The Selfish Meme

Guided mastery

So how do you build your creative confidence?

Here’s David Kelley answer. 

This talk resonated with me for two reasons.

Firstly, it works on the premise that all people can be “creative,” and therefore, it isn’t really a right of the few. Sure, some of us will always be better at coming up with creative solutions to problems than others, or some of us can articulate ideas better; but there is hope for everyone :)

Secondly, I like the idea of guided mastery, of encouraging & cajoling people to take small baby steps towards finding & nurturing their creative confidence. Its what all creative leaders should aspire to do, everyday.

As a footnote, this segregation of creative versus practical people is perhaps evident most in the profession of advertising where the former is adulated, and elevated to superstar status. As someone who works in advertising, I can confidently say that no other profession has contributed more towards destroying creative confidence.

Just ask the suits. 

For the record, this comes from an ex-suit who now is “creative” ;)

darwinised:

The next generation digital book

Is this the future of the book, and therefore by default, reading?

Software developer Mike Matas demos the first full-length interactive book for the iPad — with clever, swipeable video and graphics and some very cool data visualizations to play with. The book is “Our Choice,” Al Gore’s sequel to “An Inconvenient Truth.”

A lot of us, me included, believe that the joy of reading a book lies as much in the sensory experience (touch, smell, flip of pages) as in the written content on each page. Consequently, we believe that an e-book/digital version is an impostor, an innovation dreamed up by some evil tech genius out to make a quick buck :)

But what if an e-book was like Matas’ demo, layering information cleverly that made the content of the book richer?

Think about it. And while you’re at it, get yourself an iPad ;)

The human brain & the computer

“ Let’s just take a look about how the brain works, and then I’ll compare that with how computers work. So this clip is from the PBS series, “The Secret Life of the Brain.” It shows you these cells that process information. They are called neurons. They send little pulses of electricity down their processes to each other, and where they contact each other, those little pulses of electricity can jump from one neuron to the other. That process is called a synapse. You’ve got this huge network of cells interacting with each other, about 100 million of them, sending about 10 quadrillion of these pulses around every second. And that’s basically what’s going on in your brain right now as you’re watching this.

How does that compare with the way computers work? In the computer you have all the data going through the central processing unit, and any piece of data basically has to go through that bottleneck.Whereas in the brain, what you have is these neurons and the data just really flows through a network of connections among the neurons, there’s no bottleneck here. It’s really a network in the literal sense of the word. The net is doing the work in the brain. If you just look at these two pictures, these kind of words pop into your mind.This is serial and it’s rigid: it’s like cars on a freeway — everything has to happen in lockstep.Whereas this is parallel and it’s fluid. Information processing is very dynamic and adaptive.

So I’m not the first to figure this out. This is a quote from Brian Eno: ”The problem with computers is that there is not enough Africa in them.”

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Roger Ebert: Re-making my voice

A beautiful story by the world’s leading critique of storytellers.