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Showing posts with label Creativity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Creativity. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 22, 2020

Book Review-Creativity, A Short and Cheerful Guide By John Cleese

 

Any book by John Cleese is expected to be very entertaining. This book is also informative and helpful. John Cleese was a founder of Monty Python comedy troupe. He is also a sought-after speaker on various things which applies to the business world, especially regarding our decision-making acumen, or lack of acumen. He is, to use the overused cliché, an out of the box thinker, a renaissance man.

This is a very short book where Cleese dives into what it means to be creative, he doesn't do it in a pedantic way, instead he does it in his own playful way. The combination is  a winning one, we are entertained as well as informed.  

The first couple of chapters sets the stage: The Creative Mindset and Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind. The Creative Mindset sets the tone for the rest of the book: what is a creative mindset and how does one get into a creative mindset? The Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind chapter describes the dichotomy that many imposes on the way the brain operates. While I ascribe to a more continuous thinking process for us humans, it is a popular belief, and I will not quibble. The Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind idea seems like it follows the Kahneman and Tversky formulation of the System 1 and System 2 dichotomy, it is, and it isn’t, there are differences. Cleese focuses on how Tortoise Mind can liberate the mind by setting aside our self-imposed constraints and hopefully challenge our biases in order to be more creative. The Tortoise Mind can be more wandering by nature, it is assessing all the different possibilities that are available to us, it is allowed to be playful. This is not completely what Kahneman and Tversky talks about, yet it also is in a different way. In my understanding System 2 is the rational thought process while Tortoise Mind is the mind where you do have time to explore,  to ask silly questions, to make minds wander, to be playful, and to get at the unconventional solutions.

This exploration of all the solution space  allows the mind to generate all solutions, ignoring the usual human imposed constraints. This is a wonderful way of explaining how creativity works. Our mental processes are often constrained by our biases, by our fears, and by anything else we can find to curtail the number of possibilities that occurs in our mind just so that we can to get at a solution, any solution. Cleese is of the opinion that we need to just let it all go, to let our mind wander, and to let that wondering create as many different solutions as possible and THEN we could all sort it out later as we apply our Hare Brain to filter out the unreasonable, the untenable, and the unrealistic.

The rest of the book consists of many different advices that Cleese offers up as useful tricks to create that Tortoise Mind. They are useful, funny, and while some of them are counter intuitive,  they perfect sense when  Cleese explains it. This is a section where you will often sit back and slap your forehead and exclaim: holy cow, why didn't I think of that? Well there is a reason for that and hopefully by the time you are done with this little book you will be able to explore your own creative mind fruitfully.

This is a book that I will be referring to many times in the future to help me release the constraints that I have, as well as being quite entertained.