I want to tell you a story about two photographers. For a while now, I’ve been wanting to get more into photography, hoping eventually to buy a nice digital SLR camera. So I was quite thrilled when a photojournalist friend offered to give me some of her old film equipment to learn on. The camera, a…

One of the problems with our education system is that it teaches that for most questions there is one correct answer. Examinations with multiple choice questions force the student to try to select the right answer and avoid the wrong ones. So when our students leave school they are steeped in a system that says…

Two prisoners dug a tunnel from their cell 80 feet to escape from prison. Where did they hide the dirt? This is one of the examples used by Roni Horowitz of the consultancy group SIT to show the advantages of a method called Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT). The answer is that…

Creative writing is not an easy task. Everybody has a great opinion about how it should be done. Most of these opinions are untested. Figuring out just what makes fiction good, let alone great, is a puzzle that takes decades to figure out. Coming up with the right answers isn’t always easy. If you’re a fairly…

“Why don’t you join me on the line?” Do you think I’m inviting you to get on a conference call? Is the football player in you visualizing the scrimmage line? Does ‘on the line’ mean anything in particular to you? The line that we’re going to look at today is the line that separates risk from…

Same Old, Same Old? Do you find yourself doing the same things day in and day out? To use a metaphor, are you listening the the same songs of life every day? If so, why not hit the shuffle button on your life and let a new tune rev up your day, your creativity, and your…

If you were thinking about how to fill that time not watching TV, you might want to try a new hobby. Most provide great benefits like stress-release, increased social life and, sometimes, an income. A website that makes it really easy to get right into a common hobby is aptly titled Discover A Hobby. Here…

Chanpory Rith, a designer, talks about what are the habits junior designers have to practice in order to be productive and effective on their job. If you are a designer, or you are doing creative things for a living – you may want to hear them and adapt them: 1. Work quickly, produce a lot…

Go create something. I don’t care what, how much it cost, the purpose, or the form, but the result must be supremely innovative, worth every penny, and profoundly significant to the human race. Take your time.

The reasonable person finds this overwhelming. Creativity’s root is the tension filled conflict between the imagination and the physical: input and output, insight and achievement, learning and performing. Remove conflict and there is no need for creativity. Imagination v. reality – like a courtroom battle — negotiation leads to creative solutions. In onerous jargon laden corporate speak: look for the win/win.

Look at Dad take pictures of little Joey go down the playground slide. Wait – hasn’t he taken about 100 shots of that little boy this morning? Oh yeah – digital – our lives are digital now. Content is overwhelming: words, images, sounds. That same proud Dad uploaded this week’s most precious 150 images to the Joey’s Cute website, so all his dedicated fans can view the little darling.

Those phone photographers are in play too. The phone is now a ubiquitous capture device making no one immune from the serendipitous photographer documenting our most inelegant moments. Unedited, they’re thrown up on Flickr.com for your viewing pleasure – often for everyone’s viewing pleasure.

Pleasure? I’m not so sure. Just like those jokes we used to forward through email as web-neophytes, they swiftly become annoying. We learned only to forward those that were extra-specially, extraordinarily hilarious. The best ones traveled the internet like a virus, but as with a healthy immune system, minor viruses are cured. Who’s going to cure the information overload virus? Who’s going to help me edit my life?

We are all creative, but being “a creative” usually refers to someone for whom creativity is life’s goal: Illustrator, Architect, Advertising Art Director, Writer, Musician, Photographer, Designer, Etc. Scientists, Surgeons, Marketing Managers, CEO’s and other problem solving discovery professions are among our species most creative members, but typically don’t get the label.

Slashdot recently has published a question from a reader on the best way to manage geek. The reader has read a 1999 article on this topic and wonder if the new millenium has ever changed. There are couple of good response from geek themselves which should be a good trigger of thoughts. For…