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While some people display innate talents for certain activities early on, amazingly average people have become champions in all manner of endeavors.
there was one common factor that researchers recognized in all great performers: they practiced so hard and intensely that it hurt.
whether one has an innate aptitude for an activity or not, mastery of it takes around ten thousand hours of focused, intentional practice.
First, that the seed of greatness exists in every human being. Whether it sprouts or not is our choice. Second, that there are no such things as natural-born under- or overachievers—there are simply people that tap into their true potentials and people that don’t.
Do we heed the call to conformity, or the call to adventure?
“What is the purpose of this life?” humans have wondered for millennia, contemplating how insignificant we are in the great cosmic symphony.
we don’t seek the meaning of life, but the experience of being alive. And that’s what the nature of genius is ultimately about.
“Facts and ideas are dead in themselves and it is the imagination that gives life to them.” -W. I. B. Beveridge
His imagination was a factory with unlimited resources, and the world an exciting playground with unlimited possibilities.
Tesla’s selflessness was a testament not only to his generosity and goodwill, but his belief in his ability to continue to create his future.
An unexpected dead end in one journey is merely an opportunity to set a new course for another.
“There is something within me that might be illusion as it is often the case with young delighted people, but if I would be fortunate to achieve some of my ideals, it would be on the behalf of the whole of humanity,”
Einstein said that “imagination is more important than knowledge,” because “knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”
All great geniuses are incredibly creative in their own ways. They’re able to take what is known, dream of new possibilities, and bring them into the world. Every mathematical enigma solved, every masterful symphony composed, every revolutionary machine invented, every brilliant philosophy penned, every great corporation built...they all sprang from a person with an extraordinary imagination.
What is imagination, though? Michelangelo said he saw angels in the marble and carved until he set them free.
creativity is a process, not a providence.
Steve Jobs said creativity is “just connecting things.”
Salvador Dali said “those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.”
Picasso said “good artists copy but great artists steal.”
Good artists copy, great artists steal
It meansyou may not be the first to try something, but you did it so well that everyone thinks of you when they see that style. Like Picasso, Liechtenstein, Monet, Van Gogh…they may have started out coping someone else, but in the end they completely stole it.
Mark Twain said “all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources.”
“All ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the gardener with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral calibre and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing.”
When you start viewing creativity as a process of combination, and imagination as the ability to connect, stretch, and merge things in new ways, creative brilliance becomes less mystifying.
Ray Bradbury said that thinking is the enemy of creativity because it’s self-conscious. When you think you sit calmly and try to reason through something in a structured, logical way. Creativity dances to a different tune. Once you flip that switch, things get a bit chaotic. Ideas start buzzing. Images start popping into your head. Fragments of all kinds of data find their way into orbit.
“Our first endeavors are purely instinctive prompting of an imagination vivid and undisciplined,” Tesla wrote. “As we grow older reason asserts itself and we become more and more systematic and designing. But those early impulses, though not immediately productive, are of the greatest moment and may shape our very destinies.”
The more varied your knowledge and experiences are, the more likely you are to be able to create new associations and fresh ideas.
