As I wrote last week, James Webb Young once described the creative process as using the “production line of the mind” to generate ideas. This metaphor for the creative process is useful because it specifies a mental technique that can be learned. The technique is not esoteric, mysterious, or romantic, but rather consists of a few simple principles and methods that you can train yourself to use in your daily life. Young’s enduring insight is that the “production line of the mind” is the source of all ideas.
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As I wrote about at the beginning of the month, one of the books I first went for to begin playing the Feelings Collector in 2021 was Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book Creativity. Among the books greatest strengths is its empirical depth, much as is the case with Flow. The lives of the creative people surveyed to produce the data on which the book’s argument is based are rich and insightful. There’s a lot of collected and collective wisdom in this book.
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