Highlights from a presentation by John Cleese on creativity. He lays out a few principles for achieving it
- Got a problem? Sleep on it. Let your unconscious mind find the solution
- Another way to leverage your unconscious: it will keep working on tasks you've completed. When you revisit them, you'll find improvements waiting for you
- Avoid interruptions, they destroy flow
- Ideas "don't come from laptops", they come from thinking. You won't be creative if you're "running around all day, keeping balls in the air"
- To foster creativity you need to establish:
- Boundaries of space: a place where you can think without being interrupted
- Boundaries of time: a clear timespan during which you will think (though he doesn't explicitly say this, I've found the constraint of a deadline is a good spur to creativity)
None of this is new, but it's a good set of principles nonetheless. Here's the video.