefs I hold, or advances a cause I favor, or lets me practice my favored hobbies, or may answer a question I&#x27;m personally curious about, etc., therefore it is good&quot;). Other people just plain don&#x27;t find these ego-tied arguments compelling, nor really should they, and so they cloud the process of convincing people to go along with a new idea.<p>It would seem, then, that the trick is to remove one&#x27;s ego from the convincing process, and argue solely based on what&#x27;s left. But the ego still complicates things. Even when more observer-independent arguments can be found, they never shine as brightly in the eyes of the creator as the ego-tied ones, and so it feels like you&#x27;re selling it short: not something creatives like to do, and for obvious reasons. Worse, though, are the many ideas that just plain don&#x27;t have many (or even any) arguments that don&#x27;t tie straight back into one&#x27;s own ego. No one else will ever be convinced to go alongside these, but to attack them is to attack the creator&#x27;s ego, leading to accusations of sour grapes and headlines like &quot;People don&#x27;t actually like creativity.&quot;
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swalshover 11 years ago
I consider myself a creative individual, mostly because my boss brings it up in every review...<p>I think the thing a lot of &quot;creative&quot; people do is get too attached to ideas. When you have that idea its a diamond. Sometimes its hard to tell that its really just another rock. Of course sometimes ideas don&#x27;t die. When that&#x27;s true, you just gotta do it. Find a way.
emhsover 11 years ago
They&#x27;re right that people don&#x27;t like creativity or dissent. There was a good post on Less Wrong about this [1], and about how the rejection of creativity, the rejection of what to you, is blindingly obvious, is key in the break between the creative person, the independent thinker, and their trust in society&#x27;s expectations and sanity [2]. Seeing the things that the established process missed requires valuing finding a better idea more than how many people you might piss off along the way. It make take several ideas to get there, but you have to learn to reward your brain for producing ideas, and you can&#x27;t expect society to provide that reward. You have to produce that reward all on your own, until you find the right idea and succeed with it. Then everyone shuts up for a moment, before talking about how they knew you&#x27;d figure it out all along, and they were starting to think in that direction just the other day.<p>[1] <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/mb/lonely_dissent/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;lesswrong.com&#x2F;lw&#x2F;mb&#x2F;lonely_dissent&#x2F;</a> [2] <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/qf/no_safe_defense_not_even_science/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;lesswrong.com&#x2F;lw&#x2F;qf&#x2F;no_safe_defense_not_even_science&#x2F;</a>
toddmoreyover 11 years ago
Catchy headline, but I feel it&#x27;s an inaccurate generalization. From my experience, there is a spectrum of people between two different viewpoints: creative people who are energized by new ideas and non-creative people whose default posture is to be skeptical about them.<p>Neither bias is either completely right or completely wrong. Most new ideas fail, so it&#x27;s healthy to know critics who can help counterbalance creative enthusiasm and perhaps see potential pitfalls.<p>But new ideas—the right ones—are hugely valuable. I&#x27;ve heard creativity described as a tolerance for the cognitive dissonance—that is, the natural mental pain and discomfort—of combining unrelated or incongruent ideas. This process likely bothers a skeptical person a lot more and they tire or frustrate out earlier.<p>Less creative people can be difficult to brainstorm with because they don&#x27;t enjoy the process and want to &quot;get to the answer.&quot; But creative people can be difficult to execute with because seemingly everything at every moment is up for reinvention.<p>The point here is that we need people on both ends of the spectrum and they need to understand each other and the value they bring.
