The lives of creative people may seem chaotic, and their surroundings may indeed be untidy. But, as Tim Harford argues in his book Messy, there are advantages in ‘the untidy, unquantified, crude, cluttered, uncoordinated, improvised, imperfect, incoherent, random, ambiguous, vague, difficult, diverse or even dirty’. Those are the circumstances in which insights are found and discoveries can be made.
