It’s said that once, upon being asked to address a boys preparatory school on the nature of leadership, Winston Churchill offered a brief but valuable speech. “Boys, never give up. Never. Never. Never.” I thought of that when I watched this video illustrating part of an interview with Ira Glass, host of Public Radio International’s This American Life. I’ve been a huge fan of Ira’s for years. His quirky, humorous, generous, and tremendously insightful take on not just issues but life itself has been the heart and soul of This American Life, perhaps my favorite podcast for long drives. In this part of the interview, Glass makes an...

Phil Hansen’s ten minute TED Talk is as important as it is poignant. Faced with a condition that made his hand shake and thereby seemed to destroy his dreams of being an artist, he took his neurologist’s advice to “embrace the shake.” When he did, he eventually discovered a number of remarkable ways to make art that didn’t compensate or overcome or even transcend his shaking but rather employed it to lead him to new creative ventures and vistas. What Hansen discovered was that far from reducing creativity, limitations actually increase it. Limitations set boundaries, close off the obvious routes forward, and invite – actually...

I am fascinated by the art of making. Whether it be the art of making a guitar, or bread, or whatever, I think our creative capacity is one of those things God had in mind when in the Genesis story God declares, “Let us make humankind in our image” (Gen. 1:26). God creates. From the very first verses in the Bible God is creating, calling the world and universe into being. And in the very last verses, God is still creating, this time making all things new. So whenever we make something – whether it be a piece of art or dinner tonight, a project for work or a card for a friend – we are joining God in the creative task that connects us...

Which setting do you think is more likely to produce a good idea? A quiet room in the library, the auditorium where a prestigious lecturer holds the floor, or a crowded coffee house in the late afternoon? If you guessed the library, you’re to be forgiven for imaging that the good ideas are solitary achievements. If you imagined it was the lecturer, you can be excused for thinking we get our best ideas from experts. But if you instead suspected that it might be the crowded coffee house, then you already know something essential about creativity. It is largely about connection and conversation. Creativity, that is, emerges not from...

Do you ever wish that annoying colleague or friend who always wants to “improve” your ideas would just go away? You know the one I mean, he (or she) isn’t mean spirited or particularly unkind, just always a bit critical. Well, be careful what you wish for. More and more studies show that creativity flourishes not in an environment devoid of criticism but one filled with supportive critique. “Supportive,” of course, is key. The idea is to improve – to point out the strengths, certainly, but also and more importantly the weaknesses of an idea in order to make it better. This isn’t criticism for criticism’s sake; it’s...

Creativity is in as high demand now as perhaps it ever has been. And I don’t just mean in marketing a product better or preaching a more interesting sermon. I mean that we need creative parents to raise healthy children in an increasingly complex world. We need creative political leaders to help move us beyond partisan gridlock to solve serious problems. We need creative business leaders who can run successful businesses while also putting the larger community and society along side of shareholders as persons to whom they are accountable. We need creative religious leaders who can help us imagine how faith speaks to us in a relentlessly...

Orthodoxy, translated literally, is “right praise.” In time, it came to mean “sound doctrine” and regularly conveys, more simply, “conforming to the norm.” When something is orthodox it is approved, conventional, standard practice, acceptable. The opposite of orthodox is, not surprisingly, unorthodox or, more technically speaking, heterodox. Heterodoxy literally means “different praise” or, more typically, “unsound or controversial doctrine” and “contrary to popular practice.” If “heterodoxy” is a mouthful or sounds a little unfamiliar, you might be better acquainted with its most extreme form, “heresy,” which...

And while we’re on the subject of creativity…. David Kelley begins his TEDTalk on developing confidence in your own creative ability with a story most of us can relate to: of having our creative efforts criticized. That simple, ubiquitous experience has created for many of us the sense that we are not creative. Indeed, similar experiences have all but welded to our imaginations the notion that in this life there are two kinds of people: the “creatives” and the rest of us. But Kelley, considered one of America’s leading design innovators, believes not only that each of us is inherently creative but also that, with...

Creativity is all the rage these days: what it is, how you develop it, the various ways in which you express it. A slew of bestselling books, including my favorite Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer, offers insight into the nature, origin and application of our fundamental, foundational, and phenomenal ability to engage in creative acts. While the approaches and analyses differ somewhat at various points, one of the major points of convergence revolves around destroying the myth of the “solitary genius.” Creativity doesn’t, in other words, happen in a vacuum – creative ideas are always inspired, nurtured, cajoled, and...