Creativity is about connection — you must be connected to others in order to be inspired and share your own work — but it is also about disconnection. You must retreat from the world long enough to think, practice your art, and bring forth something worth sharing with others. You must play a little hide-and-seek in order to produce something worth being found.

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while.

There’s a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat. That’s crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they’re doing, you say ‘wow,’ and soon you’re cooking up all sorts of ideas.

Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they’re doing, you say “Wow” and soon you’re cooking up all sorts of ideas.

A criatividade é simplesmente conectar as coisas. Quando você pergunta às pessoas criativas como elas fizeram alguma coisa, eles sentem-se um pouco culpadas, pois na verdade não fizeram de fato, apenas viram algo. Depois de um tempo a coisa ficou óbvia. Isso aconteceu porque eles conseguiram fazer a ligação entre as experiências que já tiveram e então sintetizaram coisas novas

that creativity is always, in some sense, a collaboration, the result of a mind connected to other minds. What I love about the idea of scenius is that it makes room in the story of creativity for the rest of us: the people who don’t consider ourselves geniuses.

Creativity in business is often nothing more than making connections that everyone else has almost thought of. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, just attach it to a new wagon.

En esta era interconectada existe la tentación de creer que las ideas pueden desarrollarse a través de mensajes de correo electrónico y en el iChat. Eso es una locura. La creatividad surge en las reuniones espontáneas, en las discusiones aleatorias. Tú te encuentras con alguien, le preguntas qué está haciendo, te sorprendes y pronto te encuentras elucubrando todo tipo de ideas.

Creativity is choice-making.

Csikszentmihalyi suggests that the common idea of a creative individual coming up with great insights, discoveries, works, or inventions in isolation is wrong. Creativity results from a complex interaction between a person and their environment or culture, and also depends on timing.

Creativity is the ability to introduce order into the randomness of nature.

Creativity thinks up new things. Innovation does new things.

The important aspect of creativity is seeing the same thing as everybody else, but thinking of something different. Innovation and creativity ultimately results into the culture of excellence.