On the topic of being a wall

Man is, as it has been known for centuries, not an island; if John Donne had not found out, we would have seen it again and again. I am in no position to deny that Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein can have made their groundbreaking discoveries on their own; there are no stories about who was doctor Watson to the Sherlock Holmes of Thomas Edison, and Johann Sebastian Bach is not known as a participant in an artists' collective - but we who are of more average intelligence do best, when we have someone to bounce our ideas against.
Not because I am unable to get an idea every once in a while - but actually, I find one of the most interesting things for me to do is to act as a wall to the balls that people around me need to bounce to refine their ideas. Most likely, I would have been better as doctor Watson than I would have been as Sherlock Holmes.
(Translated from Noget om at være en mur, originally published May 9th, 2012)

The killing of a good idea

The other day I read an interesting piece on Eric "Astro" Teller, who heads the Google X department that does stuff, which seen from a perhaps slightly more earthbound view would be regarded as an R&D department for high-flying ideas.
The point is that when you run a department, which is limited (and who aren't these days?) with regards to time, manpower and other resources, it is imperative that one does what one can to kill ideas early - you simply must go to work with the mindset: "how do we kill our project today?"
It is an extreme interpretation of Linus Pauling's view on how to get good ideas: get a lot of ideas; hereafter you "simply" have to find out which ones should be discarded. And it is in excellent thread with so many other theories about failing quickly and celebrating mistakes, something at which we probably all should be better.
If there is just one good idea that you simply aren't able to kill, it would be worth it.
(Translated from Mordet på den gode idé, originally published April 28, 2016)

On the topic of being creative

Image courtesy of Pixabay / qimono

In my list of blog topics was a point taken from a lecture I heard the Danish professor of educational psychology at Aalborg University Lene Tanggaard give in the fall of 2010 - it merely said:

Be creative - it works!

- to cut a long story short: let the creative ideas loose when they emerge; have them written down to an extent so that they can be reconstructed as needed, and then leave them to mature and have a critical look at them later.
As it has been said so often: if there is just one good idea that turns into something, then it has been worth it - but it begins when you give yourself the permission to get the good ideas; and the easiest way to do this is to allow yourself to have a lot of ideas and hold on to them. Then, you can always later find out which ideas that are indeed good, and try to use these as the basis for innovation.
(Translated from Noget om at være kreativ, originally published January 5, 2013)