Friday, February 23, 2007

What eats crEATivity?

Today seems to be a day of delightful discoveries in blogosphere for me. Here’s a candid post from Scott (Creator of Dilbert) on the struggles that creative people go through. He talks about artists (musicians and cartoonists) but I guess it can be very well extended to all forms of creativity including thinking and blogging. Let me know if you disagree, but I think there are very few people who can be creative every minute or, let’s say, every day of their life. Creative thinking normally comes in spurts and depends on so many internal and external factors. Intrinsic motivation is absolutely fine, but there’s also energy, stamina, priorities, disturbances, interruptions etc. Creative people, I guess, like Scott indicates are forced to compete with their own selves and that’s not easy. Getting better can actually be intimidating at times because it means you just can’t slip. No, not just in the perspective of others, but, more importantly, your own. The way out, I think, is to a) not look for external acknowledgement in the first place and b) understand that life is full of ups and downs and relish those spurts of creativity and leverage fully on such phases.

PS: I was thrilled to find a mention of C&H in Scott’s post. Aww. Come on, Nimmy. How can C&H not find a place when someone’s talking about cartoons and creativity?? :)

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