mcguireover 11 years ago
I would really suggest reading the paper mentioned first in the article[1]. Although it has a good deal of the usual statistical ranting, it&#x27;s short and reasonably well-written. From the conclusion:<p>&quot;<i>Our results show that regardless of how open minded people are, when they feel motivated to reduce uncertainty either because they have an immediate goal of reducing uncertainty, or feel uncertain generally, this may bring negative associations with creativity to mind which result in lower evaluations of a creative idea. Our findings imply a deep irony. Prior research shows that uncertainty spurs the search for and generation of creative ideas, yet our findings reveal that uncertainty also makes us less able to recognize creativity, perhaps when we need it most.</i>&quot;<p>The key finding is two-fold: in a normal, non-uncertain, state, creativity has positive associations and is easier to recognize and assess. However, when people attempt to deal with an excess of uncertainty, creative ideas have negative associations.<p>That&#x27;s something to think about the next time everything is on fire.<p>Oh, and the final bit is interesting:<p>&quot;<i>In addition, our results suggest that if people have difficulty gaining acceptance for creative ideas especially when more practical and unoriginal options are readily available, the field of creativity may need to shift its current focus from identifying how to generate more creative ideas to identifying how to help innovative institutions recognize and accept creativity.</i>&quot;<p>[1] <a href="http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1457&amp;context=articles" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu&#x2F;cgi&#x2F;viewcontent.cgi?ar...</a> [PDF]
hyp0over 11 years ago
I&#x27;ve never seen a job ad for &quot;idea people&quot;. Usually, idea people are made fun of, like Michael Keaton&#x27;s character in <i>Night Shift</i> (<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084412/quotes" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.imdb.com&#x2F;title&#x2F;tt0084412&#x2F;quotes</a>) - or Scriber, in <i>A Fire Upon the Deep</i> (<a href="http://books.google.com.au/books?id=uRjpxtbshBYC&amp;lpg=PT110&amp;ots=aorLn0iZxN&amp;dq=scriber%20%22a%20fire%20upon%20the%20deep%22%20that%20had%20always%20been%20his%20problem%20too&amp;pg=PT110#v=onepage&amp;q=scriber%20%22a%20fire%20upon%20the%20deep%22%20that%20had%20always%20been%20his%20problem%20too&amp;f=false" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;books.google.com.au&#x2F;books?id=uRjpxtbshBYC&amp;lpg=PT110&amp;o...</a>).<p><pre><code> &quot;[...] It&#x27;s that, the actual doing, that&#x27;s going slow.&quot; Scriber nodded knowingly. That had been the central problem in his life too. </code></pre> The &quot;big&quot; problem is the space of ideas is huge, expanding exponentially, each variation admitting many more ways of varying. And... the vast majority are no good. So youth&#x27;s easy enthusiasm for ideas quickly turn to caution, doubt, ridicule, and they become bitter cynics before their time, getting very angry with youth&#x27;s easy enthusiasms.<p>The exception is an idea that actually has a verified concrete benefit. A <i>good</i> idea. But here, people don&#x27;t care about the idea; but they care about the benefit.<p>A common problem is when the greatest benefits of your wonderful idea are not yet verifiable... the solution is to find (or work to create) some benefit - perhaps much smaller than the dream - that <i>is</i> concrete and verifiable. Then, people will adopt it. Ideally, as time goes on, you can add more and more benefits which comprise the dream til it is complete (or at least give you time to work on making real your dream&#x27;s benefits.)
Mikeb85over 11 years ago
I think a lot of it comes down to the way societies have evolved, and our &#x27;survival&#x27; function. We don&#x27;t want to risk our limited resources and time on ideas that, more than likely, will yield nothing.<p>Furthermore, a lot of &#x27;creative people&#x27; are just hipsters that use it as a crutch to never get anything productive done. I mean, shit like this isn&#x27;t a particularly great expression of creativity: <a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/6/63/Robert_Delaunay,_1913,_Premier_Disque,_134_cm,_52.7_inches,_Private_collection.jpg/260px-Robert_Delaunay,_1913,_Premier_Disque,_134_cm,_52.7_inches,_Private_collection.jpg" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;upload.wikimedia.org&#x2F;wikipedia&#x2F;en&#x2F;thumb&#x2F;6&#x2F;63&#x2F;Robert_D...</a><p>We should encourage creativity, but also temper it with realism. While the life of the &#x27;starving artist&#x27; is alluring, it&#x27;s really not all that...
overdrivetgover 11 years ago
&quot;If your ideas are any good, you&#x27;ll have to ram them down people&#x27;s throats.&quot; - Howard Aiken<p>I suspect many here can relate.
jgeadaover 11 years ago
I heard somewhere an interesting distillation of creativity: - if something is <i>obviously</i> a good idea, it would already be the way things are done.<p>Creativity largely ends up coming up with good approaches that are not immediately obviously good and, in that respect it is inherently difficult to tease apart the good ideas from the bad ideas.
analog31over 11 years ago
An observation about the article is the frequent mention of risk. What&#x27;s risk? It&#x27;s the chance that something will go wrong. If risk is how we formally define it, then a ten million dollar idea with a 90% chance of failure is worth a million. This suggests a potential gap between the innovator&#x27;s view of their own idea, and its actual value. On the other hand, a dullard who comes up with a million dollar idea that&#x27;s demonstrably risk free, has delivered equal value.<p>What happens when the innovator presents the ten million dollar idea to a room full of dullards? After several such episodes in succession, they&#x27;ve persuaded themselves that the dullards hate innovation.<p>Blaming people for being risk-averse isn&#x27;t good enough. There has to be something else going on, such as a gap between perceived risk and real risk, that influences both innovators and dullards.
jnorthropover 11 years ago
If an organization really wants to embrace creativity it also has to embrace failure. A large percentage of creative solutions--stuff that is &quot;out-of-the-box,&quot; unique and innovative--are likely not to work. If the organization is risk adverse, it will never truly embrace creativity.
drawkboxover 11 years ago
I agree with this, it is mainly people&#x27;s plight against change.<p>Don&#x27;t ask for approval for creativity, noone will let you. Do it and ask for forgiveness later. If you are waiting for approval for creativity you are doing it wrong.<p>This is the same problem that plagues big companies who had a large market share, without creativity&#x2F;prototypes&#x2F;new innovations those companies are dead. The people in those companies are shut down when asking for approval. See the pirate flag days at Apple and what Steve Jobs had to go through for a high level at what happens, even if you start the company they won&#x27;t let you be creative without a fight.<p>The very definition of creativity is thinking different and with that comes resistance.
chacham15over 11 years ago
“I even say, ‘I’ll do the work. Just give me the go ahead and I’ll do it myself,’”<p>That&#x27;s the difference between a leader and a follower: if you strongly believe that you are indeed correct, work on the system on your own time and then you either learn a valuable lesson that youre not as &quot;good&quot; as you think you are or you teach the others a valuable lesson that you&#x27;re better than they think you are. This way people who are good will become leaders and have a better say in what goes on and people who are not will learn and one day be good. The shame is in the people who are good, but remain inactive because they dont figure out if they are actually correct and neither does the management.
jaimebueltaover 11 years ago
Creativity (substitute it by change if you prefer) is only interesting if it produces better results (by whatever definition of &quot;better&quot; that applies to the area).<p>Creative people will produce a lot of meh stuff&#x2F;crap for each interesting output. Environments that promote creativity are easy on mistakes&#x2F;failed outcomes, because they know that, at some point, it will produce something interesting. Will be 1&#x2F;100th of the times, but it will be worth it. But most of the people assumes that, just because someone is creative, all the stuff will be awesome. And that&#x27;s simply not possible. With no patience, there can&#x27;t be any creativity. And very few people is patient.
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rswaiover 11 years ago
Normal people (none of who are on hacker news ofcourse :p) tend to be scared of change, because change is &#x27;different&#x27;. Little do they know that there really is no such thing as &#x27;different&#x27; when it comes to your personality because the moment people start classifying you as different then you&#x27;ve actually started acting upon and becoming the real you! You&#x27;ve stopped being what they want you to be. Sadly enough most people in the world live in denial,suppressing their capabilities thus most partnerships formed by a group of &#x27;conformists&#x27;. I guess it explains why we&#x27;re still light years behind any real WORLD development.
dredmorbiusover 11 years ago
Reading <i>Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance</i> again, Pirsig hits on this among other themes:<p><i>Schools teach you to imitate. If you don&#x27;t imitate what the teacher wants you to get you get a bad grade. Here in college, it was more sophisticated, of course; you were supposed to imitate the teacher in such a way as to convince the teacher you were not imitating but taking the essence of the instruction and going ahead with it on your own. That got you A&#x27;s. Originality on the other hand could get you anything --- from A to F. The whole grading system cautioned against it.</i><p>The book of course is all about Quality, Creativity, and Innovation. Highly recommended.
the_cat_kittlesover 11 years ago
Another simple reason I think lots of people don&#x27;t like creativity: It is an affront to tradition. Lots of people subconsciously (or otherwise) think you are arrogant for thinking you can improve on the status quo.
spiritplumberover 11 years ago
Heh, about the part where it goes “I even say, ‘I’ll do the work. Just give me the go ahead and I’ll do it myself,’ ” she says. “But they won’t, and so the system stays less efficient.”<p>I get that at least once a month. What I generally do now is tell people &quot;You are wrong&quot; when I&#x27;m told no. This has caused a few surreal situations (one was a bunch of NASA guys listening to a presentation on how Widget T was badly behind schedule and needed a lot of work done, with the first production batch of working Widget Ts in a heap on the conference table).
johnoharaover 11 years ago
It&#x27;s important to distinguish the difference between elegant design and creativity.<p>Elegant design is often easy to recognize and appreciate. We celebrate its creativity and thought because it &quot;looks right&quot; and &quot;feels familiar.&quot;<p>But true creativity is abrasive, uncomfortable, and many times, divisive. It doesn&#x27;t often look right or feel familiar, especially when it comes from persons or sources not easily understood.<p>Which is why it struggles in environments where the goal is to stay focused on the task at hand.
danielharanover 11 years ago
What circular rot: because creative people have historically faced rejection, that rejection is good, because you&#x27;ll need it.<p>&quot;Perhaps for some people, the pain of rejection is like the pain of training for a marathon—training the mind for endurance. Research shows you’ll need it. Truly creative ideas take a very long time to be accepted. The better the idea, the longer it might take. Even the work of Nobel Prize winners was commonly rejected by their peers for an extended period of time.&quot;
gwernover 11 years ago
&gt; Unfamiliar things are distrusted and hard to process, overly familiar things are boring, and the perfect object of beauty lies somewhere in between (Sluckin, Hargreaves, &amp; Colman, 1983)...<p>(More details in <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/i0b/open_thread_july_1622_2013/9f1o" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;lesswrong.com&#x2F;lw&#x2F;i0b&#x2F;open_thread_july_1622_2013&#x2F;9f1o</a> )
mrcactu5over 11 years ago
some people are very creative but can&#x27;t get things done<p>other people are not very creative but move things over.<p>in order to achieve that result that everyone appreciates, there is usually some technical detail we have to work through that nobody else cares about or understands. anyone who is both creative and wants to do stuff has to work through that lonely period.
anigbrowlover 11 years ago
<i>Though her company initially hired her for her problem-solving skills, she is regularly unable to fix actual problems because nobody will listen to her ideas.</i><p>So true. Half (or maybe more) of being successful as a creative person is learning to play politics and sell your ideas.
liotierover 11 years ago
&quot;Here’s to the crazy ones. The rebels. The troublemakers. The ones who see things differently. Please do it somewhere else and just give us the benefits once you are established&quot; - Steve Jobs (the quote usually truncates the last sentence)
rumcajzover 11 years ago
Consider how hard is it to push through a &quot;sane&quot; solution in corporate environment. &quot;Creative&quot; solution is out of question.
Idekaover 11 years ago
Relevant: <a href="http://youtu.be/9C_HReR_McQ" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;9C_HReR_McQ</a>
ffrryuuover 11 years ago
Because they are the trouble makers. Now get back in line and do your work as you are told!
j2kunover 11 years ago
Who says that creativity implies risk? This article treats the two as equivalent.
plumeriaover 11 years ago
This reminds me of The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand...
asiekierkaover 11 years ago
I wish I were creative.
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michaelochurchover 11 years ago
I suppose what has happened to my HN account (artificially high latency, aka &quot;slowbanning&quot;, and personal penalties in comment placement, aka &quot;rankbanning&quot;) proves this. If you actually challenge VC-istan (as opposed to Graham-esque incremental improvements) on its moral fundamentals, you&#x27;ve gone too far.<p>More generally, creativity (in particular, I&#x27;ll focus on social humor) has a status effect. Let&#x27;s put social status on a scale from -1.0 to 1.0. Below 0.0, you&#x27;re an at-risk member who may be expelled from the group. At 1.0, you&#x27;re an unquestioned god-king of it (most groups&#x27; leaders are 0.5 to 0.7).<p>When you&#x27;re above +0.4, you can&#x27;t really use humor (which I&#x27;m taking to be a microcosm of creativity) except of a stunted kind, because most good humor is partisan or offensive, and not &quot;presidential&quot; or &quot;leader-like&quot;. That, I would argue, applies to creative expression in general.<p>Below 0.0, you&#x27;re a disliked member of the group and your ideas (or humor) will be rejected just because they come from you and are therefore taken to be unskilled displays and desperate attempts to improve status. Between 0.0 and +0.2, your jokes might be well-received, but it&#x27;s not worth the risk, because you don&#x27;t have much status capital to spend. This leaves a narrow range of the status spectrum-- 0.2 to 0.4-- in which humor (&#x2F;creativity) can bring improvement. However, people at +0.3 to +0.4 aren&#x27;t high enough to end up climbing corporate ladders-- you need +0.6 to +0.7 to play that game, and you need to achieve that status reliably (at each level of the executive hierarchy)-- and doubling down on humor typecasts you as &quot;the funny guy&quot;, which isn&#x27;t the image you want and limits you at the +0.4 ceiling.<p>The problem isn&#x27;t really that <i>people</i> individually dislike creativity. It&#x27;s that social groups become increasingly anti-intellectual and focused on self-preservation (which requires excluding the &quot;different&quot;) as they get bigger.
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andylover 11 years ago
I&#x27;d say: people don&#x27;t like change. Creativity is change. Change takes energy, and there&#x27;s a fininte supply of energy to go around.<p>If you can introduce creative changes that require little energy to adopt, you&#x27;re on to something.
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jd_freeover 11 years ago
We live in a society where people who use &quot;diversity&quot; as a buzzword are actively promoting policies that discourage diversity of thought and demand conformance. &quot;Standards&quot; dictated from on high are the bane of creative exploration.<p>At the same time, many &quot;creative&quot; ideas are actually just really stupid ideas. It&#x27;s to be expected that the person with the stupid idea will accuse his critics of stifling his &quot;creativity&quot;. That doesn&#x27;t mean they&#x27;re wrong.
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