
Brilliant talk by John Cleese on creativity. - pistoriusp
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGt3-fxOvug
======
lmkg
He mentions that re-writing a script from memory produces a better script. I
discovered the very same thing in high school. The best essays I turned out
where the ones were we had to write a rough draft at home, and type up a final
draft due the next day, and I forgot the rough draft in my locker[1]. I always
attributed that to the fact that the first draft is an act of discovery, and
inevitably carries cruft from wandering paths and dead ends. Starting anew is
much better at removing the cruft than editing the original.

Then I became a mathematician in college. In the maths, it's pretty well
accepted that every problem and every proof, except for the most trivial, will
take at least two drafts. One for discovery that is exploratory and
meandering, and one that drives from the hypothesis to the conclusion like an
arrow from Athena's bow. Published proofs are never in raw form, even a single
page can hide a year (or several lifetimes) of refinements and incremental
improvements on partial results.

Don't be too afraid to scrap your current work and start over, no matter what
you're doing. The second round is much faster, and much cleaner. Such an
undertaking shouldn't be done lightly, but it's often not as onerous as most
people assume it will be.

[1] Yes, this happened several times. Don't mess with a winning formula.

~~~
ig1
In mathematics it's hugely damaging though, the conciseness of published
proofs makes it much harder for other mathematicians to see how they reached
that result. And in mathematics how you got there is as important as the end
results.

Especially for students studying proofs, the step from being students to being
researchers is greatly impeded by not being able to see how researchers
reached the end results they did.

~~~
rkowalick
The space in mathematics journals is limited. They really can't afford to
publish anything that isn't of the form "Theorem-Proof."

What is useful is contacting people in the community surrounding a particular
result, including the person (or people) that proved it. Most are more than
willing to share every aspect of the problem and how their solution evolved
over the course of time.

~~~
avar
If only there was some sort of massive distributed publishing network which
mathematicians could use without worrying about page counts.

~~~
sgift
I'm not a scientist, but doesn't arxiv.org try to provide such a network?
(okay, not distributed, but still readily available and no page count)

~~~
ig1
I think avar was making a sarcastic reference to the internet...

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petervandijck
\- We don't know where our ideas come from, but it's not from our laptops.

\- Interruption kills creativity.

\- To be creative, you have to create a kind of oasis in your life. Boundaries
of space and boundaries of time.

~~~
kranner
I have to take a limited view of 'not from our laptops', in the sense that we
experience a large chunk of the world from our laptops these days.

Presumably he means that there's no algorithmic process for getting ideas.

~~~
MaMa
Also, our laptops are usually filled with interruptions.

When going into your oasis and taking your time, I'd recommend taking only pen
and paper with you.

~~~
kranner
I agree. I went back to pen and paper last year, just for thinking 'out loud'
about problems and I could not believe how much it improved the quality of my
programming.

------
themenace
Cleese talks about how multitasking is destructive to the creative process (at
time code 6m:30s):

"But if you're racing around all day, ticking things off on lists, looking at
your watch, making phone calls, and generally just keeping all the balls in
the air, you are not going to have any creative ideas."

I find it hilariously ironic that immediately after he says this, the camera
cuts over to two guys in the audience clicking away on their laptops while
ostensibly listening to Cleese's talk.

~~~
idiopathic
If they are anything like me, they are taking notes. Not only is this better
than paper for taking down everything, but taking down everything helps me
remember.

------
ronnier
Finding solutions to problems in the middle of the night while sleeping has
happened to me. Usually that's how I fall sleep at night, thinking hard about
a problem, or trying to build up an idea. Having things on ones mind before
sleeping probably does influence what we dream and think about while sleeping.

~~~
k7d
I actually find it quite disturbing. When your conscious mind has been very
focused on something the whole day it will naturally keep the momentum. That
in turn makes it difficult to fall asleep and when you do the sleep is often
quite thin. What I figured is that if you find a way to turn your mind off
either with meditation or some distraction (for example movie or book), the
sleep is much better and the next morning is usually much more productive and
often the mind comes up with some suprising new ideas.

~~~
MaMa
I had the trouble of going to bed but my mind was racing with ideas, and I
could not fall asleep. I noticed that taking a notepad next to bed and writing
down the ideas or seeds of ideas I could get them out of my mind and my mind
could be at rest and I would fall asleep.

I think it releases the mind from trying to remember the ideas in the morning.
When I write the ideas down I can review in the morning with the benefit of
having a good nights sleep.

~~~
grinich
I do this too. It's also worth buying a light pen to keep by your bed so you
don't have to turn on a lamp and blind yourself. It makes getting back to
sleep easier too.

You can sometimes get them free at conferences. This one from Amazon works
great:
[http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000BUNMU4?ie=UTF8&tag=...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000BUNMU4?ie=UTF8&tag=michaelgrinic-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B000BUNMU4)

------
joshstaiger
This video seems abridged. Does anyone know if there is an unedited version
somewhere?

~~~
audionerd
Tried to find it, but unfortunately the video link is dead:

    
    
      http://www.creativityworldforum.be/view/nl/6432289-Sessions.html#session1
    

There is a PDF though with a bit more background:

    
    
      http://www.flandersdc.be/static/content/CWF08-day1-John_Cleese.pdf

~~~
benno
Some of the other talks at the Creativity World Forum look interesting too.
Steve Wozniak's talk, for example.

The Cleese video is down, but many of the other videos, such as Wozniak's, are
still up.

EDIT: It appears all the videos on the site are abridged. The Cleese talk on
Youtube is probably the same as appeared here before the video was removed.

------
adrianwaj
"The teachers do not realize that they themselves are not very creative, and
therefore they may not value creativity even if they can recognize it."

"If the people in charge are very egotistical then they want to take credit
for everything that happens, and they want to feel that they are in control of
everything that happens. And that means consciously or unconsciously they will
discoourgage creativity in other people."

Full credit to you Mr Cleese.

------
Fargren
His "boundaries of space and boundaries of time" reamind a lot of the theories
about play in Johan Huizinga's Homo Ludens.

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scrrr
Interesting. So what number of daily views of hacker news can we estimate from
the number of views on that youtube-video?

~~~
PidGin128
If we're generous to ourselves, it looks like a jump of ~5k in the page's
analytics view (in a few weeks, I'm sure YT will mention us explicitly).

I wonder where else links were coming from?

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c1sc0
"Flemish is the best language to get rid of phlegm". I'm Phlegmish & couldn't
agree more.

