going to school.
What habits of yours kill your creativity?
21–30 of 63 posts
Re: What habits of yours kill your creativity?
#22Beer kills my creativity. I'm about to turn 30 so I need to cut back but now I'm in limbo at my job. So I get the "why not?" drink and from there it cascades until I'm 12 in and can't see straight. Feels bad, man.
Re: What habits of yours kill your creativity?
#23It's not a habit but when I think 30 years back I'd actually say that what killed most of my creativity are computers and the Internet. They simply offer too many distractions and cannot replace the intimacy of working with pencil and unlined paper. But maybe it's just the way I use it -- e.g. that I answer questions like yours and follow sites like hn etc. They offer pleasant/stimulating distractions but on the whol…
Regarding pencil and paper, I sense there to be a huge gap in notations used for representing ideas on paper/whiteboard.
Relational schema diagram notation is useful. You pick up some along the way, like "mind maps". UML is very heavy, and I don't know anyone who uses that for flow. So for most things, each person invents their own method of capturing ideas.
I've got a couple of tricks that do work for me. But the notations I use are unsophisticated compared to what could be done if this issue - smart ways to develop ideas - was a meme that lots of people were working on.
Re: What habits of yours kill your creativity?
#24Beer kills my creativity. I'm about to turn 30 so I need to cut back but now I'm in limbo at my job. So I get the "why not?" drink and from there it cascades until I'm 12 in and can't see straight. Feels bad, man.
If you are regularly drinking 12 beers in one night, killing your creativity is the least of your problems.
Re: What habits of yours kill your creativity?
#25Adding too many feeds to my reader. A site like HN is tolerable, since I won't even notice if I've been away for a couple of days, but the unread count on my reader...
Re: What habits of yours kill your creativity?
#26All the poems about water in the world will not prepare you for the first splash.
Re: What habits of yours kill your creativity?
#27Forgetting how big the world is. I get a spiritual awakening every time I take a flight longer than 5 hours.
Re: What habits of yours kill your creativity?
#28World of Warcraft.
Playing video games is a loser thing to do. Just stop it already.
It's irritating to see so many grown men hunched over a joy-stick. No one ever changed the world playing a game.
Re: What habits of yours kill your creativity?
#29Latencies in communication. As long as I'm working on something that depends on other people's responses, I get drifting aloof while trying to figure out something sensible to do until I get my next piece. In contrast, programming a big task in a long-going flow almost demands me to distract myself away from the work so that I won't be totally consumed by it.
Re: What habits of yours kill your creativity?
#30Distractions. The internet[1] being the major one, occasionally video games or books. Somewhat unpleasantly I seem wired to seek new distractions whenever I don't have one currently occupying my mind. I've been thinking of forcing myself to spend half an hour each day without stimulus, just thinking and writing on a paper notepad to get around this. [1] I find posting on the internet much more distracting than surfin…
> I've been thinking of forcing myself to spend half an hour each day without stimulus, just thinking and writing on a paper notepad to get around this.
This is good. If you find a cafe with the right ambiance for you, that's a great way of doing it. Then you make that place your "thinking cafe" - I travel a lot, and that's one of the first things I look for if I'm getting stuck or distracted at my apartment or hotel. Change of environment, for whatever reason, changes my thinking quite a lot. It's trial and error to find the right sort of environment for your thinking, but very useful when you find it.