Creativity is a technique of living life that grips originality and makes unique connections between outwardly diverse ideas. It is about experiencing life as a journey into communicating and seeing the uniqueness of the simplest, everyday facts. Most people think about creativity as producing or making something, but its root word means to grow. When people are creative, they feel that the world and everything in it is brightly alive. The by-products of creativity are some of the greatest accomplishments of civilization from the wheel invention to the Mozart’s sonatas. Moreover, human beings are born creative. From infancy onwards, people find always find innovative ways to negotiate life. Creativity expands the human perception and alongside it, new ways of doing things and problem-solving come along. The most creative people find means around obstacles because they view them as opportunities to create new ideas and not as roadblocks. Eventually, when asked about the importance of creativity, it is easy to say that it makes life interesting and fulfilling. Since creativity revolves around what people do on a daily basis, this custom interview essay writing will summarize and criticize two creativity articles. The first is “Want to Create Things That Matter? Be Lazy”, by Cal Newport. In addition, the second one is, “You Don’t Need New Ideas, You Need a New Perspective”, by Oliver Burkeman.
“Want to Create Things That Matter? Be Lazy” by Cal Newport talks about embracing habits that will help excel in life. According to the author, many people who succeed in establishing things that matter in life have worked habits that appear absolutely lazy by the standards in their field. To explain this lazy producer paradox, Newport gives a more refined understanding of the term “work”. In doing so, he outlines two distinct types of efforts, shallow and deep. He defines deep work as cognitively demanding tasks that require one to focus without distractions and apply hard skills. Shallow work, on the other hand, is defined as logistical style tasks that do not entail much attention or the application of hard to replicate skills. The author makes a point that if people are driven to do things that matter, they need to put deep work at the center of their professional ways. To do so, they must become lazier in the sense that they must treat things with sluggish efforts that keep them away from deep work in spite how many small benefits they promise themselves. To conclude, Newport proposes some lazy ideas that people need to embrace. They include becoming hard to reach, avoiding new technology tools, being slow to answer emails, refusing to hop on calls and spending whole days working on single ideas.
Following Newport’s article, I can say that it gives out brilliant concepts that promote creativity. Shifting your general mindset in the direction of one that embraces depth and rejects shallowness can create a big difference for the value that one produces. The author mentions some relevant points that are beneficial in avoiding shallowness and embracing deep work that is of more value. His main points suggest that people should recognize that deep work is what produces long lasting things. However, I think that the author fails to mention that people need leisure activities in their lives. The lazy activities referred to in the article such as emailing could also be beneficial. Despite this drawback, I think that the ideas presented promote creativity in everyday life. They are relevant to me, and I could incorporate this information by embracing activities that will bring long lasting results and shun distracting actions in my profession.
“You Don’t Need New Ideas, You Need a New Perspective” by Oliver Burkeman mainly talks about viewing problems in different perspectives every time we attempt to solve them. The author argues that the real act of discovery does not consist of finding new lands but seeing with new eyes. The trick is creating a sense of unfamiliarity to the familiar, thereby revealing solutions or opportunities that one failed to notice. According to Oliver Burkeman, the simple technique towards this approach is putting a physical distance between the problem and yourself. Furthermore, the research suggests that people rate ideas as more creative when they are described as having originated from a far-away country. This might be so because the researchers picture the idea in their mind’s eyes as off in the distance so that only their significant features stand out. The article shows that externalizing one's thoughts by writing them down may not mean that one will have a breakthrough but that by relating to the thinking will help lessen the grip of the old assumptions, contribute to see the thoughts afresh and create a potential for new insights. The author concludes by saying that what matters when handling challenges is seeing the old ideas differently when solving the problem.
I think Burkman’s suggestions of having new perspectives on the old ideas and making unfamiliar what is already known are great points. If one embraces this line of thought, it would be easier to solve challenges even when one cannot come up with new solutions. The author mentions a significant point where he says that people should view ideas as if they have originated from a far country and thus this will help see with new eyes. I think the author’s ideas promote creativity in the daily life in the sense that it will help people innovate new ways of incorporating the old ideas in the problem-solving skills. The views discussed in this article are relevant to me because they will help in changing the way of thinking when handling similar issues. I would incorporate these ideas by noting down all the ideas and using same ideas differently when handling different problems.
The two articles present valid ideas; however, I prefer Burkman’s article, “You Don’t Need New Ideas, You Need a New Perspective,” and I think it has great viewpoints for promoting creativity. This is so because the article gives great ideas that will help change people’s way of seeing things and they will not become so trained or rigid in the way they perceive. In general, I think people can modify their behaviors and attitude about the way they do and view things and make them happen. To sum up, I think that all that people need to do is embrace the valuable things, change their perspectives, believe that they can change things, and decide to do things differently.
