Creative Bravado

[Chris Barlow]

Creativity is often discussed as a struggle. It may even be said that if your idea does not fight some socially enforced boundary, it is not creativity.

My audio book listening lately has drifted to wars of ancient Greece, where I came across the most stereotypically macho statement I ever heard.

At the Battle of Thermopylae one of the three hundred Spartans was told that the Persians had so many archers that when the battle started, the arrows would block out the sun. Dienekes responded with good cheer: "excellent, we will get to fight them in the shade." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dienekes

Do you know of examples of creative people who had a similar response to resistance? The only one I think of is the story of Edison being questioned on his repeated failure to find a filament material for light bulbs, when he pointed out that he now knew 100 things that did not work.

[wanderingalan]

Chris

I have heard the Edison story with numbers like 1,000, 7,000, 10,000 and the response was

"those are not failures they are answers to problems I haven't started working on yet."

One quote (correctly or not) given credit to Walt Disney that I have heard and used often

"I like working on the impossible,
where there is less competition."

E. Paul Torrance often said...(this I heard first-hand many times in the years I knew him)

"Once you have a creative idea,
you become a minority of one.

the second part is paraphrased through my fuzzy memory...

"Once it becomes successful it becomes everyone's idea."

Here are some sample creativity quotes that may fit too...

"It is not the strongest of the species that survive nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change."
Charles Darwin, scientist

"If you're a truly creative person, you know that feeling insecure and lonely is par for the course. You can't have it both ways: You can't be creative, and conform too. You have to recognize that what makes you different also makes you creative."
Arno Penzias, Noble Prize winner for physics

"Without deviation, progress is not possible."
Frank Zappa, musician

"You have to be deviant if you're going to do anything new."
David Lee, producer of TV show Frasier

"Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary."
Sir Cecil Beaton, portrait photographer

"Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can praise them, disagree with them, quote them, disbelieve them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They invent. They imagine. They heal. They explore. They create. They inspire. They push the human race forward.

Maybe they have to be crazy.

How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art? Or sit in silence and hear a song that's never been written? Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels?

We make tools for these kinds of people. While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do."
www.Apple.com

[Chris Barlow]

I like these!