L’ultimo video dell’ottima serie PBS Off Book riguarda la creatività. Denso di riflessioni interessanti sull’argomento (e anche qualche cliché, ma va bene così), vi consiglio di prendere qualche minuto per guardarlo:

Il video mi ha fatto tornare in mente queste parole di John Cleese:

Creativity is not a talent. It is not a talent, it is a way of operating. MacKinnon showed that the most creative had simply acquired a facility for getting themselves into a particular mood “a way of operating” which allowed their natural creativity to function. In fact, MacKinnon described this particular facility as an ability to play. Indeed he described the most creative (when in this mood) as being childlike. For they were able to play with ideas… to explore them… not for any immediate practical purpose but just for enjoyment. Play for its own sake.

Questo paragrafo è estratto da un talk meraviglioso sull’argomento, che vi consiglio vivamente di guardare. Qui c’è la trascrizione intera.

Tra tutte le riflessioni di Cleese, una di quelle che mi ha affascinato di più è quella che riconduce l’originalità alla semplice attitudine a non voler risolvere un problema il più presto possibile:

Well, let me tell you a story. I was always intrigued that one of my Monty Python colleagues who seemed to be (to me) more talented than I was {but} did never produce scripts as original as mine. And I watched for some time and then I began to see why. If he was faced with a problem, and fairly soon saw a solution, he was inclined to take it. Even though (I think) he knew the solution was not very original.

Whereas if I was in the same situation, although I was sorely tempted to take the easy way out, and finish by 5 o’clock, I just couldn’t. I’d sit there with the problem for another hour-and-a-quarter, and by sticking at it would, in the end, almost always come up with something more original.

It was that simple.

My work was more creative than his simply because I was prepared to stick with the problem longer.

Tornando a PBS Off Book, tra i protagonisti della puntata c’è Kirby Ferguson, autore dell’ottimo Everything is a Remix, un vero must-watch sull’argomento: