Love, or Curiosity

Yesterday I mentioned the importance of LOVE in driving a team to push beyond the competition in designing spectacularly lovable products. Paul Graham wrote a recent post ("Think For Yourself") that touched on this idea, at least superficially.

To close the post, which is mostly making a case for curiosity and independent thinking, he says, "Perhaps, if your goal is to discover novel ideas, your motto should not be 'do what you love' so much as 'do what you're curious about.'" I won't spoil the reasoning -- it's worth it to go read his post -- but I mention it here only in passing to suggest that perhaps curiosity AND love is a really the magical combination worth pursuing.

I was reminded of his post for another reason. In it, he also exhorts readers to "...cultivate an attitude of skepticism. When you hear someone say something, stop and ask yourself 'Is that true?' Don't say it out loud. I'm not suggesting that you impose on everyone who talks to you the burden of proving what they say, but rather that you take upon yourself the burden of evaluating what they say."

This reminded me of something Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi mentions in his landmark longitudinal study of creative professionals, aptly titled, "Creativity":

“Robert Galvin of Motorola trained himself to do a simple mental exercise: whenever someone says something, he asks himself, what if the opposite were true? Imagining alternatives to what others hold to be true is probably going to be useless 99% of the time. But that one other time the practice of flipping to a divergent perspective might generate an insight that is not only original but also useful.”

Readers of my blog know that I am, of course, a big fan of doing things that have a low probability of success, not only because the odds of succeeding are low anyway, but also because it's useful to challenge one's own thought patterns.

To me, such disciplined habits of mind are one mark of a truly creative person.

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