Creative Quest

by Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson

Creative people take in more than the average person—or, rather, they are less able to shut out parts of their environment. In the modern world, that’s an even more intense problem, because so much information, so many signals, flow across our brains.

She started posting pictures of her food and linking to her Goodreads reviews.

:)

Make an effort to make your life different. It’s the only way that it will stay the same in terms of creative inspiration and creative energy. Meditation helps you switch the channel when it comes to what is moving through you. The departure helps you switch the channel when it comes to how you are moving through the world.

Again, a new skill doesn’t mean a new talent, necessarily. Often, you’re dealing with the same talent. You’re just putting it into a new place, where it can acquire new energy. There’s some scientific basis for this. Neurologists have proven that brain plasticity matters, and that when you broaden your life even in small ways, you broaden the brain that helps you to understand your life.

When you escape your diving bell, you enable yourself to become a butterfly.

Expect change. Demand change of yourself. Try, as always, to keep it within the bounds of the attainable.

Your ego is one of the things that needs to be managed rather than indulged or ignored.

One of the best ways that you can cope with the feelings of failure (or the stresses of success) is to embrace a simple fact: the world mostly doesn’t care about you.

The world is extremely cluttered. It’s filled with everything. Much of what you do creatively will not land in the middle of a receptive audience. It will just fall into the world, to be ignored by most people and found by a few who react strongly to it, either positively or negatively.

Creativity needs a certain amount of isolation to improve your ability to understand connection.

Creativity needs a certain amount of indifference to improve your ability to make a difference.

Creativity needs a certain amount of void so that you can be (...