I recently watched an interesting TED presentation by Elizabeth Gilbert on ‘a new way to think about creativity’ (found via Lateral Action where there’s a good post about the content of the talk):
The presentation looks at how creativity was often assigned to divine assistance in historical times, and the benefits that approach had – and could still have.
And examples include dancers in Spain, who for one night might be seen as channelling that divine creativity, or an American poet who felt like she had to catch poems as they passed her by.
But the insight that people, including Gilbert, can work for a long time before having that moment of celebrated divine creativity struck a chord, and reminded me of another interesting TED talk:
It also ties into the idea of practice, and of 10,000 hours being about right for expertise in any field, as written about recently in Outliers: The Story of Success
As a writer/journalist/blogger/marketer/geek, I’m always fascinated by insights into creativity and expertise – Lateral Action has proved a constant source of great insight, along with Springwise and many more sites (Many of them appear in my Google Reader Shared Items). All accompanied by music – usually Last.fm.
It did bring up one question on a marketing theme – with so many new social networks arriving, and so many new social media marketing experts appearing – how many people can honestly claim to be approaching 10,000 hours working in social media marketing or especially on a single social network?