MS Dashboard (@Demo) - v120.2.3
Spot on
Almost thirty years ago, Steve Jobs gave an interview to Wired where he came up with one of my all-time favourite quotes about creativity:
“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while.
That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.”
As someone who works in design, this is a concept I’ve thought about a lot over the years, and this is how I visualise it:
Imagine a huge wall covered in thousands of dots. Each dot represents a piece of knowledge that you’ve acquired. In your hand you have a ball of string, and you wind the string between the dots to create patterns. Connecting the dots in a new way is creativity.
Unfortunately, you find yourself recreating patterns that other people have created before. “Everything original has already been discovered”, you think. Perhaps you’re right. With a limited number of dots, after a while, you end up weaving the same old patterns.
The answer, then, is to add a new dot. Ideally it is something unexpected that doesn’t fit with the other dots at all. And voila! Suddenly you have the ability to weave a new pattern.
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