Drive: the surprising truth about motivation/creativity

For over a year now I’ve been recommending a book to various creative friends called Drive. Nicola Griffith just posted a great RSA animation about the book. For those of you not finding the time to read the book, just watch this insightful 10 minutes instead, it covers some of the observations made by Pink:

It reframed a lot of how I understood my own creativity to work, and allowed me to experiment a lot more. I’ve found some interesting things. And some things I thought I knew turned out to be wrong on testing those assumptions. All thanks to reading this book.

Trust me, most of it was me being dragged out kicking and screaming to the book’s conclusions. I’ve always viewed extraordinary stress, deadline motivators, and other craziness as the crux of my creativity.

While the image of the writer becoming desperately brilliant because of a pressing need for money right away, the truth is that these sorts of stressors can actually reduce overall creativity (you can still be decently creative, but not nearly as inventive as you could be. Just watch, you’ll see the point).

Filed under the topic Uncategorized on January 13th 2012 at 11:59 am. You can subscribe to the RSS feed for this entry to keep track of comments. You can also use to trackback.